Last Updated on 2 February, 2026
Transport yourself to the roaring 1930s, where the ink never dries and the deadlines are deadly. Managing a crumbling skyscraper while chasing the scoop of the century requires more than just good journalism. This comprehensive guide solves your logistical nightmares with battle-tested architectural layouts, hidden micromanagement tricks, and essential economic strategies to keep your presses running. We provide the blueprint you need to transform a struggling rag into a city-dominating media empire.
Table of Contents
- Mastering Tower Architecture
- The Art of Manual Labor (Micromanagement Tricks)
- Editorial Strategy and The World Map
- Personnel Management and Staffing
- Advanced Economics and Operations
- The Cheater’s Almanac
- Conclusion
Mastering Tower Architecture
Your building is a machine. If the gears grind, your profits vanish. You must design your tower for maximum flow and minimal walking time.
The Vertical Workflow
Efficiency dictates your layout. Always keep your printer setup on the top floor. Printers require zero hands-on work from anyone except maintenance staff. By pushing the printer higher, you preserve the valuable lower floors for staff who need to move constantly.
Conversely, you should place typesetters on the lower levels. They need to receive stories from reporters quickly. Reporters hand off work to typesetters, who hand off to assemblers. Reduce the travel time between these stations. A pro tip is to pair your Typesetting and Assembly tables together. Place these pairs on the bottom floors to create a short assembly line.
The Stairwell Doctrine
Novice builders waste space on accessibility. You should have only one stairwell door on each level. Place this door as close to the center as possible. Extra stair doors merely waste wall space that you could use for desks or equipment.
Design your floor plan around the door. Position workspaces around the central access point rather than placing doors to suit the desks.
Amenities and Sanitation
Your employees have biological needs. Ignore them at your peril. However, you can fulfill these needs efficiently.
- Bathrooms: Place a bathroom next to the stairs on the lower level. When reporters descend from their desks to leave or turn in work, they can use the facilities on the way.
- Food and Drink: Each floor should have a food item next to the stairs. This prevents long treks for a snack.
- Decor: Aesthetics matter, but floor space matters more. Hanging flowerpots are a gift to the efficient architect. They are cheap, beautiful, and you can even fit them onto printer modules to save space.
Power Management
Do not rush to upgrade your electricity. You will not need extra power for a long time if you choose your equipment wisely. Vents cost no power to operate, whereas electric fans do. Stick to vents early on to save on utility infrastructure.
The Art of Manual Labor (Micromanagement Tricks)
The tutorial might not tell you this, but your mouse cursor is the most powerful employee in the building. You can bypass sluggish AI behaviors by doing the heavy lifting yourself.
The “Hand of God” Resource Move
You do not have to wait for your Storage worker to fetch deliveries from the street. You can pick up paper and food deliveries with your mouse and drag them directly into your tower.
This leads to a game-changing realization: you can drop paper directly into the printer. Storage racks take up immense space. In the early game, do not even install them. Just manually drop all paper deliveries straight into the printer. While the exact limit is unknown, tycoons have stacked around 1,000 sheets of paper in the printer at once. You can apply this same logic to food; drop items straight into water fountains or coffee machines.
Aggressive Personnel Management
Your interactions extend to people as well.
- Protesters: Are angry mobs blocking your reporters from entering the tower? Grab the protesters and drop them off inside the building to clear the entrance.
- Lawsuits: A huge pile of legal trouble outside will slow you down. Help process lawsuits faster by directly grabbing the papers and dropping them onto the lawyer’s desk.
- Queue Jumping: If a typesetter finishes a story, you do not have to wait for a worker to move it. Pick it up and move it to the assembly line yourself. This can save hours of queue time, especially when your staff is overwhelmed. The game will even highlight where you can place the item.
Office Remodeling
Moving furniture one piece at a time is tedious. When you need to relocate desks, lamps, or entire departments, drag your mouse over all the items you want to move. This selects them as a group, allowing you to move a reporter’s desk along with their posters, maps, and clocks in one motion.
If mobsters destroy a desk, do not wait for maintenance. Delete the broken desk and buy a new one. It is faster than waiting for repairs.
Editorial Strategy and The World Map
Reporting is a war for influence and sales. You need a strategy for the map screen to ensure you capture the stories that matter.
The Sunday Cycle
Timing is everything. Silver and Gold level stories often have multiple parts. You can complete them halfway and let them sit on the globe until late in the week, such as Saturday or Sunday. If they are ready to complete, they will be available for print the following week.
Only stories that complete the full cycle (reporting, typesetting, assembly) during the current week will become Old News by the next week. Use this mechanic to stockpile content. Try to keep three to six stories from the previous week ready to go. Start reporting half a day before the current week’s print to get a head start.
Influence Farming
Money is easy to come by, but influence is rare.
- Recycle Trash: Start your week by dumping any stories you do not need. Use the Recycle button at the top right of the globe to clear non-essential stories. Never fail a mission because your globe is clogged with junk.
- Double Dipping: You can generate more influence by hitting a subscriber location for a second time. You won’t generate more readers, but you will harvest influence points.
- Factions: Mob, Mayor, and Society stories provide significant influence. While some managers find them risky due to negative impacts, others rely on them to build points. Just try to avoid failing them.
Managing Breaking News
Breaking Stories appear suddenly. They usually require three reporters of a specific category and have a tight deadline. Often, you cannot send a single reporter back to the same breaking story quickly enough.
The solution is brutal efficiency. Throw down a few extra desks and hire reporters with the necessary skill immediately. Once they complete the story, fire them. There are no repercussions for firing staff, so use temp labor freely to hit these targets. Note that Breaking News slots are separate from your standard story limit; they count as an extra story.
The Telegrapher Bottleneck
Always buy more Telegraphers when you can. Being able to select good stories is superior to settling for random ones. Be careful with Golden stories. They take up a Telegrapher slot while they “cook” on the map. If you discover them early in the week, that Telegrapher is out of action for days. Plan your staffing accordingly.
Personnel Management and Staffing
Your staff is your engine. You need to hire the right people at the right time.
The Hiring Strategy
Look for new hires often and early. Get employees with good traits as soon as possible so you have plenty of time to train them. Your income will generally outpace your HR spending, so do not be afraid to pay for the best talent, especially on normal difficulty.
A smart trick for reporters is to recruit them before you unlock advanced skills like illustrating, photography, or cartography. This increases your chances of getting reporters with the core genre skills you need. Later, you can train them.
The Lawyer Debate
The role of the lawyer is controversial among tower managers.
- The Skeptic’s View: Some argue that lawyers cost more than they save. They occupy space, use bathrooms, and eat food while providing little benefit if you manage risks well.
- The Proponent’s View: Lawsuits can cost up to $1,000 each. Five lawsuits can wipe out a third of your daily profit. In this scenario, lawyers are essential financial shields.
- The Hybrid Solution: Hire lawyers who also possess editing skills. You can stash their legal desk away when things are quiet and reassign them to an editor’s desk. This allows you to pivot based on your current needs.
Specialists: Artists and Photographers
Opinions vary on support staff. Some managers believe you should skip Artists and Photographers early on because the cost of an entire floor plus extra staff is too high for the return. However, others insist that Photographers make a massive difference. A gold tag from a photo can add 10,000 in sales.
Ads are a different story. Get ads early. You can often wait off the Artist requirement for ads and still collect the same money.
Advanced Economics and Operations
Profit margins in the newspaper business are slim. You need to exploit every operational advantage.
Sales and Pricing
Use your sales price to manipulate the calendar. Adjusting the price can help you avoid negative events. Additionally, always keep an eye on the Old News status. Schedule overlaps carefully and do not waste work hours by printing too early unless you specifically need to stop an article’s completion.
District Expansion
When planning for larger districts, look two weeks ahead. Search the Area Map for new territory that requires specific stories. Pick your next district goal based on the stories you currently have queued up in your production line. This synergy prevents you from entering a district empty-handed.
Technical Health
A note on player health and game mechanics: Keep your Printer Input at the bottom left level. This layout choice, along with putting paper transport behind a solid wall, may help prevent carpal tunnel issues for you, the player, by optimizing your mouse movement workflow.
Elevator Logistics
Elevators work better if you have several, but they create bottlenecks. Stairs connect floors reliably. Experiment with a mix, but remember the manual labor tip: drag items yourself to relieve pressure on the elevators.
The Cheater’s Almanac
Sometimes the deadline is too tight, or the funds are too low. For those who want to bend the rules of reality, here is a list of active cheat codes. To use them, simply type the code while in-game. There is no text box or prompt; just type.
Financial and Influence Aids
- ismellmoney: Adds $25,000 to your bank.
- kwalitaria: Adds 100 influence points.
- wallmart: Grants a 75% discount on delivery prices.
Staff Management
- pisventjes: Sets every worker’s bladder to 0 (urgent need).
- sonjabakker: Sets every worker’s nutrition to 0 (urgent hunger).
- nagsweg: Removes all nags.
Building and Maintenance
- putin: Toggles unlimited power.
- sloopdeboel: Breaks every object in the tower.
- hersteldeboel: Repairs every object in the tower.
- schijterij: Makes objects dirty.
- schoonhuis: Cleans objects instantly.
Game Progression and Unlocks
- geefmijalles: Unlocks all upgrades.
- unlocklist: Unlocks items.
- shoppingspree: Unlocks all shop entries.
- gekoloniseerd: Unlocks all map locations.
Time and Chaos
- sundae: Fast forwards time to Sunday.
- revo: Spawns protesters immediately.
- toggleversion: Toggles the game version.
- toggleui: Toggles the User Interface.
Conclusion
You now possess the insider knowledge required to outsmart the mob and outsell the competition. By mastering the art of vertical workflow and utilizing our manual labor hacks, you will turn every Sunday edition into a profitable victory. The city is waiting for its headline, so go forth and print the truth before the deadline hits.
