Papers and NPC events
| Surface | The political scene: the press page and the IN POLITICS list; the desk's morning-papers strip |
|---|---|
| State papers | Reprint the same press coverage the player received that month |
| National papers | Three generated front pages a month |
| Premium | The national papers, and a quarterly rewrite pass on the news feed |
The press page is a career's newspaper archive. It holds one edition a month, browsed with Earlier and Later buttons, and each edition shows a national row and a state row of front pages, each laid out with a masthead, a date, a headline and a subhead. Beneath the papers sits IN POLITICS, a short list of one-line news items about named politicians in the game's world.
The state row
The state papers reprint, word for word and under the state's own mastheads, the same press coverage of the month that the player already saw when the month resolved. Whose papers appear in the state row depends on the player's role: a governor, a candidate for governor, and a private citizen not yet nationally known are printed locally; a citizen who has become nationally known, and a candidate for any other office, are printed under the national mastheads instead, though still shown in the state row; a sitting President's own papers appear in the national row instead. Every state has its own set of authored newspaper names.
The national row
The national row carries three generated front pages a month, written from the state of the game world and, once the game's history has moved away from the real timeline, from the recent national news as well. They are not produced for a sitting President, whose own papers take their place. Generating them is a premium feature, and once a quarter a premium account also gets a pass where a night editor rewrites some of the month's generated items into sharper prose without changing the facts.
Real history
Alongside the generated papers, the game also prints real, dated headlines from the history of the period being played, up to the point where the player's own career causes events to diverge from what actually happened. These headlines stop printing while the player is President, since the President's own papers take over the national row, though real history resumes once the presidency ends.
In politics
The IN POLITICS list carries five to ten short items a month about politicians named elsewhere in the game: mostly the home state's own legislators, statewide officers and members of Congress, and occasionally another state's sitting governor. Each item describes something that politician did, and nudges that person's own recognition, standing or favourability rather than the player's. Clicking on an item about a home-state politician opens that person's own card. The size of these effects has not yet been tuned and is still a placeholder. Examples of what an item might describe:
- A floor speech on a local issue
- A strong fundraising quarter
- A leaked story
- A profile in a national paper