Co-screenwriter Stephen Koepp has experience in the world of journalism, as he is the editor-in-chief of TIME Magazine.
There are some dozen daily newspapers published in New York City, but the circulations of all newspapers - and the numbers of papers - have declined substantially since the dawn of the digital age. The average daily circulation of the largest paper in 2020, The Wall Street Journal, was 994,600. After that comes USA Today, with a 486,579 average daily circulation in 2020. The New York Times comes in third at 410,562, making the top three all New York published. After that the numbers drop significantly across the country, as well as in New York: the Washington Post is the only other paper above 200,000, at 206,824, while the Los Angeles Times comes in fifth at 193,015. The last New York papers in the top ten are the New York Post at 162,478 and Newsday at 123,905.
Mike Sheehan was the perfect choice to play the character of New York Detective Ritchie, a police source for Michael McDougal. Sheehan was the key detective in the Central Park Case of 1989 in which five African-American and Latino-American teens from Harlem were wrongfully accused of attempted murder and rape of a twenty-eight-year-old white woman jogging in Central Park. Despite the overturn of the Central Park Five's conviction in 2002, Sheehan remains confident that the teens committed the crime. In the film, Sheehan's character Ritchie, when pressed by MacDougal and Keaton's character Henry Hackett about whether the two teenage African-American boys are NYPD scapegoats for the killing of white businessmen in Brooklyn, gives the quote and headline for the newspaper: "They didn't do it!"
The radio broadcast heard during the opening credits of the film was originally intended to be a segment from Don Imus' "Imus in the Morning" program that was recorded live during an on-air interview with director Ron Howard. A portion of the segment appears as Michael Keaton walks through the newsroom.