News Tower 1.2.11.r Native for macOS

You begin with twelve pages to fill and a rented office in Brooklyn.

Build your staff

Hire reporters, photographers, and the folks who keep the lights on — cleaners, ad sellers, even a lawyer when things get messy. Each one shows up with their own quirks and salary demands.

Chase the story

News tips come in by telegraph. You decide which leads to follow, send reporters to Wall Street or Yankee Stadium, and hope they come back with something worth the front page.

Go to press

Lay out every column, place the photos, and get the Sunday edition out the door. Start local, then push your paper into every borough and beyond New York Bay.

Where News Tower fits on your Mac

I keep it in the Dock next to my actual writing tools — Scrivener, a text editor, the folder where I stash client notes. That sounds cute, I know, but there's a reason. When I close the game after a bad press run, I glance at my real work and think, “At least I don't have an ad salesman threatening to quit today.”

The game plays nicely with macOS's built-in screenshot tools, which matters more than you'd expect. Command-Shift-4 lets me grab a clean shot of my newsroom layout before I rearrange the whole floor. I drop those into a Finder folder labeled “Don't do this again” and reference them when I restart a scenario.

It also respects the system's focus modes. If you have a Gaming focus set up on your Mac, News Tower slides right into it — no notifications pinging you about operating system updates while you're trying to decide whether to run the corruption story or kill it to keep an advertiser happy.

Mistakes I've watched people make

Most new publishers hire three reporters and zero support staff. Then they wonder why the office is filthy, the ad revenue dried up, and nobody's answering the telegraph. A cleaner and an ad seller cost less than a junior reporter and keep the whole operation from collapsing by Wednesday.

Another classic: chasing every tip that arrives. The telegraph station piles up leads faster than you can assign them. If you don't let a few stories die, your reporters end up spread across the city with nothing finished. Pick two strong leads per cycle and actually finish them.

And for the love of everything, stop decorating before you have a second floor. I've seen players spend half their starting funds on potted plants and fancy desks for a Brooklyn office that still can't print a Sunday edition on time. The newsroom doesn't need to look pretty — it needs to work.

• Apple Silicon or Intel 64-bit Mac