Ocean State Stories director and former Providence Journal reporter G. Wayne Miller has drawn upon much of his reporting experience in his past books, but his newest release takes it up a notch with a look at the newspaper industry.

“Unfit to Print: A Modern Media Satire,” Miller’s 21st book, follows a fictional newspaper as it’s taken over by a national media conglomerate- paralleling a situation that Miller has seen happen to many real-life papers.

The idea first came to Miller earlier in his career, and he finished its first draft early last year. Its name is a play on the New York Times’ slogan- “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” Miller said he knew from the start that he wanted to make this book a satire.

“I started thinking about this book a number of years ago,” Miller said. “I knew early on I didn’t want to do a memoir because, you know, who cares? I wanted to do fiction.”

Miller also pointed out a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote which can be found on the book’s back cover- “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures”- that he considered a modus operandi for the book.

The book follows Nick Nolan- a reporter with the Boston Daily Tribune, a once-proud, now struggling paper that has drastically cut staff and changed content-wise after the conglomerate, named SuperGoodMedia, takes over. While he receives a scoop that catapults his career into stardom, his internal conflict about embellishing this story ensues, manifesting itself through the spirit of Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin is Miller’s favorite character in the book, and through Franklin, Miller criticizes the state of modern media and media ownership, in addition to other social commentary both about the modern day and the period when the U.S. was founded.

“I have a lot of fun with him,” Miller said. “There’s a lot of commentary, but it’s fun with an edge and with a point.”

Other public figures, including Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Boston mayor Michelle Wu appear in the book in fictionalized scenes.

The book balances its satirical humor with dark themes, and places a heavy focus on the issues that the journalism industry is facing, including financial issues, the rising number of “ghost papers”- newspapers with a staff that has been pared down so much that they cannot adequately cover their communities- and disinformation, among others.

“I’ve got the long view,” Miller said. “I’ve seen what’s happened firsthand to many, many newspapers- in fact, a great majority of newspapers, including the Providence Journal and what has happened there. In the acknowledgements, I mentioned the people who are still there. They’re doing heroic work. But it’s a staff that is very small compared to when I started back in the 1980s. And that’s not just the story of the Journal- it’s the story of many, many newspapers. At least the Journal is still there.”

Miller does cut through the darker themes with a ray of hope for the industry, with the book’s ending providing a “clear path forward” for both Nolan and the journalism field as a whole.

As for takeaways, Miller said that he wants readers to take to heart the importance of journalistic work, and think about the importance of journalism amidst disinformation.

“Find a way to support good, quality journalism, whether on a national level or on a local level,” Miller said. “Subscribe to a newspaper and think about the importance of journalism to our democracy over the centuries, going back to Ben Franklin’s time.”

“Unfit to Print” is available on Amazon, Kindle, Apple Books, Smashwords and Barnes and Noble’s website. An audiobook version is still in the works, and will be out by Oct. 10, according to Miller’s website.

The book’s official launch will be on Oct. 11 at 6:30 p.m. at the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.