"The Vietnam of Newspapers"

Nope, not the Daily News – the Cypress Bay High School Circuit, the subject of yet another MTV reality show, “The Paper.”

As this trailer for the show notes, reality at the Circuit is a lot like a lot of reality TV in general – people dance around, make out, argue and get teary-eyed. And most of the participants are good-looking.

I was editor of my high-school paper (and yearbook), and I can safely report that if MTV’s cameras had followed our staff around, it would’ve caused a universe-destroying rift in the time-space continuum, as MTV didn’t exist at the time. I can also report that if they had done so anyway, they wouldn’t’ve been able to cobble together enough interesting footage to put together a single episode of the show, let alone an entire season.

We didn’t break into spontaneous dance in our classroom. We didn’t make out, either, or sweep the female staffers up in our arms for publicity photos. We didn’t have singalongs. We didn’t yell and scream at one another. No one was reduced to tears over anything involving the paper (or anything else, as far as I can recall). We didn’t trash cars with sledgehammers. There wasn’t any great drama behind the selection of the editor – the faculty advisor picked someone, and that was that.

Basically, people did their work – typed up their stories, laid out the pages, cropped photos, proofread copy – or, they didn’t, because some people took courses working on the paper because even if you didn’t do a thing, you’d still get a B. And with an exception or two, we were all just kind of average-looking.

So clearly, the high-school-newspaper racket has gotten a lot sexier. Or, more likely, the reality-TV genre has inspired a generation to always be “on,” to respond like a drama queen to every potential problem, to be loud and colorful because that’s how you get cameras to remain trained upon you. But in the future, how will people know how to behave when a camera isn’t pointing at them?

- “The Paper:” 10:30 p.m. Monday, MTV.