Many people in the press state that this film was and still is the greatest representation of what actually goes on in newspaper offices all over the world. Director Ron Howard and co-writer David Koepp are still amazed at the impact the film still has despite the fact that at the time of filming, the printed press was really started to dwindle down mostly due to financial issues and some newspapers did in fact shutter at the time but still has made a lasting impact.
Co-screenwriter Stephen Koepp has experience in the world of journalism, as he is the editor-in-chief of TIME Magazine.
The office where the New York Sun is supposed to be located was an empty office space around Wall Street with a huge corner space which was perfect for the production since they were able to film parts of lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges in the distance to make it look as if their paper was actually operating from there.
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!"