Newspaper running game. Need help to develop an idea.

Hello folks. I made a small prototype for newspaper running game, but it's boring as hell, and I'm about to move on to the next project. I decided to give it a go to ask your opinion and suggestions, so here we go.

The setting is a fictional country in late 1800s, a small country inside a big empire, and this is the first media in this country's own language. Game starts with You, as a player interviewing candidates for a writer in a newly established newspaper. Each candidate has different skillsets and ideologies, and this will be reflected in their work. You can have big influence in your region as the only media available, but the newspaper would be monitored. I can think of some storylines, economy, later hiring other writers or artist, cutscenes with hand drawn animation, but the actual gameplay is real challenge.

My initial idea is to have multiple articles, or letters, news, or whatever in front of you, and you choose which ones to be displayed in paper, and how many to print. And next day you can see consequences of your choices, it can be in terms of subscription numbers, feedback from government, increase / decrease of nationalist movement amoung population, etc. But still, this is just reading some texts and ranking them, so I was looking for something more in the main loop. I haven't played many tycoon games, so maybe this is just fine, or maybe I'm missing something.

P.S. The initial idea was heavily depended on 2d animation. You are indie film director, and your friend has a script that you want to turn into short movie. Game starts auditioning 2 actors for the the movie, and the gameplay branches out based on chosen actors, and later decisions in the scenes. But of course, this is too much animation, so I decided to turn this into newspaper game.