At its heart, The Landry News is a story about the transformation of a newspaper as the people who work on it grow and change. The novel explores the moral obligations of good journalism, as well as the different aspects of what it means to report honest news. Through an examination of investigation versus invasion of privacy, the limitations of free speech, and the plurality of truth, The Landry News shows the importance of ethics for journalists and, by extension, wider society.

The novel explores the boundaries between appropriate facts and intrusion. In Chapter 3, Cara tells the kids on the bus she knows things about certain kids at school because “people who make newspapers need to know what’s going on” (16). While this is true, there is a difference between knowing what’s going on and deliberately digging up irrelevant information about someone just to report it as truth. Prior to the book’s opening, Cara used The Landry News to report in a hurtful way, giving more information than was necessary for a story to make sense. By doing so, Cara invaded the privacy of the people she wrote about and put details into the public eye that didn’t need to be there, even if they were technically true.