I’m ending my series a day before TCM’s with their Monday offerings, which are devoted to the now-embattled print media. The only title that isn’t on DVD is Mervyn LeRoy’s “Five Star Final” (1931) at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, which isn’t as good as its Best Picture Oscar nomination would suggest — the normally reliable LeRoy doesn’t do a great job with the second leads. But this antique is still an above-average early talkie inspired by Bernarr McFadden’s notorious New York City newspaper of the ’20s, the Evening Graphic. Edward G. Robinson is very good as the editor who is goaded by his circulation-hungry publisher into digging up a 20-year-old scandal, with tragic results all around. The immortal Aline McMahon makes her screen debut as the secretary who not-so-secretly loves Robinson, but the film belongs to rising star Boris Karloff (one of 16 films he made that year, including “Frankenstein” and “The Criminal Code”) as a reporter who poses as a minister to dig up the dirt on an about-to-be-remarried murderess. “Five Star Final” was remade five years later as “Two Against the World,” a poorish B-movie reset at a radio station, starring Humphrey Bogart in the Robinson role.

I also have a major soft spot for George Seaton’s “Teacher’s Pet” (1958, 5:45 p.m.) with Doris Day as a night-school journalism professor who teaches hard-bitten city editor Clark Gable about the value of investigative journalism, among other things. With its unusually acccurate depiction of the day-to-day operations of a newspaper, it would have made a helluva double feature with Jack Webb’s “-30-” if TCM had managed to finally schedule this. Instead, tonight’s 8 p.m. EST feature is the TCM debut of Rene Clair’s delightful “It Happened Tomorrow” (1944). Originally intended as a Frank Capra project, this charmer stars Dick Powell as a NYC reporter of the Gay 1890s who finds a unique way to scoop the competition. Linda Darnell and Jack Oakie co-star. I only wish this was going to be followed by Sam Fuller’s infrequently-shown “Park Row” (1952), which is set in the same era. TCM showed this vivid melodrama, which has never been on video, as part of a Fuller retrospective a few years ago.