The Corporation of The NewsStand is a titanic, efficient nation, ruled by the over-worked news vendor with a fair hand, and remarkable for its strictly enforced bedtime, irreverence towards religion, and absence of drug laws. The hard-nosed, hard-working, democratic population of 11.772 billion distributors are effectively ruled by a group of massive corporations, who run for political office and provide their well-off citizens with world-class goods and services. Their poorer citizens, however, are mostly starving to death while being urged to go out and get real jobs. The populace has reasonably extensive civil rights, although these are mostly aimed at allowing them to buy whatever they like.

The tiny, pro-business, outspoken government juggles the competing demands of Industry, Education, and Law & Order. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of Gossip Magazine. Citizens pay a flat income tax of 3.8%.

The frighteningly efficient distributing economy, worth a remarkable 1,683 trillion up-votes a year, is driven almost entirely by the private sector, which is broadly diversified and dominated by the Retail industry, with significant contributions from Soda Sales, Book Publishing, and Information Technology. Average income is an impressive 143,048 up-votes, but there is a significant disparity between incomes, with the richest 10% of citizens earning 421,582 per year while the poor average 38,193, a ratio of 11.0 to 1.

Hundreds of thousands of convicts work as slaves in The NewsStand's many privately-owned prisons, businesses are abandoning the city centre because of the lack of transport connections, X-Files ratings have hit an all-time low, and surrogate mothers are encouraged to refer to their wombs as 'rental space'. Crime is relatively low. The NewsStand's national animal is the shelf-browser, which is also the nation's favorite main course, and its national religion is Money.

The NewsStand is ranked 24,125^th in the world and 1^st in The NewsStand for Most Cultured, scoring 83 on the Snufflebottom-Wiggendum Pentatonic Scale.