I think a lot of people missed the roles of the journalists in The French Dispatch and how they furthered Anderson's brief history of New Yorker journalism. The storyteller in each episode (journalist) tells the story in increasing amounts of interjecting himself or herself into the story. In the first story we see Tilda Swinton, from back in the fifties/early sixties who observes the artist yet never interjects herself into the story, much as a classical journalist would. In the second story, we get Frances McDormand, a woman who sleeps with the protagonist of her story in the late sixties but still maintains a level of neutrality about the story and subject, and while she admits that a thoroughly objective account of a story is unreachable, she at least tries to attain that objectivity. The third story, set in the early seventies and beyond, sees the male journalist as provocateur and adventurer, and he thrusts himself in the story as if he were the stories' raison d'être, shaping and molding to the story to his own personality.
I found it a brilliant touch that said something about movements within journalism over time.