Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink

I’ve been reading newspapers since I was seven years old. As a documentary filmmaker, journalism and newspapers, as subject matter, have been my “beat.” The recent collapse of the newspaper industry, resulting in “ghost newspapers” and “news deserts” and the shrinking of local journalism throughout the country, has caused me to mourn the loss--but also on the lookout for the next great journalism story to tell. When I came across this story, of journalists standing up for their own profession, their communities, and for our democracy, I instinctively knew I had it.

The “Denver Rebellion” they called it, triggered by an editorial writer blasting the “vulture capitalist” hedge fund owners who were “murdering” the daily he worked on. And whose editorial, in turn, had been informed by two years of investigating by another journalist who used to work for the same hedge fund. Their emotions were fresh, and their passions came through, with heat and with candor. What a find!

What I didn’t know was there would be five years of battles: of journalists becoming activists, excoriating their owners without hesitation, sounding the alarm for their readers, of what would be lost if we, the collective “we”, let these greedy, unregulated hedge fund owners have their way.

The resultant film is my “value added” to the essential democracy-depends-on it conversations many are having, and subsequent public policy decisions we must consider: What do we do about hedge funds in newspapers? How do we revive, re-invent, and rebuild local journalism? And how do we sustain, in the wake of a business model that has collapsed in the digital age, a true and vibrant “public service journalism”?