‘This Decline in Local Journalism Was Noticed First by Journalists Themselves’

Janine Jackson interviewed filmmaker Rick Goldsmith about his documentary Stripped for Parts for the March 22, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Documentary filmmakers don’t start when the camera rolls. The work involves not just gathering knowledge on a topic, but establishing relationships—sometimes with people who have no reason to trust that a camera in their face will lead to anything good for them.

Likewise, documentary filmmakers are not done when the film is finished, especially in the media-everywhere-all-the-time world we live in now. Simply creating something is not the same as guiding it to who might want or need to see it, to helping it have impact.

Among his other work, Rick Goldsmith is the filmmaker behind two important films about journalism in the United States: Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press and The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. His newest film is the third in this focused trilogy; it’s called Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink. And he joins us now to talk about it. He’s joining us from Oakland, California. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Rick Goldsmith.

Rick Goldsmith: Hi, Janine, thanks so much for having me on the show.

JJ: Smart as we all are nowadays, I think the idea of capitalism as market-based, which seems to mean based on human choices—that’s been sold so well as a story that there are people thinking, well, as much as I relied on my local newspaper, I guess it was just losing so much money that it wasn’t a sustainable business. And so it had to die.

The layoffs, the closures, what many people see as news media moving from “far from perfect” to “what the hell,” is presented as sad but somehow inevitable. And I think this film intervenes in that storyline. But was there a particular spark or a particular question that set you off to make Stripped for Parts?

FAIR.org (4/11/22)

RG: There was an event that happened about six years ago, now, and it was called the Denver Rebellion. And what happened was the newspaper men and women at the Denver Post kind of rose up against their owner, who was a hedge fund. And it was newly understood that hedge funds had a really bad effect on journalism. And they criticized their own owners, they took it upon themselves. And this kind of decline in local journalism was noticed, first by the journalists themselves. And they were the canaries in the coal mine to tell the story to everybody else.

So when I found out about this uprising, the Denver Rebellion, there were several things that jumped out at me. One was, why would somebody try to intentionally run down journalism? And two, the hedge funds were taking on a business that was failing: Why would they do that, and how would they make money? And then, three, was, here were the journalists who usually don’t even report on their own industry, and they were the ones telling the story. So for me, that was rich enough to get into it and say, “What the heck is going on here? And can I add something to this story?”

JJ: I think that’s especially interesting, because accounts of what Amazon is doing, or what the auto industry is doing, they’re almost always about what the owners and shareholders are doing. And if it’s a story about the workers, that’s going to be another day, on another page. And it’s especially, maybe, true in media, in that, as you’ve just said, workers, reporters, photographers usually don’t feel that they can or should speak as workers. For a journalist, “making yourself the story,” so-called, is anathema. So it wasn’t so much…what you’re saying, you didn’t have to get reporters to talk. Reporters were like, “No, we want to get this story out.”

RG: That’s right. And that was unique about their story, but I still had to—I think that the thing you said at the top, about gaining their trust, I think was really, really important. And maybe it was because of my background, and maybe it was just because of the approach, or maybe it was because of the passion and the anger that they were feeling at the time at being downsized by this hedge fund, that they were open to talking to me. And I think those first interviews after the Denver Rebellion were very, very rich, because it was so fresh in their mind, and they were so fired up about it.

JJ: What did you learn? If you had to explain to someone, why would a profit-interested corporation buy a paper and destroy it, essentially, run it into the ground? How does that make sense? Does that make sense?

Rick Goldsmith: “They could buy the newspaper for a song, sell the building, maybe sell the printing press…and they’ve already made their money back.”

RG: Well, it makes sense if you understand what this particular hedge fund, and many like it, are in the business of. And the key phrase here is “distressed asset investing,” which is maybe a kind of Wall Streetish term. But what it means is they could buy something on the cheap that was a failing business, and then figure out what their assets were. And like a used car that is basically junk, they could strip it for parts.

And in this case, it was usually the real estate. The newsroom itself was downtown, was centrally located, and they could buy the newspaper for a song, sell the building, maybe sell the printing press and move the printing operations out of town, and they’ve already made their money back, and then everything else is gravy.

So then the next key step is, let’s cut the staff, because we don’t need these—Heath Freeman, who’s the president of Alden Global Capital, he walked into the newsroom and he famously said, “What do all these people do?” So he had a certain disdain for the people that worked for the newspapers, but it was a gleam in his eye, because he said, “We can make some money, we can make lots of money out of this.” And that’s exactly what they did.

JJ: And the public facing part of it, when Alden Global Capital or any hedge fund takes over a paper, they never say, “We’re going to strip this for parts.” That’s never the PR move. It’s, in fact, grotesque, because it’s often, “We’re going to save this failing outlet.”

RG: That’s exactly right. And in fact, after I got into the business, I mentioned the Denver Rebellion. Well, there were many, many events that then unfolded in the several years that followed. And one was that Alden Global Capital went after Gannett, which was the largest publicly owned newspaper chain in the country. USA Today was their flagship paper, but they had local newspapers all around the country. And Alden Global Capital, that was in their materials to the shareholders: “We saved newspapers.”

The Nation (2/8/19)

Unfortunately for them, at the time, people like Julie Reynolds, who was an investigative reporter that’s highlighted in our film, had done a lot of reporting, and by now she’s done over a hundred articles just on Alden Global Capital and newspapers. And what Alden didn’t see coming was they were going to lose the public relations battle, and they tried to take over Gannett in 2019, and they failed.

Now, there were other events that followed that, that made it not so great for the public, but at that time, that was a big victory for journalists, and it was because now the news about Alden Global Capital and what they were about was out in the public, and they couldn’t just do their machinations behind closed doors.

JJ: That sunshine or that transparency is, maybe it’s the baseline or the bottom line, but it’s a necessary starting point. Clearly, this work is of particular meaning for people who work in journalism, sure, but also for everybody who sees and cares about the effects of media coverage on the whole range of issues that shape our lives, and on the relationship, as we at FAIR always talk about, between the business of media and journalism’s actual and potential societal impact.

So I want to ask you about the Impact Campaign. What is the work that is going with this film that’s different than just having a series of screenings of the film around the country? What do you hope to be adding with the Impact Campaign?

RG: Our Impact Campaign is just underway, and we’re going to be in New York in this coming week with a couple of screenings at the Firehouse Cinema DCTV on Tuesday, March 26 and Wednesday, March 27. And we’re going to be following that up with going to Minneapolis and Santa Cruz and Vancouver, Washington, and later Baltimore, New England, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, all over the country.

What’s the point of all that? Well, the film itself is a jumping off point for discussion about journalism. And we show, not only the causes of the hedge fund takeover of newspapers, which is massive in this country, but also some of the solutions that are happening, with startups—there’s over 400 nonprofit newspapers, with newsrooms from two to three people to maybe ten or 20 people. Not exactly taking the place of newspapers, but very, very substantial. There’s also movements to get public funding of local journalism.

And so we have the showings of the film followed by Q&A with, generally, I might be there, either in person or virtually, and maybe somebody from the local community who’s been paying attention to the local journalism crisis, talking about it, and interacting with the audience.

And what can you do? It might be getting in touch with your local representative, because some legislation is addressing this problem, or it’s expanding your knowledge of what are the local journalism outlets in your community that you’re not even thinking about? And it’s a way of getting people who are from the community and the journalists from that community to interact, get them in the same room, get them talking.

And I think it’s only by raising the public consciousness, and raising the amount of discussion about this crisis in local journalism, and how it affects democracy, that we’re going to find our way out of it. And the solutions in each community are somewhat different, because of the particulars of that community. And I think that’s actually a wonderful thing, because then the solutions become somewhat locally generated.

JJ: And how can folks learn more about this, or maybe even bring it to their town?

RG: Great question. Come to our website, StrippedForPartsFilm.com, just like it sounds. If you somehow have trouble reaching it, just Stripped for Parts and google it. You’ll get to our website. You can get in touch with us if you want to help arrange a screening in your community. We are here, and we have the ways to make that happen. And we can do that with you and with your help.

JJ: All right, then; we’ve been speaking with documentary filmmaker Rick Goldsmith. You can learn more about the film Stripped for Parts, and the Impact Campaign that goes with it, at StrippedForPartsFilm.com. Thank you so much, Rick Goldsmith, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RG: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for reaching out to me.

The post ‘This Decline in Local Journalism Was Noticed First by Journalists Themselves’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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