The thing that instantly dates Rick Goldsmith’s documentary “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink,” about the Internet, hedge-fund and tycoon-driven death of American newspapers, is the gasping attempt to find something optimistic in the death of the country’s local legacy media institutions.
The film was finished and did the festival circuit in 2023. Since then, more newspapers have closed, tidal waves of layoffs continued at the rest and America’s real watchdogs — the ones who do the reporting TV and online folks often just copy or parrot — were too weakened and too-often ignored as they failed to sway the public that a genuinely dangerous movement of the misinformed and the misinformers was about to end our democracy.
So there’s an “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the play?” futility to this film’s expose of the most predatory hedge fund of them all’s devouring of the institutions that newspapers were.
The alarm about “business model” problems was sounded decades ago, when Craigslist, Google and Facebook took their turns “disrupting” the media and advertising landscape, robbing news organizations of their ability to fund the reporting that Google would borrow, post its own ads on and profit from.
Speaking to journalists at The Denver Post, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun newsrooms about their concerns, editorializing and protesting their fate ignores the fact that these folks are all merely survivors in a gutted landscape. Endless waves of cuts from a business that made that its practice before the Internet ever came along mean nobody should have been surprised by this.
Alden Capital/Digital First and whatever-its-called-now and its two hedge fund chiefs Randall D. Smith and Heath Freeman may make convenient villains. But they’re just rich gravediggers playing capitalism’s end game — buying newspapers, cutting costs by gutting staffs and centralizing operations on the cheap, putting the real estate these often-downtown institutions own up for sale to make a quick buck.
Tiny newspapers close, leaving much of rural America in a “news desert.”
“News deserts” are just part of the small town and county newspaper story. The ones surviving are too timid to offend advertisers or subscribers with news and facts they don’t want to read.
When Goldsmith talks to people from the Tribune Corporation as staff of the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun scramble to find billionaire “white knights” to “save” the company from Alden, he makes no mention of the fact that the gutting preceded Alden by decades, that an earlier “white knight” became an earlier ugly face of the gut-and-gut-and-profit-from-it “vulture” capitalism that’s now finishing the job.
I know. That’s one of the newspaper companies that I worked for over my career — chains named Knight-Ridder, McClathy, Tribune, Persis and Media General, most of them gone, or renamed and a shell of their former selves.
The film’s urgency is conveyed by reporters and editors profiled here — some walking picket lines, some recruiting fresh “white knights,” some taking a shot at becoming news entpreneurs.
Its “Here’s a villain” gotcha comes from former Monterey County Herald reporter Julie Reynolds, who blew the lid on secretive, underregulated Alden Capital’s buying frenzy — newspapers taken over, and mansion collections purchased with the looted profits and pension funds of those news gathering local institutions, many of which have been in business over a century.
Goldsmith has made three documentaries on newspapering — “Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press” in the ’90s, “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” in 2009 and this one. He knows the turf and all he’s choosing to leave out in his “short history” interludes in this film.
But even with those omissions of bad faith labor practices, business ethics shortcuts and the like by most any newspaper one can name, he never really makes the case for saving what’s left.
By the third act of this piece of cinematic rhetoric, the “possible solutions” step in any motivational speech, you can’t help but feel the film is five years too late to matter.
“Stripped” finishes with suggestions that capitalism has been the problem with news gathering all along, and that reporter-owned newsites and philanthropy-backed news organizations are one way to ensure journalism’s survival.
But these tiny operations, with low profiles even in the communities they set up to serve, don’t have the institutional power of a legacy media company shining a light on corruption, holding crooks accountable and helping the public make informed decisions about politics.
And Goldsmith’s interviewees suggesting that adopting some sort of “public funding” model for “the only private industry mentioned in the Bill of Rights (First Amendment press protections),” perhaps like “the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” PBS/NPR arrangement, becomes just another instantly out-of-date grasp.
“Stripped for Parts” sets out to upend the “narrative” of what killed print journalism — the Internet and online advertising’s lack of value — by putting hedge fund villains in the blame mix.
But the second newspaper I worked for closed in the early ’90s, and the “consultants” hired as cover for each new round of layoffs was a fixture in every newsroom I ever worked in.
In leaving out the sordid history of “white nights” who are nothing of the sort, from Rupert Murdoch and Sam Zell to Jeff Bezos, Goldsmith avoids undercutting his fragile thesis. But he can’t hide from the fact that the facts don’t back that thesis up.
The outmoded business model issue is still the most apt narrative for the death of newspapering. And it’s relevent only because legacy media didn’t band together, hire lawyers and lobbyists and force Google, Yahoo, Facebook and everybody else taking expensively-made content and slapping its own ads on it to share a BIG chunk of their ad revenue back in the very early 2000s, when “dead tree media” had the clout to do that.
Goldsmith knows what he’s doing as a filmmaker and is familiar enough with his subject to ask some of the right questions. But he’s made a documentary about a patient bleeding out on an operating table. It wasn’t really “timely” when he filmed it. There aren’t real “solutions” out there, and the fate of many of those interviewed (“retired,” “took buyout”) backs that up.
And it’s hard to find optimism in a eulogy, or in a movie that just adds to the “relics of the ghost of journalism past.”
Rating: unrated, some profanity
Cast: Greg Moore, Julie Reynolds, narrated by Rick Goldsmith.
Credits: Directed by Rick Goldsmith, scripted by Rick Goldsmith and Michael Chandler. A Kovno Communications release coming to PBS in October.
Running time: 1:29
Movie Nation 