Storm Lake/PBS Independent Lens photos
The newsroom of 'The Storm Lake Times' as the staff works on an issue of the twice-weekly Iowa paper.
When people talk about hating the media, it’s usually because they’re getting their knickers in a twist about the opinion of someone at Fox, MSNBC, CNN or The New York Times. They’re not talking about the likes of Tom Cullen, wandering a mobile home community with a city council candidate, or Dolores Cullen, writing human interest features covering what she jokes is “the happy beat.”
And while everybody is busy foaming at the mouth about the big players, it’s the smaller players who are disappearing across the country — the ones who cover the city councils and the happy beats. It’s a crisis for journalism and it’s a crisis for democracy, one illustrated beautifully in the documentary Storm Lake, which airs at 9 p.m. Nov. 15 as part of the PBS series Independent Lens.
The film tells the story of The Storm Lake Times and the family that runs it, including Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer Art Cullen. What began as a look at how a small twice-weekly newspaper in northwest Iowa fights for its community and won a Pulitzer became much more, as the pandemic hit and nearly shut the paper down for good. It’s a warts-and-all look at a paper and a business hanging on for dear life as greater forces swirl around it.
“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If we’re going to nose into people’s business, how could we say no to them nosing into ours?” says Art Cullen, the paper’s editor, of the documentary. “We were hoping they would produce a piece of honest journalism and they did.”
The challenges faced by the Cullens are not unique to Storm Lake. The Poynter Institute for Media Studies reports that more than 90 local newsrooms have shut down since the pandemic began, joining more than 1,700 other local newspapers that have closed since 2004. With more news deserts in local communities, people have fewer ways to become more informed about the issues that impact them most of all.
“That’s the genius of it,” Art Cullen says of the film. “It’s like how Field of Dreams is supposed to be about baseball but it’s about father-son relationships; this movie is supposed to be about a newspaper but it’s really about democracy.”
That wasn’t apparent to the filmmakers Jerry Risius and Beth Levison when they first began the project and sought financing. Risius, a cinematographer whose work includes Anthony Bourdain’s TV series, grew up on an Iowa farm near a small town that lost its local paper. Both he and Levison were drawn by Cullen’s Pulitzer and the unique aspects of Storm Lake, home to a large immigrant population because of its meatpacking industries.
“The stakes weren’t really apparent early in the process,” Levison says. “But with the entrenchment of the Trump administration and with the Iowa caucuses that went wrong and then COVID, we had a lot of people come on board because they could see what was going on and what this family is trying to do about it in their own community.”
The Storm Lake Times is a family-run, family-owned operation — Art’s brother John is publisher; Art’s wife, Dolores, is the photographer and feature reporter; son Tom is the news reporter; John’s wife, Mary, writes a recipe column.
The newspaper has gained attention since Art won the Pulitzer in 2017. He has written op-eds for the Washington Post, New York Times and the Guardian, becoming an influential figure well beyond his hometown of 11,000 people.
“I knew Art was a great character and as Beth and I continued to work on it, it just became this ensemble piece with the whole Cullen family and their newspaper,” Risius says.
An operation with meager profits during good times, the paper nearly shut down during the pandemic. It was first rescued by Paycheck Protection Program loans, then funds raised through a new nonprofit, the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation.
“Is our community strong enough to support high quality local journalism?” Cullen says. “Every community should be, but the question is, ‘Are we?’”
Since this spring, the film has played festivals and small screenings that were accompanied by panel discussions about news.
“What was a little unexpected was the degree to which organizations are seeing the promise of the film as a tool to spark conversations,” Levison says. “We have national partners, we have more partners who want to come on board and we’re getting daily emails from journalism programs nationwide.”
While local news navigates its challenges, interest in the film and its themes brings a dash of hope to the journalism landscape, Levison says.
“It’s getting people to think about their relationship to local news, why they should invest in it, why they should help support it,” she says. “Any time there’s something that encourages people to do something that’s good for our country, that’s a good thing.”
