Meet Art Cullen

He’s the muckraking small-town journalist who nabbed a Pulitzer

by

Journalists often have two fanciful notions when they start their careers. They dream of working for The New York Times or The Washington Post and maybe even nabbing a Pulitzer Prize. Or, they think how great it would be to work for their hometown paper, using a local’s knowledge to get to the guts of what’s really going on.

Most end up somewhere in between.

But in a small county seat in northwest Iowa, in a lake town surrounded by an ocean of corn, there is a rabble-rousing newspaperman who, with skill and tenacity, has managed to combine both dreams.

Art Cullen, editor of the 3,000-circulation Storm Lake Times in Storm Lake, Iowa, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017. That’s 3,000, with just three zeroes, and the paper comes out only on Wednesdays and Fridays. Cullen’s thoughtful, passionate editorials are a constant in the paper, and those he penned on government accountability, water quality and agribusiness caught the eye of the Pulitzer board. A book deal followed. On Oct. 2, Viking Press will release Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper. Cullen will read from his book at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Oct. 12.

The journalist in him recognizes that it’s a good story: Courageous small town paper stands up to the giants, including the Farm Bureau and Monsanto. But on a personal level, Cullen, 61, still sits back in amazement at what fate has handed him after decades of hard work and long hours far from any national spotlight.

“How did I get a Pulitzer and a book deal?” says Cullen, taking a break in the Times’ office, which sits in the shadow of a water tower and across the street from the local historical society. “That’s just too weird.”

Cullen’s book helps explain how it could happen. Storm Lake shows that Cullen’s hometown is not an ordinary town, but an epicenter for nearly every hot-button issue of the past two decades — immigration, climate change, water quality, agriculture and the environment. Throw in government secrecy and an independent news organization, even a small one, that wasn’t going to let itself get pushed around, and the result is a Pulitzer Prize.

“We’re pretty aggressive about our coverage,” Cullen says. “Community newspapers are often a laughingstock because we do run pet photos and stuff people like to look at. If you want to write a nice obituary about your mother, we’ll run it word-for-word, for free. But you can be folksy and at the same time be pretty hard-nosed in your reporting, and I think we’ve done that. And all the Missouri Synod Lutheran ladies still love us, even if they’re voting against all our candidates.”

The Storm Lake Times is one of more than 7,000 weeklies in the U.S. that have been able to ride out the challenges facing the newspaper industry by doing what they know best: being a hometown paper. In June 2018, The Economist ran an article under the headline, “Small-town American newspapers are surprisingly resilient.”

The story of The Storm Lake Times shows how a community can set aside its fear of change and see a brighter future, and how a newspaper can help lead the way.

“Sometimes you become a cheerleader for the community and a lot of metro journalists can’t get their heads around that,” Cullen says. “But if we aren’t going to be the cheerleader for this community, who will be?”

Cullen didn’t plan to be a journalist. While flunking out of his business major at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, he thought he’d give journalism a try because the only requirement was being able to type 25 words per minute.

“I could type 26,” he says.

His first story for the school newspaper was no piece of puffery: A housing director at the Catholic college was outed as gay and subsequently fired from his job. Cullen’s career plan was to get back to the Twin Cities and one day work for the Minneapolis Tribune (now the Star Tribune), where he had a part-time job in college. Instead he headed back to a small paper in Algona, Iowa, where he had been an intern, and replaced his brother, John, as editor. Two other Iowa stops in Ames and Mason City followed, but when family called, he set aside his big-city dream.

In 1990, John Cullen founded The Storm Lake Times and persuaded Art to join him. Together, the brothers created the formula Art Cullen spells out in his book: Print the truth, let the chips fall where they may, pay the IRS and the bankers first, then the printer and yourself last. And the most important lesson: Pick your fights carefully.

What began as a family endeavor has remained one. The paper’s staff totals 10, and five are Cullens: John is the publisher, Art is the editor, Art’s son, Tom, is the news reporter, Art’s wife, Dolores, is a feature writer and photographer, and John’s wife, Mary, works with the legal notices and writes a recipe column.

“Art Cullen could go anywhere, but it wouldn’t be the same as working with his brother,” says Randy Evans, executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council. “They’re accustomed to working long hours, but one of the things you can’t get compensated enough for is working for people you love and admire.”

Instead of heading elsewhere, Evans says, Cullen has been able to illuminate his corner of the world in much the same way his 19th century doppelganger once did.

“He looks like Mark Twain and tells stories like him, too,” Evans says. “He doesn’t write about guys named Huck and Tom, but he’s such a gifted writer.”

Storm Lake, official population 10,600, seems at first glance to be a typical Iowa community. The county seat of Buena Vista County, it has the trifecta of Iowa businesses: a Hy-Vee grocery store, a Pizza Ranch restaurant and a Casey’s convenience store. Drive around a little more, though, and things seem less ordinary.

Sure, there’s a lake — Storm Lake, about the size of Lake Monona — that is less typical in Iowa than in neighboring Minnesota and Wisconsin, and a college (Buena Vista University, pronounced BYOO-na by locals). There’s also a downtown with fully occupied storefronts. Head a block off the main drag and the Moose Lodge, El Mariachi Dance Club and Lakeshore Pho live side by side. Shops that sell or rent formal attire for weddings or proms also do good business for quinceaneras. Across from a water tower sits a Buddhist temple.

A wave of immigrants arrived in Storm Lake in the 1970s, when Iowa Gov. Robert Ray invited Vietnamese refugees to settle in the state. Most went to Des Moines or Storm Lake, and many got jobs at the local meat processing plant, now owned by Tyson Foods. Southeast Asian immigrants were followed by those from Mexico, and then other nations. According to the 2010 census, Hispanic or Latino residents make up 36 percent of the population, Asians nearly 10 percent.

“Back in the 1990s, there were anti-immigration groups that were constantly deriding Storm Lake for being a hellhole full of criminal Mexicans,” Cullen says. “Then the story started to change as these young men settled down and their kids graduated from school. They married Anglos and are going to Buena Vista University and the whole attitude is different now.

“It’s hard to hate somebody when you know them.”

The community makeover had political consequences. Northwest Iowa is home to Steve King, the race-baiting, soundbite-loving congressman who manages to continually get re-elected despite the best efforts of many Storm Lake voters. They preferred King’s opponent in the last two elections, but were outnumbered by the rest of the county; ditto for Clinton and Trump. Rather than giving in to the fear that King has stoked, Storm Lake has adapted to a changing world. Cullen credits the schools and churches for their efforts, as well as common-sense policing. This is where he’ll pat himself on the back a little bit, too.

“I think the newspaper made a difference by constantly batting down ideas such as, ‘They get welfare,’ because they don’t — they’d get deported,” Cullen says. “And we’ve been pointing that out for 20 years. And every time a valedictorian is a Latina, we do a celebration story and a big photo.”

Agriculture has also changed dramatically during Cullen’s adult life, and his coverage of that industry’s changing face is what led to his Pulitzer. The region once supported independent hog farmers, beef cattle farmers and acres of pasture crops. Today, nonstop fields of corn and soybeans help feed the 22 million hogs raised in Iowa each year in huge confinement facilities. Ethanol, made from corn, is a big deal in Iowa, too.

The shift is taking its toll on the land, Cullen says, and the combination of farming practices and torrential rains of recent years is affecting the quality of the state’s water. That was already the position of the director of Des Moines Water Works when he leaned over to Cullen at a Buena Vista County Board of Supervisors meeting and said, “By the way, we’re suing you.” Not Cullen himself, of course. The water works was suing three Iowa counties on behalf of residents whose drinking water was loaded with nitrates from the fertilizers and farm drainage systems that send runoff into the Raccoon River, a source of drinking water for half a million people in central Iowa.

Buena Vista fought the lawsuit and Cullen wondered who was paying his county’s legal bills and how much the taxpayers would need to fork over if the county lost. He got the cold shoulder from government officials, and the paper’s two-year campaign to find out who the county’s sugar daddy was had begun in earnest.

“You have to wonder if Buena Vista County Supervisors ever have a twinge of regret or shame when they cash a paycheck,” Cullen wrote. “Because, to hear them tell it, they don’t know who is paying for their awfully expensive defense of a lawsuit filed by the Des Moines Water Works. About $1 million in invoices were paid to Des Moines and Washington, D.C., law firms until March, and the supervisors claim not to know who gave them the money. That’s stunning. The Agribusiness Association of Iowa organized a fund that paid those bills, but it reportedly refuses to tell the counties who the donors were. The supervisors believe that they cannot look a gift horse in the mouth to see who planted the bit.”

The county brushed off Cullen, who then reached out to the Iowa Freedom of Information Council. The Times sought the names of the fund’s donors, but never got them because the water works’ lawsuit was dismissed by the Iowa Supreme Court.

“But the counties did agree to divorce themselves from this fund because they realized they were in violation of the law,” Cullen says. “So that was our satisfaction.”

Winning a Pulitzer Prize added to that satisfaction, though sometimes it blurs the real story about the work of The Storm Lake Times.

“What we won the Pulitzer for is basically an argument for government transparency. It’s not like we were taking on the Koch brothers; we were taking on the Buena Vista County Board of Supervisors,” he says. “We were going after the cavalier attitude by government officials who just said, ‘It’s none of your business.’”

Storm Lake Times isn’t the only small-town paper making a difference. Here in Wisconsin, the Lakeland Times in Minocqua has been battling the state Department of Justice on open records requests regarding the discipline of law-enforcement officers while also covering the outdoors, church bazaars and local athletes. Sometimes huge stories can fall into a community paper’s lap, such as July’s downtown explosion in Sun Prairie that has filled the pages and website of the twice-weekly Sun Prairie Star.

There are 170 weekly newspapers in small communities around Wisconsin. Most are independently owned, either by an individual or a group that is not publicly traded like Gannett and Lee Enterprises, which own most of the state’s larger dailies. That’s a big benefit for state readers, says Beth Bennett, executive director of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, and a stark contrast to Illinois, where dozens of weeklies are owned by the Chicago Tribune’s parent company, Tronc, or the New York-based national media company GateHouse.

“They can do whatever they want and don’t have to go to corporate and ask,” Bennett says of Wisconsin’s many small papers.

But, these are still worrisome days for the weeklies. The threatened newsprint tariffs would have been devastating to an industry that is just getting by, and one Wisconsin publisher testified about that to the Federal Trade Commission earlier this summer. Andrew Johnson, owner of the Dodge County Pionier in Mayville and two other papers and incoming president of the National Newspaper Association, says he is as worried about his profession as he is enthusiastic about it.

“We need to educate our readers about the value of a community newspaper because when they go away, they’re not coming back,” says Johnson, whose Mayville paper has three reporters and a circulation of 3,400. “If we publish a newspaper people want to read, we’ll be okay. If not, we’re dead in the water.”

Many weekly papers have been able to ride out newspapers’ tough days because they never had the same advertising base that big papers had. However, the small businesses that advertise have financial challenges of their own that have an impact on the paper.

As the only game in town, Johnson says, small newspapers are relevant to their readers by being focused solely on their community. It’s a role so important that a mayor of one town and a city council member of another have asked Johnson to start papers in communities that don’t have one. He understands why they ask, but had to say no.

“I give my heart and soul to my community,” he says. “I don’t have anything left.”

The amazing thing about The Storm Lake Times’ Pulitzer isn’t that talent lives at community newspapers, but that Cullen found time do Pulitzer-caliber work. In addition to writing an editorial in every issue, he writes a weekly column that taps into politics, the environment and life in Storm Lake (“I take it seriously, but the last one completely sucked”). He also color-corrects the photos, edits the news copy written by his son, Tom, and lays out the newspaper. He used to run the printing press, too, but stopped doing that after 20 years.

Evans, the Freedom of Information Council director, is amazed by what the Cullens have done and that the Pulitzer board recognized them.

“It’s not unheard of, but it is still a tremendous achievement because the biggest challenge when you’re putting out a weekly newspaper or twice-a-week newspaper is just getting the darn thing out,” says Evans, a retired editor at the Des Moines Register, which has won 17 Pulitzers.

Cullen entered the contest himself and had a gut feeling he was going to win. The night before prizes were announced via livestream, he asked Dolores to give him a haircut. When the big day came, he sat at his computer and heard the winners ticked off. National reporting: The Washington Post. International reporting: The New York Times. Feature photography: Chicago Tribune. Commentary: Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal.

Next up was editorial writing. Art Cullen: The Storm Lake Times. His hunch was right.

“I shot out of my chair and said, ‘John! Holy shit! We won!’” Cullen says. “And John said, ‘Won what?’ I said, ‘The freaking Pulitzer.’ And we hugged each other for the first time in our lives.”

That brought a flurry of attention to Cullen and Storm Lake. He wrote an op-ed for the Minneapolis paper where he dreamed of one day working. He wrote pieces for The New York Times and the Guardian. Three movie producers have been in touch, but haven’t followed up. Cullen is no fool and realizes at least some of the attention is because the little paper won the big prize and that’s a cute story. He’s okay with that.

“I’ll exploit it as much as I can. I’ll wear overalls for a picture if you want me to,” Cullen says. “Because anything that can draw attention to journalism is a good thing, even if it is a caricature.”

The Pulitzer ensured Cullen wouldn’t be slowing down any time soon, as if that ever was a plan anyway. He would, though, like to quit laying out the paper. Tom is poised to take over as editor, but his dad worries.

“He’s better than I am, and he’s smarter than I am,” Cullen says. “But I don’t know if you can recommend to the next generation that they should do this. I don’t know if the revenue will be there.”

For now, there’s enough to pay the bills, Cullen says, and that’s about it. Subscriptions have stayed level for years and even went up 2 percent last year; but he worries about having to charge readers more than the current $1 a copy or $69.95 a year because he doesn’t expect the ad base to grow. Pay for Times employees is generally $30,000-$35,000, with the highest paid (not Art Cullen) earning mid-$40,000s.

Cullen doesn’t plan to leave Storm Lake, knowing deep down that the place he always wanted to get away from turned into the place where dreams he didn’t even know he had came true.

“I wanted to get the hell out of northwest Iowa and to the Twin Cities and I never made it,” he says. “And I’m glad I never did.”

A national voice

These “Dreamers” are our vitality, our future. They want to stay here with family, unlike so many of us who push our children off to Chicago or the Twin Cities. As our neighbors, they have prospered with our embrace. In our prairie pothole, a place glaciers left with natural abundance, nine out of 10 students at the elementary school are immigrants — the schools here are a micro-city where you can hear 30 languages.

World trade and culture come together, mostly peacefully, in our little town. Now, that peace is threatened by our politics — the politics of President Donald Trump.

—“In My Iowa Town, We Need Immigrants,” from the op-ed page of The New York Times, July 30, 2018