Documentarian Rick Goldsmith has had a love affair with newspapers since he was young, taking in his family’s daily paper. Over the past few decades he was very well aware that all was not well — that many, if not most, local newspapers were no longer profitable and more and more were dying.
He also knew about the impact the Internet had in establishing a new platform for news, and reducing newspaper’s vital advertising revenue. Craigslist came on the scene in the mid-1990s and soon became the go-to place to display free classified ads, once a major source of funding for supporting large newspaper staffs. By 2010, print newspapers’ ad sales had been been reduced 70 percent.
But Goldsmith later learned something new that led him to make a documentary film called “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink,” which examines the role of vulture capital in the wrecking of local newspapers nationwide. The film profiles the courageous journalists who fought against the hedge funds gobbling up newspapers in order to save and rebuild local journalism. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Goldsmith and asked him to talk about the focus of his film.
RICK GOLDSMITH: What I didn’t know was that there was actually an industry of private equity and hedge funds getting into newspapers —the traditional media moguls were getting out—and gutting those newspapers and making money off of the newspapers. And that in itself was a story. And when I read an article about what was happening and they showcased an actual rebellion at the Denver Post against the hedge fund owner, which made national news, and few things came out of that story for me.
One was, why would a hedge fund try to wreck newspapers? Because the article that I read, Alden Global Capital, this was the headline, “Alden Global Capital is making so much money wrecking local journalism. It may not stop anytime soon.”
So my questions were, why would some sort of outfit want to make money wrecking journalism rather than practicing journalism? Two was, if newspapers were in bad shape economically, why were hedge funds getting into it? They were making money off of it.
And three was, the reporters. Why were they rebelling? Because reporters are taught to not focus on their own profession, but on everything else in the world around them. But this was indeed a big story and the reporters were not only reporting the story, but they were getting on the picket lines and making it public so that the communities all across the country would take notice and hopefully do something about it.
MELINDA TUHUS: After you did the research and made the documentary, do you have any sense of what bigger percentage of the problems of newspapers comes from the raiding by the hedge funds and how much might be all those other reasons?
RICK GOLDSMITH: The reason that this particular phenomenon of hedge funds getting into newspapers is important is because what they are doing is they are taking what is still the largest news organization in just about any community— it’s still the daily newspaper. And even though they’re failing, if they’re not owned by a hedge fund, they’re still trying to cover that community. And what hedge funds are doing is, “We don’t really care about the journalism.” And that’s proven time, after time, after time. “We don’t care about the journalism, so we’ll cut the staff and we’ll do everything we can to keep the newspaper going without regard to the journalism that now we’re not doing.” And that’s what’s important about this story. And so now more than half of all the daily newspapers in America are either controlled by or owned by hedge funds.
MELINDA TUHUS: You mentioned, but also in the documentary, some of the impacts, the negative impacts on losing local news coverage. Can you just elaborate a little bit on that because they were some big major things.
RICK GOLDSMITH: Well, when you lose local news in a community, you lose touch with the community. And so what studies have shown is elections, and I’m not talking national elections, I’m talking local elections where people are running for city council or for mayor or board of supervisors. When you lose a daily newspaper, the number of people that come out for elections goes down by a significant amount because people don’t hear about it, they don’t read about it. Corruption goes up, which means that in a funny sort of way, expenses for the community go up because insurance goes up. Because when there’s corruption, the insurance companies have found out that it’s more expensive to insure the city. And then misinformation and disinformation, which is coming through the Internet, tends to predominate as the “news of the community.”
MELINDA TUHUS: What are some of the new ideas and new formats that people are developing to respond to this current situation?
RICK GOLDSMITH: News organizations are getting together. So local public radio are working with newspapers or working with digital startups. A lot of nonprofit organizations, which tends to make that news organization, if it is nonprofit, tends to make them more likely to do real public service journalism. So they are not catering to the upper-middle class or to the business class. They’re covering communities that maybe the traditional newspapers hadn’t been covering. Poor communities, people who are homeless, minority communities, labor. There are hundreds, literally hundreds and hundreds of startup newspapers that most of them, having just really begun in the last 10 or 20 years.
For more information on “Stripped For Parts: American Journalism on the Brink,” visit strippedforpartsfilm.com.
See more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter to get updates to our “Hey AmeriKKKa, It’s Not Normal” compilation.
For the best listening experience and to never miss an episode, subscribe to Between The Lines on your favorite podcast app or platform.
Or subscribe to our Between The Lines and Counterpoint Weekly Summary.
