Pole Dancing, Hand-wringing In A Flick About Newspapers
There were short fun clips of newspaper people as portrayed in the movies, from Bogie and Kirk Douglas to Citizen Kane. There was generous footage of The Lodge, complete with pole dancers, since an ex-Dallas Morning News staffer now works at the local “gentleman’s club” as a manager. But the bulk of Stop The Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril–it premiered before a packed house of DMNers Wednesday night at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival–was an earnest, talking-heads take on newspapers aggregating all the conventional wisdom on the subject, sort of like a long article in the Columbia Journalism Review. Jump for the local connections, of which there were many.
This flick, you’ve probably read, was put together by former DMN writer Manny Mendoza and documentarian Mark Birnbaum, after a number of “voluntary severance agreements” at the Dallas daily slimmed its staff considerably, part of a nationwide trend. Asking the Really Big Question–whether newspapers will survive the Internet age–the filmmakers moved beyond interviews on the subject with ex-DMNers to include the thoughts of national media A-listers like Ben Bradlee, Ken Auletta and Dave Barry.
Newspaper junkies are likely to be enthralled by the film, and Dallasites in general may be, too. There’s ex-mayor and former journalist Laura Miller, after all, talking about how “rebel children” don’t last long at The News. Except, she adds, for the occasional rebel like Ed Bark–the former TV writer turned TV blogger (and regular contributor to D CEO magazine).
Bark sounded a little angry in his clip, in contrast to the mellower Michael Precker–the ex-DMNer who’s now at The Lodge (hmmm … wonder if that’s why he’s more mellow). Other local talking heads included journalists Randy Lee Loftis and Chris Kelly, as well as Jim Schermbeck of Downwinders At Risk, the environmental-activist group. He said The News gives more credence to “officials lies” than it should. So Schermbeck, like so many, has turned into a big fan of blogs and other alternative news sources.
For all its legitimate earnestness about the importance of newspapers in a free society–see the Walter Reed scandal, etc.–Stop The Presses is mainly a baby boomer’s lament: Things sure aren’t like the old days, it seems to say, when mom and dad would read the morning paper and give out the comics to the kids. Well, of course things are different. With so much churn and turmoil and change in every realm, how could newspapers possibly have stayed immune?
The flick’s also a little short-sighted in laying out the “blame” for the industry’s woes. The predictable chief villains: evil stock companies and, of course, the big bad Web. But, how about looking a little closer to home, guys? (Think Dallas, Texas, as a case in point.)
What about elitist, out-of-touch editors and writers who push stories driven by their own ideological agendas, for example, turning off readers? How about milquetoast “columnists” who never say anything vaguely interesting, for fear of offending? What about an ownership that banned coverage of a certain local industry, because it was one in which it had a direct interest? How about an ownership that also took great glee in exterminating the last vestige of healthy daily competition, helping ensure … well, mediocrity and declining readership … for years to come?
But really, what good is the blame game? For all its hand-wringing, I doubt if things in the end are as dire as portrayed in Stop The Presses. The need and hunger for news of all kinds will persist, no matter the “delivery platform.” Alternative venues like specialty newspapers and magazines, blogs–and don’t forget talk radio, which wasn’t mentioned at all–are thriving, even as we speak. Something tells me the republic, thanks very much, somehow will survive this evolving business model.
Stop The Presses will screen two more times–this afternoon at 4 at the Angelika, and again there Saturday at 1 p.m. On Saturday April 12, you can also view “extended exclusive outtakes” from the flick featuring DMN staffers at Ed Bark’s monthly gathering at Stratos Global Greek Taverna.
8 Comments to “Pole Dancing, Hand-wringing In A Flick About Newspapers”
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Here’s the problem with your swipe at the News. Let’s stipulate for discussion only that your description is accurate. Is it possible that *every* newspaper editor in the whole country has been marching to exactly the same vapid tune? Because the declines in circulation and ad revenue are pretty much universal in the industry.
It is possible through the concept of “corporate contagion” — I may copyright that term, so don’t steal it. So many of these editors go to the same seminars (or send their lackies), they gather at the Poynter flag and salute blindly and they listen to ***** focus groups and profiteering polling specialists whose message is always “change” because if it were not “change,” then why do they exist?….Newspaper management teams are prone to panic. And their corporate bosses are influenced to change for change’s sake, having been conned into the notion that readers want change desperately. Readers don’t. They like “same,” but they like “same” they can trust.
Reporters and editors don’t bear all of the blame — how much money does a newspaper invest in promotion of its honor and trustworthyness and how much money do these people invest in ad sales departments? Hire some salesmen, for crying out loud, don’t just try to cut costs. And don’t just hire geniuses — hire some people who actually know how to work for a living.
Alas, someone will save “ravings of a baby boomer,” but, you know, sometimes baby boomers are right.
“someone will ’say” not save. Pardon the error.
It’s Schermbeck, with a c, thanks.
And official disclaimer: Mark Birnbaum and I have made a couple of films together.
I believe my biggest objection to DMN coverage of air quality issues, particularly when it comes to our friends at the cement plants, was the sin of omission, not the obligatory use of quotes from Gov. Perry’s flunkies and such. Although that practice is certainly used as an excuse to leave matters unexamined by all kinds of media.
I thought the film did a job no other doc is out there talking about - how are newspapers trying to make themselves more relevant so they can survive in some form, or if that is just a hopeless cause? It IS a cultural issue, in that we haven’t lived in a world without a shared-community, agenda-setting publication, or two, for a very long time. What would such a world be like? Half the posts to FrontBurner and Unfair Park are riffs on DMN coverage, or lack thereof.
And it’s hard to do that kind of story with anything but talking heads, but by breaking things up and offering individual vignettes of reporters/former employees who are coping with this problem, I thought it made the issue more empathetic for the audience.
I don’t think being the equivalent of a long, thoughtful article in the CJR is a negative. It could have been the cinematic version of a short, engorged-text, empty calories, drive-by that DFW area newspaper readers are so familiar with now days.
Just my two bits worth.
Glenn, There’s a great essay by Eric Alterman in this week’s New Yorker, which addresses similar issues and questions brought up by you and the filmmakers. One of them is how long can the parasitic relationship continue between blogs and newspapers, whose content bloggers use liberally and for free, even while they do their best to run down the work of daily print foot soldiers. But the big question comes at the end of the New Yorker essay: “Just how an Internet-based news culture can spread the kind of “light” that is necessary to prevent terrible things, without the armies of reporters and photographers that newspapers have traditionally employed, is a question” — that desperately needs an answer ASAP.
To Dave Tarrant: Newspapers, which periodically employ the Constitution as a legal tool, should own up to their responsibility: reporting affronts to the constitution. Newspapers are morally bound to protect truth and democracy from fiends and bureaucrats and elected officials and corporate weasels.
That’s the first responsibility. Not keeping the stock at a certain level per share.
“What about elitist, out-of-touch editors and writers who push stories driven by their own ideological agendas, for example, turning off readers?”
Boy, that’s a sentence that needs a whole paragraph of elucidation before I can swallow a single word of it.
In my years at the News, I never met a reporter who was writing to push a personal ideological agenda and got away with it. That’s just not the way the job worked — for any of us. Reporters are notoriously fact-driven, with a built-in resistance to ideology. We’re often accused of being anti-intellectual for that reason. Do reporters come to conclusions about what or whom they’re covering? Of course. A conclusion based on reporting is not an ideology.
And, Glenn, no reporter at the News would be able to fire off a shoot-from-the-hips sentence like yours and expect it to get it into print. Those “elitist, out-of-touch editors” would have seen to that. Most of them would have sent you back to your computer with instructions to rewrite the sentence with some specifics: which writers, what agendas, when, where? It’s called reporting. It’s what journalists, but apparently not bloggers, do.
That DMN journalist who had an impressive career with work abroad and then just went to work at The Lodge? Awesome.