New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Chris Kirkham interviewed by producer-directors Mendoza and Birnbaum

Welcome to the newly relaunched website for Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril. We will not only promote the documentary film here but also keep you up with developments in the newspaper crisis. The links below also are a good place to find out about the latest layoffs and buyouts and the latest thinking on how in-depth and investigative journalism might be saved.

“There’s no business model for news,” New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen said earlier this month during a panel discussion at the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Chicago.

How to pay for news gathering is one of the central questions raised by Stop the Presses as it explores private, public and nonprofit models. But Jay is right. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers and paying readers at such an alarming rate that no model is working right now. That’s not to say print journalism isn’t making any money. But profits have fallen so steeply that it’s difficult to see newspapers as a viable business anymore.

I was at the AEJMC convention to let the organization of college journalism professors know that the film was about to be released as an educational DVD. Until Sept. 1, it’s available here at a steep discount. The DVD contains the 79-minute film and a dozen extras, mostly profiles of journalists at work. It also comes with a classroom study guide.

To get the discount, enter STP as the coupon code on the checkout page just before you enter your credit card information.

Stop the Presses is appropriate for use in Introduction to Mass Communication, Media Ethics, Media Management, Journalism History and beginning journalism writing classes. It explains why journalism is important, where it came from (including a history of the colonial period) and what it might look like in the future.

We deal with the Internet, which is at the root of journalism’s woes but also is its major hope.

Mark and I are available to come to your school, journalism organization or film festival to show Stop the Presses and talk about it. If you’re interested, contact me through the link on the filmmakers bio page.

Manny Mendoza