Television, with its relatively wide audience, has been our goal from the start, and it finally happened! Stop the Presses makes its TV premiere at 9 tonight, Oct. 26, on KERA-Channel 13 in Dallas, to be followed by airings around the country early next year.

Since the film first screened publicly at the AFI-Dallas festival in April 2008, things have only become worse for print journalism. So much so that we felt the need to update STP for these broadcasts. The number of layoffs and buyouts of newspaper reporters and editors since 2001, for instance, has climbed to 14,000 — that’s 10,000 more journalists on the street (or off it) in the past 18 months.

If we had known the situation was going to get this bad, we might have gone with our original subtitle, Death of the American Newspaper. This year has seen the closing of major papers in Denver and Seattle and bankruptcy filings by the former Tribune Co. (Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, etc.) and the Philadelphia papers whose publisher we profiled.

We want to thank KERA program director Bill Young for putting us on the air, American Public Television for agreeing to distribute the film to public-TV stations around the country, and Niki McCuistion for planning a wonderful panel discussion sponsored by the Dallas Press Club. Kudos also to our KERA publicist Meg Fullwood, AMS Pictures honcho Andy Streitfeld, and Laura Neitzel for producing right up to the last second.

Stayed tuned. Stop the Presses is coming soon to a public TV station near you, or you can buy it now on DVD!

Here are links to the full press release and some stories about the premiere:

Press Release

Dallas Morning News

D Magazine Front Burner

Manny Mendoza and Mark Birnbaum