Birnbaum and Mendoza flank executive producer Andy Streitfeld at the world premiere of Stop the Presses, photo by Ed Bark
cinematical
AFI Dallas Review: Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril
Posted Apr 4th 2008 6:02PM by Peter Martin
“Ha ha! Your medium is dying!” — Nelson, The Simpsons.
When an animated character on a broadcast network show mocks your medium, you know you’re really in trouble. The departure of film critics from print outlets, including most recently Nathan Lee from The Village Voice and David Ansen from Newsweek, has inspired many observers to ponder the future of film criticism. The bigger story is that the newspaper industry as a whole has been plagued by declining profits since the turn of the century, with hundreds of workers accepting buy-outs or being laid off in the last few years.
Manny Mendoza, a newspaperman since 1979, saw the writing on the wall and accepted a buy-out offer from the Dallas Morning News a couple of years ago. Bitten by the moviemaking bug, he wanted to make a documentary about local muralists, but when he enlisted the assistance of veteran filmmaker Mark Birnbaum, Birnbaum convinced him that they should instead make a film about what was happening to the print medium. The result of their efforts, Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril, had its world premiere at AFI Dallas this week, and it’s an absorbing account that should appeal to anyone concerned about the future of democracy.
Are newspapers really that important? One interviewee reminds everyone that “the press” is the only profession named in the Constitution, and others assert that without the free flow of information and “truth” disseminated by newspapers, the future of democracy would be threatened. (I put truth in quotation marks only because the objectivity of newspapers has been questioned at times.) Another newspaperman, a victim of the recent industry downsizing, says he doesn’t feel that his loss of employment should equate to the downfall of democracy. Of course, he’s currently working as the manager of a “gentleman’s club,” so his view is more pragmatic.
Historically, according to another interviewee, the first newspaper in America only managed to publish one edition before getting shut down; evidently what prompted the action was the shocking claim that the King of France was having sex with his son’s wife. It would be 14 years before another newspaper was printed. Eventually, freedom of the press was credited with cutting short the Revolutionary War.
Stop the Presses is laid out like a newspaper feature story, with timely excursions into the past to provide historical context for a developing story. The film may have begun as an examination of what happened to the Dallas Morning News, which was once upon a time widely-respected but is now a hollow shell of its former self, yet it quickly broadens its view to show what is happening nationwide, with special emphasis given to newspapers in New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Florida.
The film asks, What happens when newspapers fold their overseas news bureaus in the interest of cutting costs? Fewer reporters on the ground to cover stories means the coverage becomes more limited; more stories will be missed and our view of the world may contract as a result.
Will the Internet replace print outlets? To some degree, of course, it already has, but a relatively small number of online-only outlets can afford to hire a staff of reporters and editors, and the Internet involves an additional set of tools in order to take full advantage of its potential. Some newspaper reporters are finding that they must learn how to operate a video camera in the field, in addition to their well-worn notebooks and pens.
Are publicly-held corporations the real culprits? After all, it was their purchase of newspaper chains that made it imperative that newspapers increase their profits year by year. As one interview subject points out, though, the corporations may collectively be called the devil, but by their infusion of capital, they also made possible some of the long, complex, detailed investigative reporting that is so highly prized by observers and valued by readers. What about other types of ownership? The purchase of a small chain of Philadelphia print outlets by a wealthy businessman is examined, as well as a non-profit experiment in publishing by the Poynter Institute in Florida.
While not covering every possible aspect of the issue, Stop the Presses does a good job of laying out the problems and considering solutions that have been offered, without drawing very positive conclusions. The pace is brisk without overwhelming the viewer, and the filmmakers have judiciously chosen a plethora of film and television clips, from the familiar (Ed Asner in Lou Grant , Ace in the Hole, Deadline USA, His Girl Friday) to the obscure (Thirty Dash Thirty), to further illustrate the challenges facing the industry.
I’ve been a newspaper junkie / advocate my entire life. I’ll never forget the Los Angeles Times employee who took the time to type a kindly response to the horrid cartoon I submitted for publication when I was seven years old, or my sorrow when the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner folded many years ago, or the joy of reading the print edition of the New York Times every day in the quiet of my old office, or my bewilderment at the first copy of USA Today, or the shock when a travel columnist published an excerpt from my letter in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
As several people testify in the film, there’s nothing quite like the tactile feeling of turning the pages of a newspaper, or being able to scan the headlines and choose what to read in depth. On the other hand, I can’t imagine doing without the convenience and speed of the Internet, which allows me to quickly scan dozens of news outlets from around the world every hour, if I so choose. Even in truncated, reduced form, newspapers still offer benefits that cannot be easily reproduced elsewhere, and Stop the Presses presents a convincing case for their continuing existence in some form or another.
PETE’S PLACE
THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 2008
“Presses” gloriously spotlights newspapers’ plight
By PHILIP WUNTCH
Film Critic Emeritus
“Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril” got a thunderous ovation in its world premier showing Wednesday at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival.
Outstanding documentaries have been a highlight of this year’s fest, and “Stop the Presses” belongs in the front rank. Co-produced and co-directed by Dallas documentary filmmaker Mark Birnbaum and former Dallas Morning News staff critic Manny Mendoza, the film offers a rich history of American journalism and a probing dissection of print journalism’s current precarious state.
Wednesday evening’s Magnolia audience was filled with journalists, obviously sympathetic to the cause. But “Stop the Presses” will appeal to anyone who’s ever enjoyed the ritual of reading a daily newspaper. Without being pedantic, it should also enlighten viewers who open a newspaper only to peruse the ads. Additional screenings are today at 4 p.m. at the Angelika, and Saturday, 1 p.m., also at the Angelika.
So can I be objective when discussing “Stop the Presses”? Hell, no!
I toiled for four decades in Dallas newspapers, the first two years at the Dallas Times-Herald, the remaining 37 years at the Dallas Morning News. In December of 1974, I became the first employee to have the title of Film Critic, a job I loved.
I sensed the quiet desperation of the early 21st century and watched it grow into noisy desperation by the middle of the current decade. I accepted Belo’s buyout offer in September 2006 after upper management made it clear how movies would be handled in the future. Since then, I have watched the quantity and quality of film coverage diminish with excessive use of wire stories from non-Dallas sources. This practice violates the personalized love/hate relationship that should exist between local moviegoers and their hometown movie critics.
But the print journalism chaos is nationwide and not limited to the local scene. “Stop the Presses” covers the territory admirably, mixing archival film and television footage with contemporary interviews. The movie clips feature legends such as Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Rosalind Russell and Kirk Douglas, highlighting the era when newspaper reporting was considered a “glamorous” profession. Television clips range from “Lou Grant” to “The Simpsons” and “The Sopranos.” All the juxtapositions are clever and revealing. As a piece of sheer film making, “Stop the Presses” shines.
Former Dallas Morning News employees interviewed in the film include Charles Ealy, now of the Austin American-Statesman, who eloquently states that “the press is a fundamental key to democracy”; Ed Bark, who now commandeers the popular and newsworthy Unclebarky.com Website; Craig Flournoy, now an SMU journalism prof; and Michael Precker, who now manages the “gentleman’s club” The Lodge, following a wide-ranging journalism career. It also includes comments from former Mayor and New York Daily News/Dallas Times Herald/Dallas Observer/D Magazine columnist Laura Miller.
As an increasing number of newspapers have “gone public,” executives have become answerable to large corporations, which many observers feel hinders aggressive investigative reporting. As a result, blogs have become more popular, providing the unbiased reporting many feel the mainstream press tries to avoid.
However, neither Mendoza nor Birnbaum feels it is curtains for newspapers, and “Stop the Presses” ends on an optimistic note.
“For the next 10 or 20 years, we will still have printed newspapers,” Mendoza said following the screening. “But printed newspapers may become an elitist product, with more and more readers turning to the Internet.”
“But there will always be a human need for news,” Birnbaum confirms.
On Saturday, April 12, Ed Bark will interview Birnbaum and Mendoza on the Uncle Barky Show. Beginning at 4 p.m., the show will include extensive outtakes from Dallas Morning News staffers. The gathering will take place at Stratos Global Greek Tavern, 2907 W. Northwest Highway. Admission is free.
UNCLEBARKY.COM
Stop the Presses: Looks good on paper but better on the big-screen
04/03/08 12:29 AM
By ED BARK
Someday their prints would come.
More than 18 months in the making, Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper In Peril at last hit its first big deadline Wednesday with a world premiere at the ongoing AFI Dallas Film Festival.
Its proud parents, Mark Birnbaum, Manny Mendoza and Andy Streitfeld, met the press and friends at a pre-party before their 80-minute documentary played to a sold-out crowd across the street at the Magnolia.
Initially envisioned as a telescoped look at the Sept. 2006 buyouts that sent 110 Dallas Morning News staffers packing, Stop the Presses has emerged as an effective cautionary tale of national scope.
Its first words are from former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and its last from fake newspaperman Humphrey Bogart in the 1952 film Deadline USA.
“That’s the press, baby, the press,” he tells an inquiring mob boss over the phone as newspapers roll into print with a hard-hitting investigation. “There’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing.”
Birnbaum, a veteran filmmaker, and Mendoza, formerly an entertainment reporter/critic for the DMN, did more than 100 interviews for their doc. Paying the freight was Streitfeld’s Dallas-based AMS Productions, which invested between $75,000 and $100,000 in the film besides post-production costs, he said.
Besides Bradlee, prominent interview subjects include humorist Dave Barry, actor Ed Asner of Lou Grant fame, media writer Ken Auletta and former Dallas mayor Laura Miller, who says that rebels such as herself were seldom tolerated for long at the DMN, where she used to be a reporter.
No executives from the local daily or from its parent corporation, Belo, agreed to be interviewed for the film. But its evolvement onto a mostly national stage pretty much made them extraneous anyway.
Yours truly made the final cut as an opinionated old cuss who was interviewed just a few days after unclebarky.com revved up on Sept. 17, 2006. Let’s just say that emotions were still running high.
Former DMN colleague and still good friend Michael Precker also holds forth from his hard-won post at The Lodge gentleman’s club. He’s more conciliatory and good-humored about life after newspapering.
Stop the Presses got a deservedly strong reception from the audience and still is looking for a spot on network television. The time has passed for possible inclusion in the new P.O.V. season on PBS. But Mendoza said during a post-screening Q&A that the film is still “under consideration” for public television’s Independent Lens series. A DVD also is coming.
Mendoza and Birnbaum will be the guests on the next Uncle Barky Show (4 p.m. on April 12th at Stratos restaurant). You shouldn’t miss it, and you can’t miss the accompanying banner ads on each unclebarky.com page. Birnbaum is assembling a sizable collection of never-before-seen Stop the Presses outtakes, many of them featuring DMN staffers. An interview will follow, including questions from the audience.
As always, a $500 donation will be made to the guests’ designated charity. Great Greek food and drink specials also are part of the program.
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
‘AFI Dallas: The American Newspaper in Peril’ screening
09:55 AM CDT on Wednesday, April 2, 2008
By JOE O’CONNELL / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
What happens if the newspaper presses stop rolling? That’s the big question behind the documentary Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril, which has its world premiere today at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival. “The film samples a deep and broad range of opinions about what is happening to the American newspaper,” said co-director Mark Birnbaum. “It came down to: If the future of the American newspaper is threatened, is democracy at risk?”
Mr. Birnbaum – a respected Dallas documentarian whose previous works include Larry v. Lockney, which looked into mandatory drug testing in a small Panhandle town, and The Big Buy, about former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s rise and fall from power – teamed with former Dallas Morning News staff critic Manuel Mendoza. The project began after Mr. Mendoza joined a group of Morning News employees accepting a voluntary severance agreement aimed at trimming staff, a development increasingly common in American newsrooms.
Mr. Mendoza approached Mr. Birnbaum about making a short film about a Deep Ellum artist. Mr. Birnbaum instead suggested they tackle the story of longtime reporters and editors facing a career crisis.
The film quickly grew from a local story to one with national implications, Mr. Birnbaum said. Once Andy Streitfeld of AMS Productions offered funding, the filmmaking pair were off and running. “We cast a pretty wide net and then sat down with 110-some interviews and about as many hours of footage,” Mr. Birnbaum said. “We then transcribed, cataloged and sorted by themes. From that we pulled 80 minutes together.”
The resulting film looks at the future of newspapers from many angles: Does thorough news coverage get lost in the drive for corporate profits? Are privately owned newspapers the answer? Perhaps newspapers should be run as nonprofits? Has the Internet sounded the death knell for news dissemination as we have long known it? “It’s hard to find good things to say about the situation,” Mr. Birnbaum said. “For this transition newspapers find themselves in, no one of anyone we talked to had the answers.
Joe O’Connell is an Austin freelancer who writes the Shot in Texas column for GuideLive.
DALLAS OBSERVER
Entering Its Second Year, AFI Dallas Avoids the Sophomore Slump
By Robert Wilonsky Published: March 27, 2008
AFI is actually like most film festivals: Its documentaries offer the most must-sees. Alex Gibney brings to Dallas his Hunter S. Thompson doc Gonzo, which chronicles with great wit and warmth the rise and fall of the good Doctor of Journalism, who ended his tale with a bullet to the head three years ago. Thompson likely would have appreciated former TV critic Manny Mendoza and local filmmaker Mark Birnbaum’s debuting doc Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril, inspired in part by Mendoza’s taking The Dallas Morning News‘ buyout offer two years ago. Featuring the likes of Ben Bradlee, Walter Cronkite, Todd Gitlin and, yup, former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller, it’s a profoundly dispiriting film (newspaper companies do the goddamnedest, dumbest things) but also surprisingly inspiring, as it points to the inevitable reinvention of an industry in need of new life.
FRONTBURNER
Pole Dancing, Hand-wringing In A Flick About Newspapers
Posted on April 3rd, 2008 1:19pm by Glenn Hunter
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”
Jeffrey Weiss @ April 3rd, 2008 at 1:50 pm
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’snotpersonal @ April 3rd, 2008 at 2:10 pm
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 idiot 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.
It’snotpersonal @ April 3rd, 2008 at 2:12 pm
“someone will ’say” not save. Pardon the error.
Jim Schermbeck @ April 3rd, 2008 at 2:24 pm
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.
Dave Tarrant @ April 3rd, 2008 at 2:51 pm
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.
It’snotpersonal @ April 3rd, 2008 at 4:49 pm
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.
Bill M. @ April 3rd, 2008 at 7:36 pm
“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.
Mike @ April 4th, 2008 at 2:33 am
That DMN journalist who had an impressive career with work abroad and then just went to work at The Lodge? Awesome.
MOVING PICTURES: THE STORIES BEHIND THE MOVIES
Stop the Presses: the American Newspaper in Peril (documentary)
Reviewed by Elliot V. Kotek
(from the 2008 AFI Dallas International Film Festival)
Directors: Mark Birnbaum and Manny Mendoza
Starring: Ben Bradlee, Bob Kaiser, Marty Baron, Anders Gyllenhaal, Bill Bastone, Jim Brady, Paul C. Tash, David Carr, Ken Auletta
With the L.A. Times buy-outs being covered daily by media watchdogs, and 4,000 print journalists laid off or bought out since 2000, Stop the Presses accepts that the epitaph is being drafted for the grave of the great American newspapers. But what this doc also does is plant the flowers in the headstone from which will grow the future of journalism - whatever form that takes.
Directors Birnbaum and Mendoza cover a huge scope of subjects surrounding the printed press - loss of classifieds to Craigslist and other online community noticeboards, the pressures inherent in being publicly listed versus private media entities, the constitutional debate as to whether the future of print and the freedom of press endanger our very notions of democracy - and ask the right questions in consideration of where and from whom we will continue to be fed our news. The film also does a fine job of introducing the history of the newspaper while reiterating the physical dexterity of paper as the ultimate portable media device.
And, while we can debate whether the brands will survive online when and if the presses stop printing, and whether roving reporters and newshounds will be forced to become manipulators of multi-media in the blogosphere or elsewhere, it does seem clear that the future power of journalism will remain in the hands of those who have the articulate ability and marketing finesse to get their words read, or opinions heard, wherever those thoughts appear.
The directors make full use of their computer software (and some music more often associated with the porn industry than documentary filmmaking) that entertainingly (for the first hour at least) tells a tale that may have been delivered dry in less capable hands. Adding to the cinematic value of their talking head subjects, the directors have cut the film with clips from classic cinema - His Girl Friday, Deadline USA, All the President’s Men, Citizen Kane and TV’s “Lou Grant” - as well as some contemporary culture in “The Sopranos” and, of course, the greatest of all social commentary, “The Simpsons.”
With a collection of mouthpieces as varied as those listed as “Starring” above, the filmmakers have created a work of inherent value to mediamakers and academics, and have raised such a great range of topics for discussion that they, themselves, will contemporaneously create worthy journalistic discourse. So, while the printing of a paper may be hanging on a precipice (or press-ipice, if you will), journalism, and journalists, may well be competing for screen time instead. After all, content is king, is it not?
FADING TO BLACK
A look at the downward spiral of the newspaper industry in the 21st century.
Because no news is bad news.
There’s no going back
Newsman-turned-filmmaker Manny Mendoza, who along with Mark Birnbaum is producing “Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril,” took the time recently to answer some questions from Fading to Black regarding the new documentary which looks at the decline of the newspaper business. Mendoza started in the business as a copy boy and moved on to the Miami News, Bergen Record and Milwaukee Journalbefore settling in at the Dallas Morning News, where he spent 14 years as an arts and entertainment critic. Last year he became yet another casualty of the industry.
Fading to Black: For those who haven’t had that sinking feeling, please explain what it is like when your employer tells you and dozens of your friends your services are no longer required.
Manny Mendoza: Creeping downsizing across the industry — including two rounds of layoffs at the Dallas Morning News — somewhat prepared us for last fall’s buyout. The most startling moment was a meeting with management during which the arts and entertainment staff was told a survey showed readers preferred “national critics” to “local critics” on pop culture beats like TV and movies. It was obviously a loaded question, but the fact that it was asked helped many of us decide to go. Seven of the department’s 13 critics took the buyout. I looked at the positive side — they were paying me half a year’s salary to figure out what I wanted to do next. Then this film fell in my lap. Talk about irony. Still, it felt like the end of an era for a profession I felt privileged to be a part of. In fact, it was such a great job I’m not ruling out a return to it full time in the future, crisis or not.
FTB: Is the current atmosphere in North American newsrooms unprecedented, have things been this bleak for newspapers in the past? What was everybody saying when radio and TV were encroaching on newspapers’ traditional territory?
MM: In some ways, it is unprecedented. Yes, there was concern over radio and TV, which did encroach on the newspaper’s audience. But as newspapers closed, consolidated and/or went public, profit margins kept rising. They actually didn’t peak until the late 1990s, early 2000s. Today’s panic atmosphere seems new and the threat from the Internet somehow feels different, more permanent perhaps. The windfall from classified ads is gone for good, and advertisers now have a way to track consumers and market to them more efficiently. There’s no going back.
FTB: News gathering is a labor-intensive operation, but is it possible that newsrooms with hundreds of employees was always overkill?
MM: Absolutely not. The size of newsrooms is what makes their best work possible. No other entity in a city — not TV, not radio, not websites — has the resources to turn over rocks and find out what is really going on in a community, the nation or the world on an ongoing basis. Our film explores the example of the Washington Post’s Walter Reed investigation, which two reporters spent four months on full time. The question becomes, can newspapers keep enough staff to maintain their historical role as watchdog while figuring out how to make as much money online as they have from ink on paper. There is some promising web journalism emerging — Talking Points Memo for instance — but it’s going to take a lot of niche sites to equal the work of the major newspapers.
FTB: Is it inevitable that once corporations get involved in journalism that the overall product suffers?
MM: Yes and no. Newsrooms were not that big until newspapers companies starting going public in the 1960s and had the money to invest in more journalists — another irony. Now, the fate of papers is tied to that same dependence on margins, which are no longer growing. But all these media mergers have had the effect of distancing the people in charge from the journalism on the ground. How can you serve Los Angeles from Chicago, as is the case with the Tribune Co.’s ownership of the Los Angeles Times? Investors in public corporations only care about increasing returns, which is fine in most situations. But not when it comes to the newspapers, which have a special role in American society.
FTB: What can we expect to see in Stop the Presses that we don’t already know?
MM: That of all the major papers, the New Orleans Times-Picayune is the most well read in its community, both before and after Katrina. That there is some good investigative journalism going on on the Web. That Roy Peter Clark is salty. But the devil is in the details. While I’m not sure we uncovered any new facts, this will be the first time most viewers see reporters at work, showing and explaining how they do their job. We also capture readers enacting their morning newspaper rituals and non-readers talking about why they avoid the news. We’re also integrating movie and TV clips about journalists (Citizen Kane, Deadline USA, Somewhere I’ll Find You, Lou Grant) to bring home the place of the reporter in American popular culture.
FTB: When will your documentary be released, and in what format?
MM: We expect to release “Stop the Presses” next year on television and DVD. We are talking to the PBS series “P.O.V.” among others. Cable is also a possibility. Before that, we hope to be on the film festival circuit. In fact, work in progress versions have already been shown at the Dallas Video Festival and just last week at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. We also will be applying to the SXSW, AFI Dallas and Full Frame film festivals. The latest information can be found at our website, www.stopthepressesdoc.com.
Dilemmas dog documentary filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev
By CHRIS VOGNAR / Movie Critic
Amir Bar-Lev thought he was making a film about art. A 4-year-old abstract painting prodigy named Marla Olmstead had been burning up the New York scene, selling thousands of dollars worth of paintings and reigniting old accusations that modern art is a big sham with no objective standards. It all sounded like fine fodder for a documentary.
But documentaries can be slippery little critters, shifting focus as reality dictates. Life doesn’t stop or slow down for the cameras. It keeps twisting and turning with its own momentum. And so, about halfway through shooting his film, Mr. Bar-Lev realized he was no longer telling the story he set out to tell.
The resulting doc, My Kid Could Paint That, is a fascinating look at media ethics, firestorms and the creative process that casts an interrogative eye on the filmmaker himself.
It’s also a case study in why the documentary filmmaker has to be ready for anything.
“I have a tendency to chalk the whole thing up to being in the right place at the right time,” said Mr. Bar-Lev, 35, over a recent dinner in Dallas. (Full disclosure: I went to high school with Mr. Bar-Lev but lost touch afterward until reconnecting to discuss the film.) “Documentary filmmaking is about being able to improvise. You’re flying by the seat of your pants to a certain degree, but you’re also projecting your story onto reality. At the same time you’re open to reality throwing you a couple of curveballs.”
In Mr. Bar-Lev’s case, the first curveball was hurled by a piece on 60 Minutes II. Reported by Charlie Rose, the story cast doubt on the authenticity of Marla’s work and suggested that her father, Mark, may have had a hand in the paintings.
The second curveball came when Mr. Bar-Lev began having doubts of his own and wondering if, in fact, Marla got some unacknowledged help with her work.
“I thought I was going to get a David and Goliath story, where I would prove 60 Minutes was just being sensationalistic,” he says. “I was sad to the degree that I gravitated closer to their take on things.”
Mr. Bar-Lev is hardly the first documentarian to see the ground shift beneath his feet.
“It’s often happened to me,” says Dallas-based filmmaker Mark Birnbaum ( The Big Buy: Tom DeLay’s Stolen Congress). “Many of the subjects I’ve been drawn too are political, or what you’d call a breaking story, not like an historical documentary that’s really good at looking at events that have already transpired.”
Mr. Birnbaum and former Dallas Morning News staff critic Manuel Mendoza are now at work on Stop the Presses, a doc about the ultimate moving target: the newspaper industry. “When we started shooting there were rumors that Rupert Murdoch would buy The Wall Street Journal,” Mr. Birnbaum says. “That’s a done deal now, but a lot of the early interviews we show don’t account for that. It changes the way you use your interviews in the editing.”
But a few factors make Mr. Bar-Lev’s case particularly thorny. First, he became friends with the Olmstead family early in the shoot. “I did have feelings of affection for them,” he says. “We had lots of meals together. They cooked for me. I never had a successful interview with Marla, because it became me playing with her. That’s what made it so hard for me to contemplate a representation of them that was not what they were expecting.” And as we see him come face to face with his doubts, we feel the tension rising between filmmaker and subjects.
Then, as the Olmstead story became a grotesque media circus following the 60 Minutes II report – 4-Year-Old Artist: Genius or Fraud?! – Mr. Bar-Lev saw himself becoming a part of that circus. My Kid Could Paint That is a far cry from the sensationalist coverage that rained down on the story; indeed, at its best, it works as a skeptical condemnation of that coverage. Elizabeth Cohen of the Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin and Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times both covered the Olmstead story at various stages, and both appear on camera as voices of reason. But tabloid TV framed the saga in typically hyperbolic, black-and-white terms.
For all of its ingenuity and restraint, My Kid is still another voice in the echo chamber. And Mr. Bar-Lev acknowledges this when he turns the camera on himself and examines his role as a friend turned skeptic.
My Kid Could Paint That is still about modern art, to a degree. We are asked to consider what makes one canvas of paint splotches more appealing than another, and if a market that bestows glory, then shame, on 4-year-olds is out of whack.
But it’s also about representation, filmmaking and the relationships that develop and shift between documentarian and subject.
And it’s about what happens when a film starts out as one thing before taking on a life of its own.
From UncleBarky.com
Dallas Morning News expatriate Manny Mendoza (left) and veteran filmmaker Mark Birnbaum showed part of their Stop the Presses doc on closing night of the Dallas Video Festival. Photo: Ed Bark
By ED BARK
Filmmaker Mark Birnbaum initially felt inclined to tell a smaller story about large-scale downsizing at The Dallas Morning News.
Now, for better or possibly worse, Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper In Peril tentatively will paint just a splotch of Dallas on a much larger canvas. Birnbaum and former DMN entertainment writer Manny Mendoza instead have ranged far and wide to amass, by their count, 103 interviews and 108 hours of film.
That’s very close to the 112 DMN staffers, including this writer, who took the buyout last September. Might it also make for an unmanageable documentary slated to run at exactly 56 minutes, 46 seconds if it ends up as hoped for next year on public television’s POV series?
“It’s a challenge. They’re all challenges,” Birnbaum said Sunday night beforeStop the Presses had its first public showing in the form of a 15-minute sampler at the Dallas Video Festival. “This one is pretty interview-heavy. The challenge is going to be also finding a compelling visual way to tell the story.”
Birnbaum and Mendoza began filming immediately after the Sept. 15 exodus from the DMN, which less than two years earlier had laid off more than 60 staffers. Most of those interviews were either with ex-DMNers or interested observers living in the newspaper’s circulation area. But that was then.
“It’s not the core of the film, no,” Birnbaum said. “When you guys were going through the buyout, I was drawn to you as people I know going through something very challenging and personal. That’s what drew me emotionally toward the subject. We had thought at one point that the stories of what people were going through at least might be the emotional core of the film. I’m not even sure if that’s going to happen.”
“Definitely the story has expanded since we first started shooting in Dallas,” Mendoza said.
They’ve landed some big names — Walter Cronkite, Ben Bradlee, Ken Auletta — and a large number of lesser known newspaper editors and analysts. But so did Lowell Bergman in his recent four-part News Wars series for PBS.
Last February’s Part 3 of Bergman’s series telescoped the tumult at The Los Angeles Times to tell a larger story about the possibly dismal future of newspapers in the face of the Internet and stockholder demands on publicly traded companies. Belo Corp., which owns the DMN, is one of those companies. Its executives so far have declined to be interviewed for Stop the Presses.
“But it’s gonna happen,” Mendoza insisted.
“I don’t think that’s the way they do things,” Birnbaum disagreed. “I don’t think they’re going to cooperate.”
“We’ve got so many great people,” Mendoza said. “If we get nobody else, it’s still gonna be great.”
They hope to have a rough cut of the film finished by early fall. Sunday’s excerpt began at a Sept. 10 party where many DMN staffers gathered to imbibe and commiserate before the mass walkout.
The always outspoken and voluble Jeffrey Weiss, who remains at the paper, says on camera that losing more than 100 people clearly would diminish theDMN. It wouldn’t matter who left, he said. The sheer volume of departures would make the paper “less good as a result.”
Former DMN reporter Michael Precker, now a day manager at The Lodge gentleman’s club, says matter-of-factly, “The worse you make the product, the faster it’s going to decline.”
The segment then mostly went national, showcasing a dozen or so out-of-state talking heads. Much of what they say already has the feeling of same-old, same-old. Just read Romenesko.com on any given day.
During a brief Q&A session after the screening, Precker wondered whetherStop the Presses would find its way back toward the “personal” stories of some who left the paper. He didn’t get a direct answer, but was chided by Video Festival founder Bart Weiss. Did Precker want even more screen time, Weiss asked.
That wasn’t the intent of Precker’s question, which raised a valid point. Stop the Presses, bankrolled in large part by Dallas-based AMS Production Group, runs the considerable risk of shortchanging itself with too many voices from afar. The film’s heart, under its current blueprint, doesn’t really beat for Dallas anymore. That may sound parochial. But the emotional punch that Birnbaum seeks won’t be found anywhere but here.
“We’ve got a lot of opinions about this business, and how it got into this mess and where it might go,” he said.
All well and good, and maybe detrimental to the film on which Birnbaum and Mendoza have worked so hard. Now all will be won or lost in the editing room.
“We really haven’t begun to string that one-hour together yet,” Birnbaum said.
So in reality, it could still go either way.
From the Dallas Morning News Movies blog: The Screening Room
Stop the Presses! (But read the blog).
Among the work-in-progress clips shown Sunday night at the Dallas Video Festival was Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril. Made by local doc maker Mark Birnbaum and former Dallas Morning News TV critic (and colleague of mine) Manny Mendoza, the film - or at least the 15 minutes shown Sunday - is a studious, well-sourced overview of the changes that continue to rock the American newspaper industry. (Plus, Ben Bradlee is in it, and how cool is that)? If location is the key to real estate, then context is the mother’s milk of documentary. Presses has it in king-size font. Look for a finished version later this year.
Dallas Video Festival’s Weiss juggles madcap mix 20 years
By MICHAEL GRANBERRY / Staff Writer
It was, as moments go, electric.
The year was 1996, when Dallas wasn’t exactly a model of racial harmony. Bart Weiss, founder of the Dallas Video Festival, had asked Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price to lead a discussion on the pros and cons of the controversial 1950s television showAmos ‘n’ Andy.
The festival was honoring pioneer black filmmaker Spencer Williams, who had played Andy. At the time, Mr. Price was as much of a lightning rod on issues of race as anyone in Dallas. Mr. Weiss fretted openly about the need for security.
“I was worried,” he says. Legendary comedian Steve Allen had led an earlier discussion about his own golden era in television and decided, spontaneously, to join the discussion on Amos ‘n’ Andy. He assisted Mr. Price by talking about anti-Semitism and how comedy has long played a role in defusing racial tension.
“The show goes on, and it’s wonderful,” says Mr. Weiss, 54, who this year is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Dallas Video Festival, which takes place today and Wednesday at the Angelika Film Center & Cafe before moving on to the Dallas Theater Center on Thursday through Sunday. The discussion “was beautiful … one of those magical moments you’ll never forget.”
There have been many more, of course, starting with the first festival in 1987, when actress Edie Adams, the widow of comedian Ernie Kovacs, showed a catalog of memorable clips from her husband’s years as a television pioneer.
It did nothing less, says Mr. Weiss, than set the tone for a most ambitious festival, which this year will screen more than 250 titles from 13 countries and is the oldest in the nation devoted to video.
Video has grown exponentially since the festival began and, says Mr. Weiss, now plays the lofty role of transcending the often straitjacketed worlds of commercial television and blockbuster flicks. Beyond that, however, he has been surprised and thrilled at how Dallas, his adopted home (he was born in Philadelphia and lives in the Kessler Park section of Oak Cliff), has embraced and sustained the festival.
“Especially in Dallas, where the culture is rather conservative,” says Mr. Weiss, who teaches video and film in the department of art and art history at the University of Texas at Arlington. “But for 20 years, we’ve screened films and videos that are completely different, quite upstream from popular culture, and we’ve been able to exist and thrive and build an audience – here. And to me, that’s a really amazing thing.”
This year’s festival promises to be no exception, with titles ranging from Fat Girls to Freaks of Dallas to Making an Anti-Hollywood Movie for Under 40 Grand to Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril.
ROMENESKO
Your daily fix of media industry news, commentary, and memos.
Manny Mendoza, who left the Dallas Morning News last year, has interviewed Ben Bradlee, Kurt Andersen and 100 other journalists for “Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril,” which he hopes to finish this fall. “Our whole premise going in and our only assumption was we thought newspapers were very integral to democracy in America, and they seem to be in peril,” says Mendoza.
A Former Dallas News’er Takes on the Entire Newspaper Business
Dallas Observer
Yesterday we mentioned Craig Flournoy and Tracy Everbach’s bad-News piece in the latest Columbia Journalism Review, for which they claim to have interviewed about 100 former newsroomies. But one former Dallas Morning News’er with whom they didn’t touch base was TV critic Manny Mendoza, among those who took last fall’s buyout — so he could head to Vegas for a year’s worth of poker playing, Manny would occasionally threaten back then. Turns out, he decided to become a filmmaker instead. That’s called a large re-raise.
Yup, for the last several months, he’s been working with well-respected local doc-maker Mark Birnbaum on a film about the future of the newspaper business. Titled, at the moment, Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril, it took as its jumping-off point the layoffs and buyouts at the News — among those interviewed were TV critic Ed Bark, architecture critic David Dillon and sports editor Dwayne Bray — but quickly became a Big Picture kind of endeavor. Mendoza says he and Birnbaum have interviewed “exactly 102 people” — among them Walter Cronkite, former Washington Post bossman Ben Bradlee, ex-Spy editor and novelist Kurt Anderson and Len Downie, executive editor at The Washington Post — and ended up with 109 hours of tape, which they’re in the process of whittling down to a rough cut they hope to have finished in the fall.
“Our whole premise going in and our only assumption was we thought newspapers were very integral to democracy in America, and they seem to be in peril,” Mendoza tells Unfair Park. “And if they’re in peril, that puts democracy in peril. We also wanted to find out why Wall Street on the one hand thinks newspapers are bad investments, when the Los Angeles Times is sending a quarter of a billion to Chicago every year in profit. It’s complicated.”
Initially, Mendoza approached Birnbaum last year about making a documentary about local artist Frank Campagna, who owns and operate the Kettle Art gallery in Deep Ellum. Mendoza wanted to “make an art film” with his buyout money and then spend time with the family in Florida before figuring out his next move. But Birnbaum says he had other ideas: There had been plenty written in the last few years about The Death of the Newspaper, but no one had made a film on the subject. And since Mendoza knew plenty about it, well, yeah, he was in.
And it was personal for Birnbaum as well; he says he knew plenty of people at Dallas’ Only Daily who were “struggling with whether they should remain journalists or take the buyout and go somewhere else.” When Mendoza informed Birnbaum — about who Mendoza had written a story years ago, when Birnbaum was finishing his documentary Larry v. Lockney with co-director Jim Schermbeck — he was making the jump, Birnbaum told him, “Let’s do this film.”
“So we started shooting interviews with people in Dallas immediately — we did 17 interviews,” Mendoza says. “We even talked to Laura Miller, who was really good. But we didn’t have any funding at that point. Mark’s usually made his personal films in between paid jobs, and I couldn’t spend two or three years on this for nothing. So I went to Florida to hang out with family, I got home in December, and by the first of the year Andy Streitfeld of AMS production Group, a big commercial house, put up enough money for us to travel and a little for us. But I am working well below my normal rate — change per hour, I think it works out to. But we were off and running.”
Make no mistake: Mendoza and Birnbaum are still looking for financing to finish the movie. And only a little of what they’ve come up with is available on their Web site — the only video clip is an interview with Downie and Bob Kaiser, associate editor at The Washington Post. They hope to have a 10-minute clip ready to show at the Dallas Video Festival early next month, then perhaps get it screened on PBS’ P.O.V. series some time next year. But there are still interviews to be done: Both men say they’d like to get more newspaper owners on record, but they’ve been reluctant to sit for the cameras thus far.
And in case you’re wondering, no one in management from The Dallas Morning News has agreed to an interview for the movie. Not so far, anyway. “I think they will before this is over,” Mendoza insists.
–Robert Wilonsky
Documenting the decline
Production has begun on Stop the Presses, a documentary looking at “the American newspaper in peril.” The film is being produced by Manny Mendoza, late of the Dallas Morning News, and documentary filmmaker Mark Birnbaum. No release date has been set. The Stop the Presses website describes the film thusly:
From inside the newsrooms where journalists are fighting for their profession, through interviews with leading lights and media experts, “Stop the Presses” asks, is the “dead tree” model of printed newspapers still relevant?
Can and should they survive, or will they be completely replaced by electronically distributed information sources? What, if anything, will be lost as shareholder-driven publishers continue to scale back coverage and eliminate reporters and editors?
Are we on the verge of losing merely a tradition of words on newsprint, or journalism itself, the only profession mentioned in the Constitution?
Dallas Morning News, Friday, May 18, 2007
By JOE O’CONNELL / Special Contributor
Bonus footage
Dallas filmmaker Mark Birnbaum and former Dallas Morning News critic Manuel Mendoza are shooting the doc Stop the Presses: American Newspapers in Peril, which will examine the industry’s future. Visit www.stopthepresses doc.com.
From the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention newspaper, the ASNE Reporter
The American newspaper: ‘A damsel in distress’?
On the door of room 745 at the JW Marriott is a cryptic, hand-penned message: “STOP THE PRESSES: PLEASE KNOCK.”
Inside the hospitality suite is a makeshift studio where two men are trying to tell the story of the American newspaper. This week they have invited an elite handful of ASNE members to predict whether or not, well, the presses might literally stop.
PBS-published filmmaker Mark Birnbaum said this:
“We’re posing the newspaper as a damsel in distress tied to the railroad tracks …” Manny Mendoza added, “about to get run over by the train.”
And Mendoza should know. Just last year, the former TV and film critic took a buyout from the Dallas Morning News.
Chopin’s “Nocturnes” played forlornly in the background as the pair explained their documentary. At first Birnbaum and Mendoza planned to call the film “- 30 -” in a reference to the traditional newspaper signoff. Ultimately, they christened it “Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril.”
Here in suite 745 (price tag per night: $500), Birnbaum sleeps on the Murphy bed and Mendoza on the pull-out couch. Not knowing how much funding they’ll ultimately get, they’re trying to stay frugal.
That’s a problem we can all identify with.
- APRIL YEE / ASNE Reporter