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

On the panel after the Denver Newspaper Agency screening were (left to right) film critic and moderator Bob Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News finance editor David Milstead, Dow Jones business columnist Al Lewis and yours truly

We had great success at the Starz Denver Film Festival last month, in part because the print journalism situation in that city is so precarious. Awareness is high, and worried reporters and editors turned out in force for our screening at the offices of the two daily papers, hosted by the Denver Press Club. It was followed by a lively and occasionally contentious panel discussion.

Denver is one of the last cities in America with semi-competing newspapers, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News. Their business operations merged in 2001 under what’s called a Joint Operation Agreement while their newsrooms remained separate.

Now comes word that the Rocky has been put up for sale by its parent company, E.W. Scripps, which reports losing $11 million on the paper in the first three quarters of 2008. As circulation and ad revenue continue to plummet — accelerated by the recession — newspapers aren’t just dealing with falling profits anymore. Some are operating in the red.

I want to thank Brit Withey, Adam Lancaster, Elizabeth Alley and all the other fine folks at the festival for creating a great experience for us and the movie-going public. Thanks to them, we received a lot of media, (which I will post shortly), sold a bunch of DVDs and got to see some worthwhile films. Another 200 people saw Stop the Presses in Denver, bringing our total festival audience to more than 1,000.

I asked producer-director-cinematographer-editor Mark Birnbaum to create a photo essay of our trip. The following pictures are by him (or a passerby when he’s in the shot), unless otherwise noted.

Manny Mendoza

Mark and I on a bench on the 16th Street Mall outside the world-famous Tattered Cover bookstore

I took this one of Mark inside the Starz Film Center with his iPhone

Me taking questions after our nearly sold-out screening at the FilmCenter

Mark and I on the local Fox station’s Good Day Colorado, photo by festival publicist Elizabeth Alley

Mark and I outside the FilmCenter

Mark and I outside our FilmCenter screening

Me on the red carpet with a Starz channel reporter

I took this shot of Mark in the Filmmakers Lounge, and after we got back he discovered this iPhone app that allows you to insert cloud quotes in photos

Me and the marquee at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival

On the heels of our triumphant appearance in Hot Springs — more 200 people saw the film there — we’re off to Colorado this weekend for screenings at the Starz Denver Film Festival. This is looking like a real cool opportunity.

After the Sunday afternoon showing at the Denver Newspaper Agency, home to the city’s two dailies, we’ll have a panel discussion about the future of print journalism with a couple of local business scribes who’ve written about the financial and spiritual woes of newspapers.

The moderator is former Rocky Mountain News film critic Bob Denerstein, who recently took a buyout. The panel is sponsored by the Denver Press Club and the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. There’s a second screening at the Starz FilmCenter on Monday, and we’ll have DVDs for sale.

I’m also looking forward to catching some other films. As always, Starz Denver has a wide selection of international fare, and this year there are quite a few animated offerings. My wish list includes The Toe Tactic, A Christmas Tale, No Subtitles Necessary, Slumdog Millionaire, The Class, Waltz with Bashir, An Evening with Bruce Bickford, Obscene, The Guitar, Megalopolis and Cinemocracy. Here’s the full schedule.

Look for stories about Stop the Presses this weekend in the Rocky Mountain News and The Advocate, the school paper at the University of Colorado at Denver. We were interviewed by both.

Manny Mendoza

That is supposedly Alfred Hitchcock’s crane outside the Malco in Hot Springs

Me with poster-under-glass at the Malco

Me, second from left, talking about Stop the Presses on a San Francisco Chronicle podcast

We’re back where we started. Our second screening ever — 40 minutes of a work-in-progress — took place at last year’s Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. Now we’re back at this year’s fest, already underway, with the completed Stop the Presses, which will have two showings at the Malco Theatre: 9:30 p.m. Friday and 2:30 p.m. next Sunday. Mark’s already there, reporting that he’s just seen a great doc about New Orleans. I’ve read through the schedule and identified at least two dozen flicks I plan to check out after arriving Wednesday. Here’s the full schedule and the film synopses.

Stop the Presses also has been accepted by the Starz Denver Film Festival, which has been around for three decades and operates its own multi-screen theater, the Starz FilmCenter, year round. Mark and I are both attending the mid-November fest. In addition to a screening at the theater on Monday, Nov. 17, the film will show at the Denver Newspaper Agency, home to the area’s two daily newspapers, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, on Sunday, Nov. 16, sponsored by the Denver Press Club and the Society of Professional Journalists. Here’s the DPC announcement from its website:

Sunday, Nov. 16, 3 p.m., the DPC and SPJ will co-sponsor the Colorado premiere of “Stop the Presses - The American Newspaper in Peril” in the auditorium of the Denver Newspaper Agency, 101 W. Colfax Ave.

The documentary is being shown as part of the Denver International Film Festival. The film examines the economic pressures daily newspapers face. It features interviews with journalists such as Ben Bradlee, Dave Barry and Ken Auletta.

After the screening, there’ll be a panel discussion involving local journalists and producer/director Manny Mendoza, a former reporter for the Dallas Morning News. Participants include Al Lewis of the Dow Jones News Service and David Milstead of the Rocky Mountain News.

Manny Mendoza

Photo by Justin Parnell

Our first screening on the left coast is just a couple of weeks away: We’re an official selection of the Berkeley Video & Film Festival, screening at 6:40 p.m. on Sat., Sept. 27, at the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas. I’ll be there for a Q&A afterward, and I hear we’re getting an award the night before.

Manny Mendoza

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

Following its spring premiere at AFI-Dallas, Stop the Presses is set to screen at a second major film festival.

Update: The Hot Springs screening is at 9:30 p.m. Oct. 24, followed by a Q&A.

Here’s the original press release:

DALLAS, Texas – The AMS Pictures documentary Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril has been selected for screening at the 17th annual Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, to be held Oct. 17 to 26 at the historic Malco Theatre in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.

The Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival strives to provide unique cultural and educational opportunities for the documentary genre to advance as a meaningful art form and seeks to become the premier documentary film festival in the world.

“We’re thrilled to be screening at Hot Springs,” said producer-director Mark Birnbaum. “They started a tradition of rolling out the red carpet for documentary filmmakers long before that was cool.”

Producer-director Manny Mendoza points out that a work-in-progress version of Stop the Presses screened at last year’s festival. “It’s great to be able to take the completed film back to that knowledgeable audience,” he said. “It’s a nurturing atmosphere for documentaries.”

At its world premiere in April at the AFI-Dallas International Film Festival, Stop the Presses sold out theaters and wowed critics. The documentary was made by award-winning filmmaker Birnbaum and former Dallas Morning News TV critic Mendoza. It tells an important story about the role of print journalism in a free society, a role that is now under threat because of the migration of readers and advertisers to the Internet.

Critics have called the film “an absorbing account that should appeal to anyone concerned about the future of democracy” and “surprisingly inspiring, as it points to the inevitable reinvention of an industry in need of new life.”

An educational DVD version of Stop the Presses, aimed at high school and university journalism classes, is for sale at www.amspictures.com. For more information, visit www.stopthepressesdoc.com or www.hsdfi.org. To request a screener or interview with the filmmakers, contact Tammy Nguyen Lee at 214.646.9309 or TNLee@amspg.com.

Manny Mendoza

We had a great week at the AFI-Dallas festival, where the film premiered and sold out two of its three screenings.

Critics called it “an absorbing account that should appeal to anyone concerned with the future of democracy” and “surprisingly inspiring, as it points to the inevitable reinvention of an industry in need of new life.”

Practically every press outlet in town wrote about it (you can read the reviews and features by clicking on our Press page), Gary Cogill interviewed us on the Channel 8 news, and talk of Stop the Presses became another virus infecting the Internet, somewhat ironic considering our subject matter.

We’ve been receiving emails from professors across the country and the world clamoring for copies to show their students. A professor in Spain told us people were blogging about the film there, even though they hadn’t seen it. Gotta love that World Wide Web.

What’s next, you ask? We’re headed to other film festivals, including the Ybor Festival of the Moving Image in my hometown of Tampa this weekend; we’re talking to film folks about theatrical, television and DVD distribution; and we’re starting to think about the educational possibilities, including creating a study guide for use in the classroom.

I’ll keep you posted on our reception in Tampa and other developments.

Manny Mendoza

First the slightly old news: We’ve wrestled this baby to the ground, and it’s going to premiere for the world on April 2 at the AFI-Dallas Int’l Film Festival. “Stop the Presses” is part of the festival’s “Target 10 Documentary Feature Competition,” with 25K going to the winner. (Keep your fingers crossed.) After the premiere at the Magnolia Theatre in West Village, we’re screening twice more, April 3 and 5 at the Angelika. These developments make us very happy and you can help keep it that way by buying your tickets. click here.

There’s a lot of activity around the film right now. We’re submitting to other festivals, we’re under consideration for a slot on a PBS documentary series to be named later, a foundation is threatening to give us an underwriting grant, and we’re working on a cartoon with Element X Creative — to be inserted as soon as we’re done with it (accounting for the asterisk in the headline) — depicting the American Newspaper as a damsel in distress from Wall Street and the Internet.

A week after AFI ends, on April 12, we’ll be the featured guests on “The Uncle Barky Show” at Stratos Greek Taverna on Northwest Highway, hosted by former Dallas Morning News TV critic Ed Bark, now proprietor of unclebarky.com, where his work on the beat continues unabated. We’ll screen clips and show a few juicy extras. Here’s Ed’s announcement of the event, click here .

For now, we’re in the midst of whipping up some local press in advance of AFI, so look for us in the Dallas media. Many, many people have made “Stop the Presses” possible, but I want to single out two: Mark Birnbaum, whose Herculean efforts are right up there on the screen, and Andy Streitfeld, who believed in the project and put his shop behind it. Without them, I wouldn’t have had this once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I’ll leave you with the kick-ass trailer, edited by Brad Osborne (click here ).

Manny Mendoza

When is a film done shooting? Apparently never.