ISSUE #84  | 10/16/2023

As a little kid, I’d come down to breakfast each morning to the sight of my parents absorbed in our local newspaper. As they read and discussed the latest news, I claimed the comics. A few years later, I delivered the evening paper — the Toronto Star — door to door with my brother. We had a big route and I especially remember knocking on our customers’ doors, usually in the encroaching dark, to collect payments in cash or check.

It was the glory days of journalism when I fell into my first job. I loved everything about the newsroom — the clamor of voices, the adrenaline, my smart and funny colleagues. I was there to tell stories, travel the country and talk to people I’d otherwise never meet. I was going to change the world.

Then came the layoffs, the buyouts, the closings. As those once-noisy newsrooms were silenced, word grew about a secretive hedge fund called Alden Global Capital, a vulture firm that saw newspapers purely as “distressed opportunities” ripe for plundering.  

That’s the story told in “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink,” a documentary about the systematic destruction of newspapers from Chicago to Denver to San Jose. For Alden’s two principal owners, the value of these papers lay not in the information they disseminated but in their downtown real estate. And as they went about laying off thousands of reporters and closing dozens of news outlets, the senior owner bought 16 mansions in Palm Beach, Florida, worth more than $50 million.

The film lays it all out in a methodical, narrative style that will make your blood boil. At least, it did mine. It was produced by Rick Goldsmith, a documentary filmmaker who specializes in telling David vs. Goliath stories. Goldsmith, who’s probably best known for the 2009 documentary, “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” is a generous storyteller who gives his subjects the space and time to tell their stories — and then lets the tale unfold in all its human and systemic consequences.  

“Stripped for Parts” is getting its world premiere at the 15th Annual Santa Fe International Film Festival this Saturday afternoon, Oct. 21, at the Violet Crown Cinema. I’ll be there to moderate a Q&A with Goldsmith after the film’s 3:15 p.m. showing. If you care about the future of journalism and its role in preserving democracy, I urge you to come out, watch it for yourself, and ask questions.