Night turned into day from the glow of the big screen

It’s worth waxing on a bit about the outpouring of support we’ve received since the documentary film “Storm Lake” hit the silver screen at the Vista Theatre in September.

The movie will enjoy its first national television broadcast next Monday, Nov. 15 at 9 p.m. on PBS’s Independent Lens program. We hope you tune in. It’s a lovely and true film that is, at its core, about building a diverse rural community through civic engagement. The Storm Lake Times serves as the lens through which we peer at a rapidly changing City Beautiful.

And, directors Beth Levison and Jerry Risius certainly portray accurately the struggles that local journalism faces. There was a point in the spring of 2020 when Fearless Leader John and I wondered if the newspaper would go under. Reliving it at 24 frames per second makes my gut spin. The movie suggests the question: What is going to happen to this newspaper and so many others like it, as social media and the pandemic turn the world inside out?

We are much relieved to report that the public is responding.

The Cullens have been zigzagging Iowa and the Midwest with Beth and Jerry at live screenings from Winterset to Chicago. During the swing, I did an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air program. A billionaire from California listened. I got to my hotel room in Detroit at midnight and checked the email. My correspondent, a Chinese immigrant, said he liked what he heard and wanted to give us enough money to get us through the pandemic. So he did just that before I got home.

There is a God, and he/she sent an angel to my hotel room. I gave him the address of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation, which we started to organize in the depths of the pandemic with Doug Burns of the Carroll Times Herald and Lorena Lopez of La Prensa of Iowa in Denison. Last January, the WIJF was granted non-profit status by the IRS so it can accept tax-deductible gifts. It is intended to support independent, locally-owned news operations.

We have received several checks ranging from $1,000 to $5,000, enough to keep our paper and others afloat during the worst of the pandemic — along with a Payroll Protection grant. Just this week, the WIJF received a six-figure grant from a California foundation interested in sustainable agriculture and climate reporting. Note that none of the newspapers take their orders from donors — we don’t even know who most of them are. The givers are supporting us for what we’ve done in the past, trying to report without fear or favor.

Pandemic or not, every local journalist knows that things have to change as digital platforms upended our business model. In the future, we will depend more on readers for revenue than advertisers. We will have to offer more and better digital products to a larger audience that can support local journalism. Everyone in the industry agrees on that. We have to figure out how to pay for it.

Philanthropy buys time and the ability to experiment with new forms of information delivery. I understand an old offset press flinging ink, but I do not care to understand TikTok. We need to recapitalize journalism for a new digital generation and keep old goats like me typing in the background.

Democracy depends on that successful transformation. Lies and propaganda drove insurrections at state capitols in Minnesota and Michigan, and eventually at the US Capitol. Disinformation meant only to divide and cause fear is keeping people from getting vaccinated against Covid. Never has a common set of facts been more important.

That’s what we’re hearing from potential donors. They feel the threat. And it is what we heard from theatre audiences everywhere we went: How can we snuff out the disinformation and bring communities together? Though old-fashioned honest journalism (delivered in new ways through a dizzying array of media). It’s easy: Subscribe at stormlake.com.

The documentary is prompting a broad discussion across the country through national journalism advocacy groups, taking the producer somewhat by surprise. The film will be shown in more communities and on more college campuses in hopes of elevating the importance of real journalism to our democratic life.

All sorts of ideas are being tried out: non-profits are cropping up in what used to be news deserts, communities with no local news source; a new digital newspaper is starting in Baltimore in competition with The Sun, much depleted and now owned by a hedge fund; college students are putting out a community newspaper in Oxford, Ohio; The Salt Lake Tribune went entirely non-profit; The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Seattle Times are supported by non-profit foundations like the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation.

A few donations have turned night into day for us. The same can be true for the 1,800 communities across the country that lost their only news source in the last decade (including a half-dozen in Iowa over the past year). We’re getting new digital subscribers at www.stormlake.com. We think we hit bottom. A new story is about to be told thanks to your support (and thanks to the work of Beth Levison, Jerry Risius and Crew). Enjoy the movie. We surely have!

Art Cullen is the publisher and editor of The Storm Lake Times. He won the the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 2017 and is the author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.” Cullen can be reached at times@stormlake.com.