Oscar-nominated filmmaker Rick Goldsmith’s “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink” screens on Tuesday evening at Oakland’s New Parkway Theatre, ironically, a few blocks from the once-bustling Oakland Tribune building, where a team of well-respected journalists worked. Shuttered since 2016, the newspaper, like so many others, is long gone.
The demise of the Trib, as it affectionately was called, is part of a broader newspaper story and problem that are the subject of “Stripped of Parts,” which chronicles how the New York-based hedge fund company Alden Global Capital has engaged in a newspaper shopping spree at the expense of local, community-based journalism.
Goldsmith tracks how Alden Global Capital swooped in and scooped up 100 newspapers and other enterprises, including the San Jose Mercury News and the East Bay Times; it also covers how the Oakland Tribune and other community-based Bay Area News Group newspapers ceased operation, as well as how Dean Singleton, founder of the Bay Area papers’ parent company Digital First Media, stepped down in 2018.
The award-winning documentary describes the ethically questionable business tactics of Alden, its founder Randall Smith and president Heath Freeman. It also tells stories of brave journalists, particularly reporters at the Denver Post, who stood up to their bosses at risk of losing their jobs. The film, which could have been an outright downer about the decrepit state of journalism, morphs into a thoughtful overview of a new path for journalism, via a nonprofit model.
Goldsmith’s film is being shown at 6 and 8:40 p.m., presented in partnership with The Berkeley Film Foundation. Following the movie, I will be moderating a conversation with Goldsmith, investigative reporter Julie Reynolds, cofounder of the nonprofit news site Voice of Monterey Bay who has been doggedly investigating Alden for seven years, and former Bay Area News Group investigative journalist Thomas Peele, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who covered the 2016 Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland. Both are in the film; Peele will attend the first screening (which is sold out) only.
I caught up with Goldsmith to talk about the film. (Some questions and answers have been edited for clarity and length.)
What led you to making “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink”?
Goldsmith: I’ve been reading newspapers since I was a kid. You know, I got it for sports scores when I was 7. I devoured newspapers and it became a huge part of my life. And when I got into documentary filmmaking, I was first drawn to the subject of journalism. My first feature film was on George Seldes, this muckraking journalist (1996’s “To Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press”). This is really kind of the third of my trilogy about journalism; the second one being (2009’s “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” which earned an Oscar nomination).
I had been talking with (journalist and political commentator) Bill Moyers in 2018, and a couple of weeks later, I get an email, and he says, “I’m sitting in the barber chair and reading this article (about Alden Global Capital). This is a film that has to be made and Goldsmith’s the one that has to make it.” Or something like that.
Can you speak about how Ken Doctor’s 2018 article “Newsonomics: Alden Global Capital is making so much money wrecking local journalism it might not want to stop anytime soon” was the impetus to make the documentary?
Goldsmith: Three things popped out at me. One was: How could you make money from what I knew to be a distressed industry? Two was, “wrecking” local journalism, like this was intentional. Why would anybody do that? And three, and this was the thing that really sucked me into the article, was the Denver Post rebellion where an editorial writer had basically written an editorial blasting the hedge fund owner. The more I dug into it, and I didn’t have to dig into it very far, I saw that this didn’t indeed start with this editorial writer. That editorial writer got his information from an investigation that started a couple of years earlier. And before that, this hedge fund had been into journalism for 10 years, and nobody knew about it.
This third thing that really got me into it was about journalists fighting back. You think of journalists as being impartial, not injecting themselves into the story. But in this case, they did. And, indeed, they were part of this story. If it wasn’t for journalists unearthing all this information about Alden Golden Capital, no one would know about it. It would just be another continuation of these newspapers going down the tubes, blah, blah. No. There are people out for greed and doing this intentionally.
What resonated most with you about the subject?
Goldsmith: I saw this thing that I loved so much, and yet I still had a kind of complicated love-hate relationship with it, because legacy newspapers weren’t always on the right side of things, and they had their faults. But it was so much a part of my life that I felt like this was kind of a personal quest for me—what’s going on and how can I help tell this story so that it matters to what happens to local journalism going forward.
What surprised you the most?
Goldsmith: There were a number of things. I’m not naive about the financial world. What little I did know about hedge funds, I kind of got that people were in it for the money and it was apparent from the get-go that they had no interest in the journalist.
In my knowledge of newspaper barons—this goes back to the George Seldes movie, there were two things going on. One was: This is a great place to get rich. It really is. Become a publisher of a newspaper. And not only to become rich but to become powerful because you’re connected to the wheels of power. But the second thing was that maybe, with small exceptions, most of these newspaper barons did have a simple civic mission. They cared about the communities and often, even if they were chain moguls, they started in some local place and they were connected to the local community.
[What] became apparent as the No. 1 thing was that these people, illegitimate owners of newspapers, were not connected to the communities. And they saw no purpose in making their newspapers good newspapers. That was what the editorial was about from the Denver Post. So when I read about the mansions in Florida [Randall Smith, in 2013, went on to purchase 16 Palm Beach homes] and the sucking out of the profits and putting them either into other business ventures or personal mansions… It was one thing after another. It was like the step of evilness kept going up with each new thing I found out.
Now what we’re finding out is that private equity and hedge funds—which are almost the same thing—are buying up so much of our daily lives. You know they’re in trailer home parks. They’re in hospitals. They’re in prisons. They’re in schools. And it’s the same model that they use for those things. So where does that leave the average person? With institutions that are weaker and don’t serve the public, and without a voice. What these newspaper men and women were showing is that you’ve got to use your voice.
What can be done to support journalism?
Goldsmith: We need a new model. Are we going to be bold enough to talk about public funding? Are we going to be bold enough to say, you know, we pay for the police. We pay for the army, the armed forces. We pay for the fire department. We pay for public education. Why don’t we pay for journalism? In a small way, we do pay…NPR, PBS. But that’s not the whole news infrastructure. So what about that? Are we going to be serious about valuing how valuable journalism is? How necessary it is for our democracy. These are the things that are facing us. And they’re not just facing the news industry. They’re facing all of us.
“Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink” screens at 6 and 8:40 p.m. Jan. 30 at the New Parkway Theater, 474 24th St., Oakland. For tickets ($14-$16) to the late show, visit thenewparkway.com.