Storm Lake (2021 | USA | 85 minutes | Jerry Risius, Beth Levinson)
Most people haven’t heard of the Storm Lake Times newspaper for the same reason they likely haven’t heard of the Nome (Alaska) Nugget or, say, the Daily World from my hometown of Aberdeen, WA. But the Storm Lakes Times fills an important role in informing the citizens of Buena Vista County, Iowa. Despite having a circulation not much over 3,000 for a bi-weekly, small-community newspaper, it won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for editorial writing and exposing corruption in the agriculture industry.
It’s also the subject of a documentary that is playing at SIFF’s first-ever DocFest. Storm Lake explores the newspaper and what role it plays in a future where more and more local media outlets are disappearing or being absorbed by large corporations like Sinclair.
Run by the Cullen family (John Cullen started the newspaper in 1990 and his brother Art is the editor, other family members fill out the editorial staff), the Storm Lake Times covers national and local news, including having an outsized role when the Iowa caucuses are the biggest news story in national politics. They host candidate forums and have had countless top-tier candidates stop by their offices for endorsement interviews. There’s a funny sequence in this documentary where “Agent Pete” Buttigieg stops by the paper hoping to help garner support in the state (which he did win under shady circumstances) and the next scene focuses on an area man who can grow abnormally large cabbages running for city council.
In this documentary, you see first-hand the issues facing small area media sources face. The Cullens note that they lost subscribers and advertisers when they won the Pulitzer because the deeply conservative Buena Vista County residents didn’t like that they had won a prestigious award for left-leaning reporting. The city of Storm Lake, the movie notes, has a large immigrant population, so the county seat has vastly different politics than the county as a whole. The paper always ran on razor-thin margins, so anything that upsets advertisers (whose ads cost around $100) can be painful, let alone an entire pandemic where lots of retail and restaurants were shut down.
I thought Storm Lake was one of my favorite documentaries of this series because it shows how important local news can be and what realities they face to continue to provide information to their audiences. I didn’t know how costly even television listings can be. The Cullens found that they were cost-prohibitive but their readers liked having them in the papers, so they remain.
For all of the problems with local, national, and international media, I found the story of Storm Lake and the Storm Lake Times hopeful. It’s something worth protecting and this is a movie worth cheering for.
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Storm Lake is currently streaming on the SIFF Channel for DocFest.