By Adam Rabiner
The principal character of Storm Lake, Art Cullen, is editor of the Storm Lake Times, a small-town newspaper with a staff of ten, mostly family, in Iowa with a circulation of around three thousand readers. And with his shaggy mustache and mop-top hair, he is a character, most likely intentionally casting himself as a latter-day Samuel Clemens. Cullen takes his editor’s beat very seriously – he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 2017 for investigative articles challenging powerful corporate agricultural interests in the state. But he’s also a folksy storyteller, in the vein of Garrison Keillor, narrating the lives of those who inhabit his fictional Lake Wobegon.
The stories that Cullen spins, assisted by his wife, brother, son, sister-in-law and other relatives, are broad and deep, spanning both hyper-local news such as City Council meetings, the School Board of Supervisors, the Court House, the plight of local farmers confronting odd weather and climate change, who had a baby, got married or died, as well as nationally oriented stories such as the 2020 presidential election, the disastrous Democratic Iowa Caucus meltdown, and the onset of Covid 19 and its impact on the paper and the town that same year.
These stories are woven into the documentary, which also chronicles the struggles of the newspaper itself to stay afloat in the face of various financial challenges such as competitors like Facebook and the dearth of local businesses that can afford to buy advertisements. He recognizes that he needs to increase his readership but acknowledges too that people now want to get their news for free.
In the past fifteen years, as many as a quarter of the newspapers in the United States have shuttered, and with its two times a week paper circulation, the $1.00 an issue Storm Lake Times is one of the last of its kind. Founded in 1990, the paper often just breaks even, making a small profit one year followed by a small loss the next. To survive, it must supplement advertising fees with support from the reader community, which over the years has become more diverse and Democratic with the influx of diverse immigrants, though outside of town remains firmly Republican. For Cullen and his family, keeping the Storm Lake Times afloat is not primarily about achieving financial success. It is about providing good local journalism and news which Cullen believes is the foundation of a successful democracy. Cullen believes that the ten thousand residents that form the community of Storm Lake represent a microcosm of the nation which is only as strong as its newspaper and banks.
With the demise of many papers, such as Ohio’s Youngstown Vindicator and others, Cullen estimates that there are around three hundred “news deserts,” medium-sized towns of twenty to thirty thousand people, without a local news source. The plight of these papers parallels those of the small family farm, which is also endangered by economic forces and policies favoring agglomeration and big, corporate operations. The business models that once
supported the small farm, the small paper, and mom and pop stores, institutions that back one another up, have fallen apart, leaving rural communities weaker.
Storm Lake certainly does resemble a microcosm of the United States as it grapples with common and widespread issues: warmer and wetter weather and its effect on crop yields and planting patterns, the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment, worsening political polarization, the plight of small family farms, and others. There are no easy answers to these problems. For example, if you blow up the system of large-scale agricultural production, where does that leave the immigrant workers who rely on it for employment?
At the end of the day, this film’s central theme is the role that a small-town newspaper, pulling itself up by its bootstraps, plays in helping to shore up democracy. Art Cullen, who likes to quote Madison and Jefferson and proudly displays a poster of JFK on his office wall, may not be representative of his rural community. But in some ways his folksy Mark Twain demeanor and Midwestern decency caste him as the quintessential American Everyman comfortably inhabiting a kind of mythic heartland made famous by a Prairie Home Companion, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
The principal character of Storm Lake, Art Cullen, is editor of the Storm Lake Times, a small-town newspaper with a staff of ten, mostly family, in Iowa with a circulation of around three thousand readers. And with his shaggy mustache and mop-top hair, he is a character, most likely intentionally casting himself as a latter-day Samuel Clemens. Cullen takes his editor’s beat very seriously – he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 2017 for investigative articles challenging powerful corporate agricultural interests in the state. But he’s also a folksy storyteller, in the vein of Garrison Keillor, narrating the lives of those who inhabit his fictional Lake Wobegon.
The stories that Cullen spins, assisted by his wife, brother, son, sister-in-law and other relatives, are broad and deep, spanning both hyper-local news such as City Council meetings, the School Board of Supervisors, the Court House, the plight of local farmers confronting odd weather and climate change, who had a baby, got married or died, as well as nationally oriented stories such as the 2020 presidential election, the disastrous Democratic Iowa Caucus meltdown, and the onset of Covid 19 and its impact on the paper and the town that same year.
These stories are woven into the documentary, which also chronicles the struggles of the newspaper itself to stay afloat in the face of various financial challenges such as competitors like Facebook and the dearth of local businesses that can afford to buy advertisements. He recognizes that he needs to increase his readership but acknowledges too that people now want to get their news for free.
In the past fifteen years, as many as a quarter of the newspapers in the United States have shuttered, and with its two times a week paper circulation, the $1.00 an issue Storm Lake Times is one of the last of its kind. Founded in 1990, the paper often just breaks even, making a small profit one year followed by a small loss the next. To survive, it must supplement advertising fees with support from the reader community, which over the years has become more diverse and Democratic with the influx of diverse immigrants, though outside of town remains firmly Republican. For Cullen and his family, keeping the Storm Lake Times afloat is not primarily about achieving financial success. It is about providing good local journalism and news which Cullen believes is the foundation of a successful democracy. Cullen believes that the ten thousand residents that form the community of Storm Lake represent a microcosm of the nation which is only as strong as its newspaper and banks.
With the demise of many papers, such as Ohio’s Youngstown Vindicator and others, Cullen estimates that there are around three hundred “news deserts,” medium-sized towns of twenty to thirty thousand people, without a local news source. The plight of these papers parallels those of the small family farm, which is also endangered by economic forces and policies favoring agglomeration and big, corporate operations. The business models that once
supported the small farm, the small paper, and mom and pop stores, institutions that back one another up, have fallen apart, leaving rural communities weaker.
Storm Lake certainly does resemble a microcosm of the United States as it grapples with common and widespread issues: warmer and wetter weather and its effect on crop yields and planting patterns, the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment, worsening political polarization, the plight of small family farms, and others. There are no easy answers to these problems. For example, if you blow up the system of large-scale agricultural production, where does that leave the immigrant workers who rely on it for employment?
At the end of the day, this film’s central theme is the role that a small-town newspaper, pulling itself up by its bootstraps, plays in helping to shore up democracy. Art Cullen, who likes to quote Madison and Jefferson and proudly displays a poster of JFK on his office wall, may not be representative of his rural community. But in some ways his folksy Mark Twain demeanor and Midwestern decency caste him as the quintessential American Everyman comfortably inhabiting a kind of mythic heartland made famous by a Prairie Home Companion, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”