If you’ve ever wondered what happened to your local printed newspaper, you’ll want to watch the documentary film, “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink,” streaming on PBS this October.
Spoiler alert: it’s a much bigger story than simply “the internet killed newspapers.”
“Stripped for Parts” is the award-winning documentary that Estes Valley Voice showed at its Estes Chamber ribbon-cutting in August 2024.
Directed by Rick Goldsmith, the 95-minute documentary focuses on journalist Julie Reynolds’ in-depth investigation into who is gobbling up American newspapers—and why.
Through investigative journalism, Reynolds uncovered the story behind hedge fund Alden Global Capital’s stealthy gutting of local newspapers across the country, including The Denver Post, which involved selling off newspapers’ real estate, closing printing plants, and slashing editorial staffs to skeletal crews.
As Reynolds’ revelations sparked national protests by more than just displaced journalists, the film serves as a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks losing local newspapers isn’t a big deal.
The documentary is both hopeful and a call to action, featuring victories by independent journalists who rose up, fought back, and established independent and nonprofit newspapers, such as The San Jose Spotlight, The Colorado Sun, and The Baltimore Banner.
While “Stripped for Parts” addresses the precarious balance between capitalism and the production of newspapers, it also presents local journalism as a public service. That philosophy is fundamental to the Estes Valley Voice, and why we are a public benefit corporation. In Colorado, a public benefit corporation is a for-profit company “intended to produce a public benefit or public benefits and to operate in a responsible and sustainable manner.”
Consider the latest statistics on the impact of newspapers on a community’s health.
- According to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism’s “The State of Local News 2024 Report,” over the past 20 years, more than 3,200 print newspapers have vanished, and most recently, they continue to disappear at a rate of more than two per week. In the past year alone, more than 130 newspapers have shut their doors.
- In August, News Media Corporation abruptly shut down dozens of newspapers across five states—Wyoming, Illinois, Arizona, South Dakota, and Nebraska. These closures have intensified the problem of “news deserts” in rural areas across the U.S., leaving communities without their primary local news source. News Media Corporation is owned by Alden Global Capital, which owns Prairie Mountain Media, which publishes the Estes Park Trail Gazette.
- In Colorado, research by the Colorado News Collaborative identified challenges facing news outlets, including funding and revenue generation, staffing, capacity and burnout, print costs, audience growth and engagement, as well as meeting the needs of younger and Latino audiences.
- With closures and mergers, newspapers are reducing their print coverage, shrinking the number of pages, shifting from daily to weekly publications, and in many cases, stopping publication altogether. Communities are getting less actual news coverage, and what they are getting is often from fewer, more consolidated and homogenized sources, leading to information silos and biased echo chambers.
- A June 2025 study by the Columbia Journalism Review found that “all else being equal, the closure of a newspaper yielded a 6.9 percent increase in corruption charges, a 6.8 percent increase in the number of indicted defendants, and a 7.4 percent increase in cases filed.”
- Other casualties of the decline in local newspapers, as cited by the American Journalism Project, include decreased voter turnout, reduced civic engagement, and increased community polarization.
Taking back local news locally
Ultimately, “Stripped for Parts” is a plea to communities to understand what is at stake, to support local journalism, and to fight back against what Goldsmith’s documentary calls “vulture journalism.”
Local communities need local news that is connected to the community. Communities deserve boots-on-the-ground reporting with writers, editors, and publishers who know their local audience.
We invite you to watch “Stripped for Parts” to understand what is happening to local journalism.
We also invite you to support us as we work to keep local journalism local. No one else is going to come up the hill to tell our local community’s stories, sit in on local special district meetings, and report on the budgets, businesses, local elections, events, and people of the community.
There are two basic models of journalism: watchdog and lapdog. The Estes Valley Voice loves to tell the stories of the Estes Valley and celebrate the community, but we are not lapdog journalists or a house organ of any government office, organization, or business, including our advertisers.
In fact, we are careful about maintaining a firewall between our advertisers and our news reporting, and we work hard to publish our editorial opinions in our commentaries and not in our reporting.
We are locally owned, journalist-led, and fiercely independent. We do not publish press releases or advertorials. We use a press release to follow up on a story and do our reporting with journalists who are paid for their writing. We believe that a diversity of opinions expressed with civility is essential in public discourse, and we welcome letters to the editor and commentary essays on topics relevant to our community.
It is far easier to publish only the fun stuff and to never dig into difficult, complex stories, but that’s not journalism. There are far more profitable ways to earn a living than to run a news publication, and being in the news business, we know that journalism will make some people mad. There’s a famous quote attributed to George Orwell, “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”
We’re in the news business, not the public relations business. We are accountable to the Estes Valley community because we are part of the community.
Please consider signing up for our email newsletter on our home page, and please become an Estes Valley Voice subscriber, a super supporter, or an advertiser. And thank you to our readers for allowing us to be your local, independent news source in the Estes Valley.
How to watch “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink”
- Streaming – From October 1 through December 31, you can stream the film, free and on demand, at PBS.org on your web browser or the PBS app through Roku, Apple TV, Google Play, or most smart TVs.
- October 20 at 5 p.m. MST on PBS World Channel, broadcast everywhere.
- Click here for a link to repeat broadcasts.