Last spring’s Denver Post editorial page revolt against its hedge-fund owner, which garnered national headlines and became known in media circles as the Denver Rebellion, led an intriguing figure to trek to Colorado from California.

Rick Goldsmith, a well-known documentary filmmaker who had already produced two Academy-Award-nominated films about journalism, embarked on a new project: Stripped for Parts: American Journalism at the Crossroads. And while the film, which is still in production, has a national focus, “it was definitely the Denver Rebellion that instigated this,” Goldsmith says.

For more than a year, he and a film crew have been in and out of Colorado interviewing subjects. Their cameras have been rolling at public events about the news. “We do cover the Denver Rebellion,” he told me this week about the documentary. “We cover the fight against [Post owner] Alden Global Capital, and it broadens out into the crisis in journalism— and local journalism specifically — today that’s happening all around the country.”

Our nation’s local news crisis is certainly ripe for documentary treatment, and as a fan of Goldsmith’s film, The Most Dangerous Man in America, about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, I can’t wait to see the final product. In the meantime, you can now watch the trailer for Stripped for Parts 👇🏼

The film isn’t finished— Goldsmith said he expects a release in early 2021— and he says one goal is for viewers to have a better understanding of what it means that hedge funds are “so involved in controlling newspapers and news dissemination” these days. I asked him if the film will be all doom-and-gloom or if it might also focus on potential solutions to what essentially amounts to a crisis in democracy. He said he’ll cover the past, present, and future, and the struggle to make journalism “responsive to the needs of the public and to serve democracy.”

In the nearly-four-minute trailer, you’ll recognize plenty of familiar faces from Colorado journalism as subjects of the film, which also tracks reporters from elsewhere around the country. (For background on California investigative journalist Julie Reynolds, who also appears to play a key role, read this Q-and-A I did with her for CJR as she dug into Alden Global.)

Beyond his documentary about the Pentagon Papers, Goldsmith in 1996 made Tell the Truth and Run about muckraker George Seldes. “Journalism has always been a subject close to my heart,” he said.

You can help support Stripped for Parts here. You can also sign up here for emailed news about the film.

So, that rollout went smoothly…

When asked whether having faculty leading the charge on stories that may cover the university critically would be a conflict of interest, Skewes said CU’s media faculty are “journalists at heart” and would pursue the news under the new venture. “If there is news about the university that may reflect negatively on the university, what we want to do is teach our students through this learning lab model how to report that thoroughly and carefully and have it nailed down,” Skewes said. “This is not about controlling what the students write. It’s about making sure when it’s published, the stories are verified and accurate. We don’t want to control the message. We want to make sure the message is being relayed in a way that reflects the best standards of journalism.”

The college’s new program will not bury stories that are unfavorable to the university, Skewes said, citing abundant journalism experience among faculty. “The mission of this new opportunity is not to have some kind of publication that tries to make the university look good all the time,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a lot that the university is doing that needs to be uncovered, but if it does need to be uncovered, we want to encourage students to do it in a way that’s thorough and deep.” 

The line, “I don’t think there’s a lot that the university is doing that needs to be uncovered” came in for criticism by the Camera’s opinion page editor, The Denver Post’s top editor, and others including CU grad Carina Julig, who is a reporter for The Loveland Reporter-Herald and worked for the campus paper as a recent student. And it makes sense. The Camera recently sued CU’s board of trustees over transparency in the process of its recent controversial search for a new president. Julig pointed to reporting she did for the CU Independent about how LGBTQ grad students at the school “struggle with isolation and intolerance,” and a piece another student wrote about the way the school shut down a program appreciated by marginalized students on campus.

Is this the kind of reporting that a faculty-run student media outlet will prioritize? Universities are some of the least transparent institutions that reporters cover, and CU has a *lot* of skeletons in its closet. The idea that there is not a lot of uncover is just not true.

— Carina Julig (@CarinaJulig) December 9, 2019

For her part, Skewes said she wasn’t surprised by the response to her remark. “I would have responded in the same way to the partial quote that’s been circulating on Twitter,” she told me. “However, the partial quote was misleading.”

So what did she mean by it? Here’s what she said over the phone last week:

“I realize CU is a big institution, and yes, the Kennedy search … there are certainly questions that need to be raised about that, and I think the attempt to get at more of the records around that is important, and that’s what we teach our students. But as I was saying that particular middle part of that quote my brain was thinking about the people who have the offices near me and the kind of time and dedication that they put in and, you know, yeah, I don’t think they’re doing a lot that’s wrong, so that’s where that came from. I wasn’t trying to convey a sense that ‘Don’t look to the right because there’s nothing to see here,’ it’s that I work with really good people.”​

If there is a negative story about the university to publish “or about a faculty member, or about me,” Skewes said, “I want this new student publication to go for it and do the best job they can of it.”

The CU Independent has changed over the years. From around 1980 until 2009, the paper, which used to be called Campus Press, “was a publication that was produced by a class taken by students for a grade and taught by journalism department faculty,” Skewes said. “In its current incarnation, as an editorially independent student publication that has been funded by an academic unit, the CUI has been in existence only since the Spring 2009 semester.” (Hernandez of the Post has more history of it here.)

Here’s The Boulder Daily Camera editorializing about the matter this weekend:

The Independent is truly independent — the outlet’s journalists work with a “student media manager,” school staff member Gil Asakawa, but they do not consult with faculty members on editorial direction or seek the school’s approval for their reporting. The new enterprise will be different. It explicitly will be “faculty-led.” How such supervision will shape content is unclear, but it’s certain that student journalists, with school-paid adults looking over their shoulders, will feel pressures that the Independent’s reporters do not. It’s easy to imagine that the journalistic impulse to aggressively pursue a sensitive story involving the university itself could be compromised by the editorial involvement of university staff.

The CU Independent’s editor, Rob Tann, was able to use this entire scenario to explain why he believes keeping a truly independent paper around at the university is necessary with these changes on the way. “If a story comes up that’s critical of the university, looking at a certain policy or doing watchdog journalism, I think it’s a little unclear how that will play out in a university setting,” Tann told the Camera, adding, “I think students will recognize that’s where the CU Independent thrives.” (The student paper already raised nearly $1,000 in a GoFundMe campaign. The school pumps about $13,000 into it per semester, which it is set to lose.)

The paper’s fate could serve as an interesting case study about the extent to which readers within (or outside) the university community are willing to support it because of its coverage priorities or whether the new CU multimedia learning lab outlet will cover the institution comprehensively enough — warts and all.

Eater dot com is moving on from Denver

“We are instead prioritizing investment in other cities where we’ve seen strong growth, including Portland and Seattle, experimenting in new areas (launching in 2020), and focusing on national initiatives, including travel coverage and events,” Kludt said. Denver is the only city where Eater is eliminating its reporting staff, Kludt said. Eater Denver launched in late 2011 and always has had one part-time editor/reporter. The site, which also worked with local freelancers, typically has published multiple news stories a week on restaurant openings, closings and menu changes.

Tribune journalists are protesting The Nothing

Alden is best known as the hedge fund that never found a budget it couldn’t cut, a journalist it couldn’t lay off, or a community it couldn’t make a little bit dumber. By all accounts, Tribune itself was surprised by the deal and has taken steps to limit Alden’s further investment in the company (which is currently up to around 32 percent). But that can only last for a few months — until June 30, 2020 — after which it’s possible control of Tribune could be available for Alden strip-mining.