Indie Lens Pop-Up Online Screening: Storm Lake

Join us online for a free Indie Lens Pop-Up screening of STORM LAKE, the new documentary by Jerry Risius and Beth Levison, followed by an interactive discussion of the state of local journalism with the film’s stars.

In STORM LAKE, Pulitzer-winning editor Art Cullen and his family dedicate themselves to keeping a newspaper alive in a small Iowa town. Nearly 2,000 local papers have shuttered in America in the last twenty years, a crisis accelerated by COVID-19. The stakes have been especially high for the Cullen family, as they comprise half of their paper’s ten-person team. Against tight deadlines and slimmer margins, the Cullens report on their town, and wonder how the paper will survive as readers cese to support journalism like they used to. If American democracy requires an informed citizenry, can it survive without the backbone of independent local journalism?

PANELISTS:
Art Cullen, Editor, The Storm Lake Times
Tom Cullen, Reporter, The Storm Lake Times
Errin Haines, Editor-at-Large, The 19th
Lorena López, Editor, La Prensa
Alison Bethel, Vice President, Report for America

Featuring upcoming documentaries from the Peabody Award-winning PBS series Independent Lens, Indie Lens Pop-Up brings people together for film screenings and community-driven conversations. Indie Lens Pop-Up is presented in Connecticut by the Yale Film Archive, CPTV, and PBS’s Independent Lens.