The Storm Lake Times is a print newspaper that, since 1990, has been published twice a week in Storm Lake, Iowa. This neck of the woods is often dismissively referred to as “flyover country,” but over the course of the new documentary film Storm Lake, a momentous media struggle sweeping small town USA is played out in this rural enclave with less than 11,000 residents.
“The business model has changed. People want their news free on Facebook over breakfast. The problem is that’s not how you sustain a democracy. You need people who can talk about facts.”
What happens is that Storm Lake is hit by two huge stories of national and international import, putting the family-owned biweekly paper on its toes. The first is the Iowa caucuses for the 2020 presidential election; the second is the outbreak of COVID-19, especially within the state’s meatpacking plants.
The Storm Lake Times belongs to the Cullen family, Iowans with a decidedly liberal bent. According to The Progressive Populist, “The Cullens are the sons of the late Pat and Eileen Cullen of Storm Lake. Pat Cullen was foolish enough to run as a Democrat for the Iowa Legislature on the Kennedy ticket. He had a KKK cross burned in his ‘honor.’ He lost.”
Today, the Cullens are doggedly determined to keep their community-oriented newspaper afloat amidst the shifting seas of digital portals that are challenging the primacy of print. The Storm Lake Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning (more on this later), white-haired and mustachioed Art Cullen, is the paper’s stalwart editor. He seeks to serve the highest calling of journalism, serving the residents of Buena Vista County in a changing media marketplace and landscape.
Cullen is given to waxing poetic over the evolving nature of reportage in the twenty-first century.
“The First Amendment may be quaint nowadays,” he muses in the film. “The business model has changed. People want their news free on Facebook over breakfast. The problem is that’s not how you sustain a democracy. You need people who can talk about facts.” Citing James Madison, Cullen adds: “The reporter is the cornerstone of democracy.”
Enlisted in the noble cause of fact-based, community-oriented journalism are Art’s brother, John Cullen, the Storm Lake Times’s publisher and founder; Art’s wife, Dolores Cullen, whose beats include photography and recipes; and their son, Tom, a staff reporter whose struggle to meet deadlines is complicated by the fact that his editor also happens to be his dad.
The Storm Lake Times brings the same commitment to reporting on stories ranging from local marching bands to a talent contest featuring a competitor who works at the nearby Tyson plant to the reality of immigration in this largely white Iowa county.
At a time when immigrants and refugees are being vilified, the Storm Lake Times endeavors to give fair, dignified coverage to Latinx residents and other new arrivals. Many of these nonwhite Iowans work at the Tyson meat packing plant, which has been investigated by the Storm Lake Times for its outbreak of COVID-19.
The small-town ambiance of the film is also rocked by the February 3, 2020, Iowa Caucus, which—being scheduled about a week before the New Hampshire primary—catapults outliers like the town of Storm Lake into the limelight. A deluge of Democratic candidates and their advocates descend on the Hawkeye State, turning the hinterlands into ground zero for the presidential race.
Storm Lake includes glimpses of Democratic hopefuls, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, Julián Castro, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, and Pete Buttigieg, campaigning for the White House. Senator Bernie Sanders and surrogate Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also vie for Iowa’s voters. Sweeping Storm Lake’s Latinx vote, Sanders finishes statewide in a dead heat with Buttigieg.
The film proceeds to chronicle how the ever-resourceful Cullens manage to navigate the unprecedented, unpredictable tides of the COVID-19 pandemic—not only continuing to publish two times a week, but even managing to modestly increase their circulation numbers.
Storm Lake is told in a very conventional, straightforward way. According to press notes, the documentary’s co-director and director of photography, Jerry Risius, was drawn to the subject matter for his directorial debut because “I grew up about an hour from Storm Lake on a hog farm in Buffalo Center.”
I wished that the eighty-five-minute Storm Lake was slightly longer. The documentary glosses over Art Cullen’s winning of the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017, except to note a curious reaction to his singular achievement: It only made MAGA-types more skeptical of the Storm Lake Times as a “fake news” bastion.
There is another curious omission: The chronicle fails to note the Cullens’ other journalistic enterprise—the above-mentioned The Progressive Populist—a bimonthly national print tabloid that reprints articles and columns by noteworthy liberal-to-leftist journalists and activists, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, Marxist economist Richard Wolff, cartoonist Ted Rall, and The Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel.
In The Progressive Populist’s masthead, James Cullen is listed as editor, John Cullen as publisher, and Art Cullen as managing editor. It also regularly publishes Art’s columns, and in the interest of full disclosure, it reprints my film reviews, too.
Having said that, it’s baffling that The Progressive Populist, which has existed since 1995, doesn’t merit a mention in Storm Lake. Nor does the fact that the titular town happens to be the birthplace of Iowa’s reactionary Republican ex-Congressman Steve King, known for his racist remarks.
These quibbles aside, Storm Lake provides a penetrating, insider look at the struggle of a family-owned-and-operated newspaper trying to remain relevant, survive, and thrive in the age of journalism-by-the-algorithms, Trumpism, and COVID-19.
The world premiere of Storm Lake is June 2-6 at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina. For upcoming screenings see: https://stormlakemovie.com/screenings/.