When the Vindicator, the only daily newspaper in the city of Youngstown, Ohio, announced it was closing down after serving the city and the surrounding Mahoning Valley for 150 years, the community was shocked. But they weren’t alone. Over the past 15 years, over one in five newspapers have closed in the United States, according to a study by the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism.
But this particular closing hit me hard. I was born and raised 20 miles north of Youngstown. My dad was a steelworker in nearby Warren, Ohio, and I went to college at Youngstown State University. Soon after I heard the news of the closing of the Vindy — as it’s affectionately known by locals — I started to pursue the possibility of documenting the impact of the loss. What I discovered was a community that first mourned and then rallied to try to fill the void left by the loss of the daily paper. This film chronicles those efforts. From a nearby paper in Warren (the Tribune Chronicle that I used to deliver as a kid) expanding their coverage and taking on the Vindicator masthead, to a digital startup called Mahoning Matters, staffed with former Vindy reporters and editors, to the national non-profit ProPublica funding a reporter to devote his time to investigative work, there was tremendous energy in the months after the final edition of the Vindicator landed on doorsteps. I followed those efforts for more than a year, going to Youngstown from Chicago as often and as much as the travel distance and a pandemic would allow. The result is Newstown, a 52-minute film on a community keeping news alive after a tremendous loss.
The documentary was funded in large part with contributions to the Medill Local News Initiative, a Northwestern project to promote financial sustainability in local news at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, where I am a professor. The largest individual supporters of the project are Medill graduate Mitch Tobin (BSJ79) and his wife, Susan Jacobson. Additional funding was provided via the Knight Chair in Digital Media and Strategy at Medill.
Some additional news about the film:
Mahoning Matters: ‘Newstown’ documentary chronicles loss of Vindicator, rise of local media
Northwestern/Medill Local News Initiative: What Happens When a Newspaper Dies? Medill Professor’s Film Looks at Impact in Youngstown
Local Heroes and National Solutions Discussed at Medill’s Youngstown Film Event