Storm Lake A chronicle of change, resilience, and hope from a heartland newspaper

Review by New York Times Review

last year, Art Cullen, the editor of The Storm Lake Times, a twice-weekly newspaper in rural Iowa with a circulation of 3,000, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Cullen, who has a mop of white hair and a horseshoe mustache, had written a series of blistering editorials about the role agricultural corporations played in defending the pollution of local waterways. Cullen so angered some state legislators that a resolution simply congratulating Cullen and his colleagues couldn't garner enough votes. The Republican state senator Mark Segebart told The Des Moines Register that Cullen "is not one of our favorite newspapermen." It's not easy being a journalist these days, but it's especially not easy if you're working at a local newspaper. According to the Pew Research Center, daily newspaper circulation declined 11 percent from 2016 to 2017; the number of reporters and editors has plummeted by 45 percent since 2004. Amid these dark clouds, Storm Lake's winning the Pulitzer feels reassuring, a reminder that even the smallest newspapers - Storm Lake is a family affair, involving Cullen's brother (the publisher), his wife (a photographer) and his son (a reporter) - can hold the most powerful among us accountable. Cullen is a crusader in the spirit of Elijah Lovejoy, a 19th-century small-town newspaper publisher whose editorials took on the institution of slavery. As Cullen writes in his new book, "Storm Lake," when he and his brother John began to publish their newspaper, they had one thing in mind: "Print the truth and raise hell." In the wake of being awarded journalism's highest honor, Cullen received phone calls from New York publishers asking if he'd be interested in writing a book. He eventually agreed. The book begins as a history of Cullen's and his brother's journalistic journey, including their purchase of The Storm Lake Times in 1990, and the story behind their Pulitzer-winning editorials. Because of changes in farming, nitrates were being dumped into local waterways at an alarming rate, the pollution ending up downstream, in places like Des Moines. When the Des Moines Water Works sued three counties, including the one that is home to Cullen's paper, the local governments quickly amassed a large war chest for their legal defense. Through dogged reporting, The Storm Lake Times learned that much of the money came from corporate agricultural interests along with state farmer associations; as a result of the editorials, the counties stopped taking the money. This book, though, feels rushed. Too much of "Storm Lake" consists of broadsides, suppositional reporting and thinly drawn character sketches. Cullen has an unfortunate tendency toward armchair editorializing rather than grounded reporting. At one point, he asks, "If you're a white male living in Storm Lake, what gives with the angry routine?" Afew pages later, he walks into a bar and grill in nearby Rockwell City. "I rolled through the door and got the hairy eyeball from a guy my age in a crew cut and T-shirt," he writes. He then goes on to imagine what this gentleman must be thinking: "He thinks people have been looking down at him since junior high school." Cullen imagines that the man worries his taxes will go up because of the influx of immigrants; that black men could be going to college tuition-free but riot in the streets instead; and that his future is slipping away. "I could attempt to understand him," Cullen muses. "Or I could just eat my cheeseburger." He chooses the cheeseburger. I wanted to shout: You're a journalist! Talk to him! I share Cullen's disdain for the odious Steve King, the Iowa congressman whose history of promoting white nationalist views recently drew a rebuke from the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and who happens to hail from Storm Lake, which has a population of 10,000. Yet when Cullen encounters King at a political gathering, he misses the chance to ask hard questions, writing, "I approached King after he locked up the convention and asked for a happy quote." I've been a journalist for 40 years and have never heard of a reporter making such a request. I'm not even sure what a "happy quote" is. While Cullen's writing is impassioned, a plea for the rest of us not to dismiss places like Storm Lake, the prose too often feels careless and imprecise. At one point he writes of the children born to immigrants in town: "They are babies born to people who weren't babies born here themselves." Such foggy prose doesn't serve Cullen well. I don't mean to sound cranky, but this book feels like a missed opportunity. Cullen and his brother are heroic figures, especially at a time when local journalism stands on such wobbly legs. Moreover, they live in a place that speaks to the dramatic changes in this country: Immigrants have settled in Storm Lake to take low-paying jobs at the local meatpacking plants (Cullen vigorously defends their right to be there), and white men and women who are rabid Trump supporters seem to vote against their own interests. The mayor of a nearby town refuses to speak to the paper because, he claims, it publishes "fake news." I wanted to cherish this book, to feel I could pass it on to young aspiring reporters, to get them to consider working at papers like The Storm Lake Times. Toward the very end, Cullen reprints a letter he wrote to his son Tom when Tom returns home after college to work at the newspaper. It's a beautiful missive, inspirational and honest and pointed. Is it worth the price of admission? I'm not sure. But it's something I will give to my students as they consider entering this honorable, yet beleaguered, profession. Here's a taste of Art Cullen at his best: "Dear Tom, "We are delighted that you have agreed to work at Buena Vista County's Hometown Newspaper.... "The newspaper always comes first. If you are on your honeymoon ... of course you tell your bride to wait a moment while you take photos of a fire. The marriage will be there in a half-hour; the fire will not be.... "A pretty good rule is that an Iowa town will be about as strong as its newspaper and its banks. The best journalism is that which builds communities. You build your community by publicizing good deeds done, by reporting on the cheats and scoundrels and other politicians, by urging yourself and those around you to do better, by allowing dissenting voices to be heard. "Above all, rejoice that you write for a living. ... You can change the world through journalism.... "Love (you had better check it out), "Dad "PS: Is that story done yet?" ALEX KOTLOWITZ teaches at Northwestern University's Medili School of Journalism and is the author of four books, including the forthcoming "An American Summer."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Cullen, editor of Storm Lake, Iowa's small hometown newspaper, the Storm Lake Times, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for a series of editorials about farming practices and water quality in northwest Iowa. Here, Cullen chronicles his early life in Storm Lake, his journalistic forays at various Midwestern newspapers, and his ultimate return home when his older brother, John, needed help managing his fledgling paper. An engaging storyteller, Cullen recounts the deeds (and misdeeds) of youth, but his writer's passion shines when he discusses the events that led him to write the prize-winning editorials. He cares deeply about his community and the changes it has undergone. Storm Lake, like many other small Midwestern towns, has seen manufacturing jobs dry up and farming morph into a corporate concern, but more uniquely, it has welcomed immigrants in search of a better life, and it is thriving. The moral, economic, and social history of a small town in Iowa might not seem like much of a story, but in Cullen's hands, it is. He and his family have sunk their roots deeply, engaged with the issues of their place, and cared enough to call out injustice.--Joan Curbow Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Pulitzer Prize-winning editor Cullen reflects on his 28 years chronicling small-town Iowa for the Storm Lake Times (which he co-owns) in this memoir that gracefully illuminates the challenges facing the American heartland. Composed of political history, tales of civic controversies, and human interest stories, the subject matter is elevated by Cullen's passion into parables relevant to all Americans. The changing demographics of Storm Lake and agricultural decline serve as primary points of tension ("The wrench of efficiency turns and squeezes and turns. Every year farms grow larger and people fewer"). Cullen shows compassion for newly arrived immigrants ("Back when Latinos were starting to arrive, a bunch of good-hearted people in town set up a community get-to-know-you potluck") and longtime residents that transcends partisanship, although he demonstrates a clear disdain for Republican congressman Steve King, "who had an uncanny way of getting his zany views of history and European (read that white) culture on national television." At times Cullen dives too deeply into the minutiae of Storm Lake's history, but he nevertheless remains informative. Journalism buffs will understand the struggles he faces of keeping a small publication in print with a circulation of just 3,000 and will marvel at his resourcefulness. Cullen's portrayal of the daily livelihood of Midwesterners gives a window into small-town America. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times, won a 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing that challenged corporatized agriculture. Essentially a collection of linked essays documenting the essence of contemporary America through the lens of Storm Lake, a town of 10,000 in northwestern Iowa, Cullen's first book is part reminiscence, part polemic, and all memorable-if a bit confusing. In a conversational style, and with deep knowledge and a spirit of inclusivity, he introduces longtime neighbors and family members, farmers, politicians, residents of nearby towns, and Latino, Lao, and Hmong immigrants who have endured much to make a precarious home in Storm Lake. He includes these many individuals to share their responses to changing land conditions or demographics or simply to situate them within the intimate story of their place. VERDICT While hard to categorize, this wide-ranging, timely volume is, fittingly, exceptionally strong in its analysis of agricultural practice, the profound hazards of corn monoculture, and the economic and political pressures facing today's farmers. Deserving of a wide audience, it will contribute to dialogs on land use, foodways, rural life, and immigration.-Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A feisty newspaper editor speaks from the heart and the heartland.In 2017, Cullen, editor and half-owner (with his brother, the founder) of the twice-weekly newspaper the Storm Lake Times, won a Pulitzer Prize for, as the judges wrote, "editorials fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa." Those qualities are on ample display in the author's first book, a hard-hitting, urgent, and eloquent portrait of his home town, "a dot of political blue" in a state that has emerged as a forecaster of national politics. Part memoir and family history, Cullen's sharp political critique chronicles the dramatic changes and challenges faced by Storm Lake in the last four decades. Aiming to "print the truth and raise hell," he has taken on issues such as pollution, climate change, gun rights, immigration, political corruption, and the inexorable advent of industrial agriculture, dominated by Monsanto and Koch Fertilizer, which has promoted "a way of doing business more sacred than the life of the community." Abetted by politicians, corporate agriculture "got a green light to charge full speed ahead" until his newspaper's reporting "revealed who pulls the marionette strings" in Iowa. An informed electorate, writes the author, must be willing to take on stewardship of the Earth: "It doesn't cost billions more to let rivers run clean. It takes a conscience." Besides exposing the fouling of lake and soil, his paper helped Storm Lake's largely white community understandand welcomean influx of aspiring newcomers from around the world. Cullen excoriates the "brand of radical politics steeped in resentment" fomented by Donald Trump and Iowa's Republican congressman Steve King, "the voice of the hardscrabble western part of the state that forever thinks it has been forgotten and neglected and flown over." Trump's victory in 2016, Cullen asserts, does not predict the outcome for 2018 or 2020. Iowans, he alerts Democrats, are "yearning for a revival message" rather than "the message that tears down."An impassioned, significant book from a newsman who made a difference. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1 The First Question: Why? A good reporter's first task is to ask questions. It's a family habit of ours, learned early on. My first memory is of waving good-bye to Dad on our sun-drenched lawn one Sunday morning a hundred yards north of the sparkling lake. I was two. Dad piled into a car bound for Madison, Wisconsin, where he would be a guinea pig for a potential cure for tuberculosis. The year was 1959. Why did he leave me there? Where was he going? Would he come back? A childhood friend of his from Whittemore, Iowa, Lloyd Roth, head of the department of pharmacology at the University of Chicago, was working on this project at the Veterans Administration hospital. Roth was also a physicist and had worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Dad had picked up TB during World War II while stationed in Sicily with the Army Air Corps. He was a captain in charge of a supply depot at an air base; it's a wonder the planes could fly because he didn't know a screw from a screwdriver. The disease didn't fully manifest itself until after the war. When it did, more than a decade later, our family was in quarantine in Storm Lake, Iowa, a meatpacking town of about seven thousand with a small college and, yes, a lake. There we were, Mom alone with six kids, I the youngest. Brother Bill let loose hamsters in the basement that spread throughout the house. Brother Jim and I painted the basement red--including the clothes and bedding drying in the furnace room. Brother Tom, the eldest, tore the screen doors off the Corral Drive-In theater with a beery buddy. Brother John wanted to run away. Sister Ann was taking care of me, after a fashion. Mom called Dad in the hospital hoping for sympathy. He laughed. They took out a lung and he wasn't supposed to last more than a few months. He made it fourteen years, just long enough for me not to understand him. Meantime, Mom had been battling the VA ever since the war ended, trying to get him promised benefits. The records building in St. Louis burned down and with it the evidence that Dad contracted TB while in service. She had been through an endless siege for information before. Her first husband and father of my oldest brother, Tom, Omer Kelly, was shot to death in a Chicago bar when Tom was about two. Mom spent years trying to find out how he died. Her father, Art Murray, traveled from Bancroft, Iowa, to Chicago with his lawyer, Luke Linnan, to find justice. Linnan had an old friend who was a judge there. The judge told them to go home, and to quit asking questions. She never quit asking. Our mother reared us to do the same. Sometimes your questions get answered. Which means, of course, that often they don't. I have been a reporter and editor for Iowa newspapers for thirty-eight years, and I've spent a lot of that time asking questions about little towns and about quiet people who also ask the same questions amid a patchwork of corn and soybean rows. I didn't mean to wind up in Storm Lake at all. I was driving to the big city and bright lights but took a U-turn to come back home where brother John had just started a weekly newspaper, The Storm Lake Times . I did not want to go back. But the journey led me to the story of a lifetime, to a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for taking on corporate agriculture over river pollution, and down a road to a place where I finally realized that I belonged. Worlds are built and worlds are buried amid the tall grass here in Iowa. You plunge your finger in the soft black soil and expose a seed, a kernel of knowing where you are, a story, an idea, a myth of who you are, and it grows out here against all the odds. It persists against the hail that comes sideways. It preserves itself frozen in a January gale out of the northwest that makes you wonder how you ever survived. It gets flooded and scorched and comes back. No matter what you do for the next ten years, it comes back. It demands you pay heed to it, heel to it, nurture it, and hope for it. It's the land, the story, an impulse to take a rough first draft of history, a drive to divine some truth in a place that lays it bare, by asking and listening. To love a place and be its chronicler, to commit yourself to it, to prick its conscience and make it aware that we have bucked up against its limits, and to leave your mark for posterity. The seed becomes a song, its verses written in this expansive green garden, and you are left to discern them and write one anew. To be a friend to the place and not to spoil it. These are the questions I start with. Who came first, and where did they go? What is our place? When will I live up to him? How do we live against that horizon? Why am I drawn or pushed here? Where are we going? Into the pink sunset, down Buena Vista County blacktop C-49, as the combines spew dust and corn stover, you can almost see the lights eleven miles west as dusk enshrouds Varina, home to St. Columbkille Catholic Church and a grain elevator outpost with a smattering of weathered frame houses. Home beckons. Storm Lake, Iowa. Excerpted from Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope on the Horizon in America's Heartland by Art Cullen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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