Florida Debut of 'Stripped for Parts' Highlights Urgency to Support Local News

In a note to readers, Voice Editor Beth Kassab writes about the value of access to local news in our communities

Sept. 18, 2025

Dear Reader,

Thank you for being part of our Winter Park Voice community! If you are here, then you probably share my interest in local news and believe in its value when it comes to understanding the place where you live and work. Our mission at the Winter Park Voice is to deliver stories that you can’t find anywhere else about your city — like why electric rates are going up or down, who is influencing the county redistricting maps, how the police are doing their jobs or who’s running for local office and who is funding their campaigns (just to name a few recent stories).

We believe in the power of local news to help residents be more engaged in their communities. That’s why I want to share with you an event set to take place Sunday at the Enzian Theater, which will host the Florida debut of “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink.”

The film tells the story of “a secretive hedge fund that is plundering what is left of America’s newspapers, and the journalists who are fighting back.”

Alden Capital purchased Tribune Publishing, which included the Orlando Sentinel, in 2021.

Since then, the Sentinel newsroom has continued its disappearing act that started long before this acquisition. That means fewer journalists to cover the stories that are most important to all of us. The Sentinel Guild is sponsoring Sunday’s screening.

“For us, this is a story we know all too well,” Cristóbal Reyes, a Sentinel reporter and the guild’s unit chairman, told me. “We’ve been on the front lines of this since we formed our union.”

Reyes said the numbers tell a startling story. When a group of reporters and photographers formed the guild in 2020, they had 54 members. Today there are just 26 left.

As one of the people who had the privilege of working at the Sentinel for 20 years, I can tell you there was no place more exhilarating than a newsroom humming on all cylinders. That old windowless second story expanse over Orange Avenue didn’t have a lick of natural sunshine. But its people with their grimey keyboards and notebooks and rolodexes channeled their energy into a bright light across Central Florida everyday in the form of a broadsheet and digital product.

To be clear, my motivation at the Voice in 2025 isn’t nostalgia for the past — though I have plenty. The industry has changed. Hard stop. And we must move forward and find the best and most effective ways to serve our readers today.

Because what hasn’t changed is the need for access to news about your city, your neighborhood, your school and your workplace. You can take your pick of sources when it comes to scrolling headlines about national politics or the national economy.

But who is going to City Hall to listen to a debate about how much of your tax dollars go to police and how much go to preventing the next post-hurricane flood? Who is going to ask questions about the latest historic building scheduled for demolition? How will you know who is making those decisions and who paid for the campaigns that got them into office?

The Winter Park Voice is one of hundreds of small nonprofit news sites that have sprouted up across the county aiming to do that work and fill the gaps left by our shrinking regional newspapers. The Voice is part of a national network of those sites through the Institute for Nonprofit News.

And the Voice is proud to be part of the News Collaborative of Central Florida, which includes the Sentinel, Central Florida Public Media, Oviedo Community News, WKMG, VoxPopuli and more.  This group, born just last year, is finding ways to partner where it makes sense to deliver more stories that otherwise might not be told.

I want to be clear about something else: The people who remain at the Sentinel and these other organizations are still doing amazing work despite the odds. I see it on their pages every single day. There just aren’t enough of them.

The Voice is trying to be part of the solution. We are working to meet the problem of a dwindling news landscape with the urgency and doggedness it demands and deserves. We provide our content for free without a paywall and subsist solely on community donations.

So if you care about stories about your community that are vetted for facts, context and history then take a moment to learn about this film or support one of the local nonprofit news organizations. We need you. 

All my best,

Beth Kassab

Editor, Winter Park Voice

P.S. For more information about tickets to the film click here. The Orlando Sentinel’s Scott Maxwell will moderate a Q&A following the screening with the filmmaker and Judith Smelser, president and general manager of Central Florida Public Media. Proceeds from the event will benefit Central Florida Public Media.

WinterParkVoiceEditor@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

Hedge fund Alden Global Capital is quietly gobbling up newspapers across the country and gutting them, but no one knows why– until journalist Julie Reynolds begins to investigate. Her findings trigger rebellions across the country by journalists working at Alden-owned newspapers. Backed by the NewsGuild union, the newsmen and women go toe-to-toe with their “vulture capitalist” owners in a battle to save and rebuild local journalism in America. Who will control the future of America’s news ecosystem: Wall Street billionaires concerned only with profit, or those who see journalism as an essential public service, the lifeblood of our democracy?