A newsroom built against the odds
Errin Haines, editor-at-large at The 19th, in a scene from Breaking the News. Photo: Heather Courtney
A BOLD EXPERIMENT IN JOURNALISM, SIX YEARS LATER
This past weekend marked the sixth anniversary of The 19th, the award-winning news start-up founded by women to cover gender, politics, policy, and power.
It may not be a traditional milestone anniversary. But in a punishing media landscape of shrinking newsrooms, shuttered outlets, and mounting pressure on independent journalism, six years is no small achievement.
Our new release Breaking the News tells the unlikely and riveting story of The 19th’s launch.
Set against the pandemic, the 2020 election, and a nationwide reckoning over race, the film follows the outlet’s founders and the diverse group of women and LGBTQ+ journalists who join them as they build a newsroom committed to covering stories too often overlooked in corporate media.
Breaking the News is now available for educational use in multiple formats through MEF.
The film captures the risks, tensions, setbacks, and possibilities of building a different kind of political journalism from the ground up. It also gives students an unusually intimate look at the choices that determine which stories become news, whose experiences are treated as politically significant, and what it takes to challenge the conventions of an established industry.
Breaking the News invites students to ask:
- Who decides what counts as news?
- How do race, gender, and newsroom hierarchies shape whose voices are heard and whose stories are taken seriously?
- Can journalism become more representative without reproducing the exclusions of the institutions it seeks to change?
- And what does truly independent political reporting require in an era of commercial pressure and concentrated media power?
PRAISE FOR BREAKING THE NEWS
“Breaking the News is a must-see documentary for anyone who works in journalism or is studying to get into the field. The 19th*’s unique rise to independent newsroom fame is one for the history books, and the experiences of the editors and journalists contained within will be endlessly valuable to people who want to make changes in the field.”
—Video Librarian
“Breaking the News is an immersive, crowd-pleasing, candid portrait of a start-up [news agency] experiencing growing pains, roadblocks, and ultimately success in changing the paradigm and business model for news. … One of those rare films that, like Citizenfour, might be seen as a major landmark in cinéma vérité documentaries about journalism.”
—John Fink, The Film Stage
“A scrappy group of women and LGBTQ+ journalists buck the white male-dominated status quo, banding together to launch The 19th*, a digital news startup aiming to combat misinformation. A story of an America in flux, and the voices often left out of the narrative, the documentary Breaking the News shows change doesn’t come easy.”
—PBS, Independent Lens
“This high-stakes documentary … looks poised to join the pantheon of great newsroom docs.”
—International Documentary Association
