Breaking barriers in the news media

In the wobbly world of media, this might have seemed like a long shot.
“The 19th” – a journalism source with a female perspective—was launching in the midst of the pandemic. “Are you insane?” one amiable investor asked with a laugh.
That’s shown in the early moments of “Breaking the News” (shown here), a documentary that airs at 10 p.m. Monday (Feb. 19) on PBS’ “Independent Lens.” As it turns out, the idea proved to be quite sane. In its first two years, The 19th – named after the amendment that gave women the vote — raised a reported $12 million and broke national stories.
The film’s directors said they weren’t surprised by the success. Two of them were based in Austin, Texas, home of 19th co-founders Emily Ramshaw and Amanda Zamora.
“I knew about Emily Ramshaw when she was at the Texas Tribune,” Chelsea Hernandez said. “When I saw the tweet that she was leaving (as the Tribune’s editor) to start this, I thought it could be amazing for my first feature film.”
Heather Courtney had already made an award-winning documentary, a decade earlier and a world away. “Where Soldiers Come From” followed young men in her frozen home town of Hancock (in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula), before they went to war in Afghanistan. Now she lived in Austin and liked the prospects of The 19th.
“I knew Emily had tenacity,” she said. “Leaving the Texas Tribune was a big decision, which she would not have done without thinking it through.”
They linked with Princess Hairston, then a busy editor in New York, to co-direct the film. “There were so many unexpected things along the way,” Courtney said.
The 19th officially started early in 2020, just as the pandemic began. Its people were mostly confined to their homes; so were the filmmakers.
They hired Ramshaw’s husband, a professional cameraman, to film her. They sent a camera to reporter Errin Haines (shown here) in Philadelphia, so she could film herself. They recorded the Zoom meetings and gradually made field triips.
There were plenty of reasons for The 19th to fail. On the day of this Zoom interview with the filmmakers, The Messenger, a giant news organization, folded after less than nine months.
(Full disclosure by this reporter: My daughter works for The 19th. However, she joined the paper later, after the documentary was filmed, and does tech work from Michigan.)
Why would one news organization succeed while others failed? “The 19th was started with a community in mind,” Hairston said. “It was a non-profit.”
It could focus on journalism, Hernandez said. “It was not reporting for the clicks.”
Other possible advantages included
— A gradual start. The Messenger, by comparison, reportedly had offices in three cities, starting with 150 reporters, getting to 300 and expecting to almost double that. The 19th began with one reporter (Haines), adding others slowly. It began by linking with the Washington Post, before launching its own website six months later
— Some pluses from the pandemic. It was an equalizer; every organization, new and old, simply had people scrambling from home. It gave readers time to focus on the news. And it provided stories: The website opened on Aug. 2, 2020, with Chabeli Carrazana, an Orlando-based economy writer, viewing “the first female recession.”
— And one more factor: “Emily is a machine as far as fundraising goes,” Courtney said. That can be crucial for a start-up, for filmmakers or for any PBS show.