The Newspaper Noir series at SIFF Cinema starts tomorrow: 14 films about murder and intrigue and natty suits set in the old clicketty-clacketty newsroom. 
In this week’s film lead, Eli Sanders discusses what this good-old-days-of-journalism nostalgia means in the context of the modern newspaper’s death rattle:
Each news cycle, it now seems, brings even more stories about this sad decline of the modern newspaper—and, with them, a ritual gnashing of teeth over the implications of the trend. A way of life is ending. A culture of hard-bitten truth tellers is being replaced by bloggers and other new-media entrepreneurs, who succeed precisely because they don’t play by the old “objective journalism” rules. Democracy may be suffering as a result.
Maybe.
There are other viewpoints, naturally, and this month SIFF Cinema offers a number of opportunities to forget about the angst and loudly cheer the demise of the modern newspaper—or, at least, lament the demise a little less—with Noir City, a series of dark films about newspaper life, most of them from the 1940s and ’50s.
Read the whole thing here. It is great. And the movies are a lot of fun.
