Samuel Fuller's Park Row (1952).

Just as violence is at the core of Fuller's world, so his style centers on the violent working-together of disparate elements, the long take with the moving camera.  The essence of Fuller's style lies in creating dramatic confrontations by disrupting the spatial unity of a scene; the sacrifice of external naturalism to internal significance.
--Phil Hardy, Samuel Fuller (Praeger, 1970).

At the beginning of Park Row there is a list of the 1772 daily newspapers in the United States. "one of these newspapers is yours."  Many of these newspapers no longer exist, others are now owned by faceless corporations; the world of journalism has changed.  Fuller's film reminds one of what journalism was like when it had barely begun.  Park Row takes place in the 1880s:  Mergenthaler's invention of a line-typesetting machine, the first newsstands, wholesale distribution, circulation wars, multiple editions a day.  This is all shown against the backdrop of Joseph Pulitzer's subscription drive to pay for a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty and Steve Brodie's leap from the Brooklyn Bridge.

Samuel Fuller started in journalism as a copyboy at 14.  When I was that age I was reading several New York newspapers a day, a way to learn about the world in my small upstate town with no bookstores or library and no books in the home.  I read the Daily News, Mirror, Herald-Tribune and Times in the morning and Post and Journal-American in the afternoon.  I had a paper route delivering the Hudson Register-Star and, later, the Albany Times-Union.  Fuller became a crime reporter, wrote pulp novels in the thirties, served in WWII and made his first film in 1949.

Park Row is a highly personal film made on a shoestring, recreating a world now even further in the past but one from which we can still learn about the importance of freedom of the press.  The names of Zenger, Pulitzer and Horace Greeley are often mentioned and editor and publisher Phineas Mitchell (played by Gene Evans) keeps their pictures in the composing room; there is a statue of Benjamin Franklin on Park Row.  Mitchell's big rival is Charity Hackett (played by Mary Welch, in her only film role), who is treated as an important newspaper publisher with little reference to her sex, whose newspaper eventually merges with Mitchell's.  Park Row, like other Fuller films, is made with a passion for the importance of history.