Chillicothe — A concise, emotive, well-crafted ten-minute video was released on August 8th about the struggle with the closing of Chillicothe’s Pixelle paper mill, two days before its official closing date.
“Paper Promises – A Film For Chillicothe, Ohio” was directed by Grayson Kisker & Grant O’Brien and “paid for by The Accountability Project 2025.” It was produced recently enough to have some footage from nine days before.
It had almost 12,300 views when I published this – 1,300 more than when I started writing this a couple house earlier.
From the YouTube page: “For over 200 years the Mead paper mill was the backbone of Chillicothe, Ohio — a source of good jobs, generational pride, and a town’s identity. In August 2025, that legacy is torn apart as the mill’s closure leaves more than 800 workers without jobs and a community reeling…”
I’m not familiar with The Accountability Project, but it says that it “gives researchers and journalists a powerful, but simple tool to search across data that would otherwise be siloed. Our collection includes more than 1.9 billion public records…Journalists regularly use TAP for research and our data has supported investigations across the country.”
The video opens with a mill employee facing the end of his career. Then it then adds voices of union leaders, neighboring business owners and employees, other mill workers, and an economic expert.
At 4:20 is the manic timeline on corporate handovers since Mead’s departure in 2002, from Chamber leader Mike Throne.
Then, recounted at 5:00, is advice that post-Mead ownership should have put $30M into the facility annually. Instead, they invested one-tenth of that.
Of course this article is more than a review, since I am as involved as I can in reporting news about the Pixelle paper mill – find my stories on the Scioto Post and iHeart radio station websites.
My biggest critique is that the video is a little too mournful. From what I see as a reporter, Chillicothe may be sad and worried about the loss of this historic major employer – and hundreds if not thousands of employees and secondary workers and businesspeople will be being hurt by it – but we have a great team that jumped into the breach, we have an economic diversity that will cushion us, the overall economy is healthy and Columbus jobs are growing powerfully…and what news we have about the corporate actions regarding the mill hints at a buyer soon.
But the apparent blood-thirst for profit, and bloodless apathy about who they hurt, was briefly pointed out at 7:30 regarding the billionaire leader of Pixelle owner H.I.G. Capital.
Still, this is a message the needs to be shared.
