There's an old joke which says that the second title to roll off Gutenberg's printing press after the bible was a book on the death of the publishing industry. Whatever the media, predictions have been made about its demise nearly ever since its inception. This drumbeat of doom has been particularly thunderous during the past couple years when it comes to print newspapers, with their ad revenue ravaged by digital competitors and a readership depleted by Twitterized 21st-century information overload. Not long after an infamous January 2009 feature ran in the Atlantic asking whether the New York Times could be out of business by that May, director Andrew Ross embedded himself at the Old Gray Lady herself to watch the storm play out.
Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times is a blithe and breezy look inside a normally fraught subject, a surprising approach given the paper's hallowed place in the media realm and its famously tight control over its own image. The narrative's loose-limbed nature makes something of a mockery of the subtitle, with Rossi showing little interest in imposing a chronological tick-tock structure, instead letting his film ramble over a rag-and-bone-shop's worth of State of the Media memes. To that end, he brings in prognosticators of print's demise like the ebulliently downbeat Jeff Jarvis. Rossi also includes debates between webby news aggregators such as Michael Wolff (Newser) and Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post) with reporters from the legacy publications which those free websites commonly filch material from.
The further Rossi gets away from this kind of endlessly rehashed debate and the further into the stories that break while he's there (Wikileaks, in particular, which unspools while he's there) the better his film gets. He tags along with the guys on the Times media desk, like the section editor Bruce Headlam, a gruff and genially sarcastic presence, and up-and-coming tech kid and Twitter evangelist Brian Stelter. By watching them work, Rossi gets an eagle-eye view of how a media behemoth like the Times must be able to slough off all the reports of its supposedly imminent demise and stay ahead of the story.
The star of the show, though, is the grizzled and hunched David Carr, who came to the paper late after running up an impressive rap sheet as Minneapolis reporter and self-proclaimed "drug-snorting thug" and now professes an "immigrant's love" for his new home. With his rattled, dusty whisper of a voice and a survivor's impatience with lies and hubris, Carr cuts through the film like the banged-up but tenacious spirit of journalism itself. Whether watching him work the phones on a juicy story about the ugly corporate culture at their rival the Tribune Company or cutting off the poseurs at Vice magazine at the knees, Rossi's film is at its most vibrant when reflected in the bright torch of Carr's profane company.
Page One manages to convey a healthy cynicism about the snake-oil promises of bilious new media avatars while (for the most part) refusing to romanticize the threatened world of the ink-stained wretches. Like most embeds, Rossi definitely goes native, though not so definitively as say films like The September Issue or the more egregiously cheerleading Control Room (which Rossi was associate producer on). There are some touches of critique, as in Carr's take on the Times' "organizational hubris" that led to their getting blindsided by the new media revolution, or a brief glance at scandals like Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. This is an admiring but not sycophantic portrait of top-level journalists making the case for the value of original news reporting by simply trying to be the best at it - and frequently succeeding.
Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times is a blithe and breezy look inside a normally fraught subject, a surprising approach given the paper's hallowed place in the media realm and its famously tight control over its own image. The narrative's loose-limbed nature makes something of a mockery of the subtitle, with Rossi showing little interest in imposing a chronological tick-tock structure, instead letting his film ramble over a rag-and-bone-shop's worth of State of the Media memes. To that end, he brings in prognosticators of print's demise like the ebulliently downbeat Jeff Jarvis. Rossi also includes debates between webby news aggregators such as Michael Wolff (Newser) and Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post) with reporters from the legacy publications which those free websites commonly filch material from.
The further Rossi gets away from this kind of endlessly rehashed debate and the further into the stories that break while he's there (Wikileaks, in particular, which unspools while he's there) the better his film gets. He tags along with the guys on the Times media desk, like the section editor Bruce Headlam, a gruff and genially sarcastic presence, and up-and-coming tech kid and Twitter evangelist Brian Stelter. By watching them work, Rossi gets an eagle-eye view of how a media behemoth like the Times must be able to slough off all the reports of its supposedly imminent demise and stay ahead of the story.
The star of the show, though, is the grizzled and hunched David Carr, who came to the paper late after running up an impressive rap sheet as Minneapolis reporter and self-proclaimed "drug-snorting thug" and now professes an "immigrant's love" for his new home. With his rattled, dusty whisper of a voice and a survivor's impatience with lies and hubris, Carr cuts through the film like the banged-up but tenacious spirit of journalism itself. Whether watching him work the phones on a juicy story about the ugly corporate culture at their rival the Tribune Company or cutting off the poseurs at Vice magazine at the knees, Rossi's film is at its most vibrant when reflected in the bright torch of Carr's profane company.
Page One manages to convey a healthy cynicism about the snake-oil promises of bilious new media avatars while (for the most part) refusing to romanticize the threatened world of the ink-stained wretches. Like most embeds, Rossi definitely goes native, though not so definitively as say films like The September Issue or the more egregiously cheerleading Control Room (which Rossi was associate producer on). There are some touches of critique, as in Carr's take on the Times' "organizational hubris" that led to their getting blindsided by the new media revolution, or a brief glance at scandals like Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. This is an admiring but not sycophantic portrait of top-level journalists making the case for the value of original news reporting by simply trying to be the best at it - and frequently succeeding.
