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Page One: Inside the New York Times
| Released |
23 September 2011 |
| Director |
Andrew Rossi |
Starring
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Carl Bernstein, David Carr, Bruce Headlam, Bill Keller, Brian Stelter, Jimmy Wales |
| Writer(s) |
Kate Novack, Andrew Rossi |
| Producer(s) |
Alan Oxman, Adam Schlesinger |
| Origin |
United States |
| Running Time |
88 minutes |
| Genre |
Documentary |
| Rating |
TBC |
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Read all about it.
Good documentary is often very like good journalism, it sifts through a complex subject, interrogates its premise, has impeccable sources, reports facts and makes it all compelling for an audience. Taking a year long look inside The New York Times Andrew Rossi's new documentary does exactly that, following denizens of The Gray Lady's media desk it centres itself around those topics which assail every modern day newspaper, namely, how exactly with the onslaught of accessible online information can it stay relevant? How do sanctioned journo scribblings compare to the myriad bloggers, online citizen journalists, tweeters, facebookers and video diarists that people have access to today? And are the supposedly precarious fates of newspapers worldwide really just doom and gloom prophesying?
Well, distilling information to an audience has always been difficult, its format and provider important (as we all know there's news and then there's reliable news) and information as well as editorials come with an extra dollop of gravitas when they hail from the pages of a paper as prestigious as The New York Times. As irascible ex-crack addict New York Times media desk writer wryly misquotes Marshall McLuhan “the medium isn't the message, the messages are the medium.” But paired down to its most vital resources and often adorned raw footage, information has long since been the currency of the Internet Age and people value its immediacy often far above the prepared offerings broadsheets provide. Furthermore, even newspapers like The New York Times have been hit with their fair share of ethical quandaries in the past few years. Judith Miller's pro Bush biased and often incorrect coverage of the Iraqi war and Jayson Blair's resignation following the revelation of everything from repeated plagiarism to total fabrication in his column, to name but two.
And yet in between the obvious brimming intelligence, quipping, quoting and jostling for that ever important soundbite, you'll catch a glint of actual fear in the eyes of The Times reporters. You might not think it possible but given the list of recent demises, including the thunderous crash of The News of the World amidst ethical scandals of its own earlier this year, it's actually teetering on the brink of possibility. But The New York Times fights its corner with David Carr as its greatest proponent (his wry wit and bulldog attitude often saving the documentary from being a powerpoint presentation of the many failures and struggles of the eminent daily paper). And while it keeps up the tempo eschewing the dry process of exposition via talking head interview Page One never really lands a big story, we get to see the many human hearts that beat inside the monolith institution, are provided with some interesting talking points but never handed a big revelation.
As scoops go, Page One hasn't done awfully, I suppose, but for an audience already avidly following the topics covered (everything from Julian Assange to the release of the iPad), it presents the exact problem that it pinpoints in The New York Times. All Page One's news is most definitely already yesterdays!
- Cormac O’Brien |
