There is something meta to approximately the fifth power about writing a blog post about a movie about a newspaper dealing with the digital age that ends with a call to action to visit a website (particularly when one saw said movie in a theater with an old fashioned, analog projector). It’s already a story about a story about a story, and that’s before you take into account the way it splays across every medium available to modern man. But in its own way, that’s sort of the point of Page One: Inside the New York Times.
The movie isn’t a standard documentary, of either the polemical or investigative variety. Nor is it, despite the subtitle, strictly about the operations and people of the Times. It isn’t even a lament for dying media or a cry in the wilderness to save them. Instead, it’s a well researched but inconclusive visual term paper, a collection of facts, anecdotes and interviews that, interesting as they often are, can’t answer the question the movie often asks: what is to become of the former Gray Lady in the brave new digital salon?
That the movie fails to answer this question is hardly its fault, it’s not like anyone has a great handle on where things are ultimately headed for newspapers and newspaper like journalism. But for a movie whose audience presumably contains a great deal of people who not only read the Times, but who also follow media, current events, and journalism on-line, it’s an undeniable shortcoming. One can’t help but feel a sense of incompleteness at the movie’s studied lack of either hope or despair.
In what can’t quite be read as a joke or a metaphor for the he said/she said fake objectivity for which the Times and similar outlets are routinely criticized, Page One follows around a few newspaper people while allowing plenty of other people time to look into the camera and pronounce such media dead as the dodo or as vital as ever. There’s Arianna Huffington testifying before John Kerry about notions of “citizen journalism”. There’s Bill Keller refusing to allow that what he does can be boiled down to a catchphrase. There’s Brian Stelter extolling the virtues of Twitter from within the Times itself. There’s David Remnick lamenting the devolution of The Washington Post into Kaplan Test Prep Daily and hoping the same doesn’t happen to the Times. And there’s the guy from Newser getting his head handed to him by David Carr at a panel debate on the death of traditional media.
Carr, who writes about media for the Times and made his own headlines three years ago with his autobiographical account of drug addition and recovery, is the closest thing the movie has to a star. A grizzled veteran reporter straight from central casting, he’s a staunch defender of the Times and of the kind of serious stories that represent newspapers at their best. He’s also the closest thing the movie has to an answer to the question that hovers over every scene and interview.
Carr is an old guy who’s accepted that Twitter is useful and isn’t afraid to trade blows with Stephen Colbert. But he’s also a practitioner of the long form journalism that can’t get done by someone who has to hit “publish” on blog stories half a dozen times per day. The movie devotes plenty of screen time to Carr’s revelatory story about the Tribune Company, its bankruptcy, and the disastrously debt and blowjob ridden buyout that led to it. Preparing to delve into the story, he informs Times Media Editor Bruce Headlam, the movie’s second lead, that he’ll need two weeks to report the story and then another to write it. Three weeks(!), that’s timescale on which Twitter is barely even searchable.
The story Carr eventually produced rocked the Tribune Company and its comically inept owner/conqueror Sam Zell. It had everything a good investigative story could want: corruption, incompetence and sex. But it’s also the kind of thing that appears to be getting harder and harder to do. More people like David Carr, and more people willing to pay them, are needed, but that’s only a partial answer. The greater question, about what happens to the Times and the absolutely vital brand of journalism that’s a big part of what it does, remains unanswerable, however engaging and fun it is to take a closer look.
