Page One: Inside the New York Times

All the News That's Fit to Print meets All that's New and Fit to Film.

That's the primary dynamic in the print-journalism-as-endangered-species documentary, Page One: Inside the New York Times, as it chronicles the workings and worries, the adjustments and accommodations, the merits and missteps, and the trials and tribulations of the nation's paper of record over the course of a year.

The film acknowledges that this is a page-one story still being written, but it tries to take the digital-age temperature during the ongoing metamorphosis of serious news reporting, investigative journalism, and the daily newspaper, all of which sometimes seem not just devalued but on their deathbed.

With the news-delivery model transmogrified and newsroom layoffs proliferating of late, and the new media nudging the old media right off a cliff, "Stop the presses" has taken on a whole new meaning.

Is the Times already an anachronism? Maybe.

From his director's chair, documentarian Andrew Rossi (Eat This New York, Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven) takes the fly-on-the-wall approach and concentrates on the Times' media desk, which has been in existence a mere three years. This seems at first glance to be a rather limited vantage point for this kind of film.

But there's an upside because of the emergence in the film of media columnist David Carr, an insightful and delightful interviewee whose idiosyncratic personality and acerbic wit allow him to give his employer a much-needed movie-screen face. All things considered, Carr pretty much drives off with the film.

Unfortunately, as fascinating as it is to get a glimpse behind the scenes at the Times, we come away from the documentary wishing that it were further inside the print titan than it is and could thus offer us more insights and truths about old-school versus new-school journalism that we were not already familiar with.

This contemporary snapshot of the media landscape, focusing as it does on journalism's Gray Lady, is perhaps too gray itself. Carr's contributions certainly help anchor this consideration of the newspaper crisis in general and the Times crisis in particular, but the film could use another splash of color or two so that it compelled more as a movie.

That PO:ITNYT will appeal to avid media watchers and journalism junkies -- especially those fearing and bemoaning the seemingly inevitable and possibly imminent decline or even demise of the newspaper as part of everyday life -- is inarguable. But the film would seem to lack sufficient urgency or pizzazz to corral, or be of much interest to, a wider audience.

That's a pity, but not one that obliterates the film's value for its target audience, as they wonder whether their grandchildren will even know what it was like to read a newspaper. Let alone the newspaper.

Page One: Inside the New York Times is a pessimistic portrait of a punctured paper, the Times, in times like these.

 

88 minutes

In theaters July 8, 2011

Rating: R, Documentary

 

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"Page One: Inside the New York Times" Movie Trailer

 

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