REVIEW: Page One Goes Inside the New York Times, But Also Beyond

A few weeks ago at the edge of one of the Brooklyn parks, I passed a guy at a table hawking New York Times home-delivery subscriptions. "Already got one," I said. Like a Jehovah's Witness crossed with a Doberman, he clamped down on me. "How many days?" he demanded, probably thinking I was one of those weenies who just gets the weekend package. "Seven," I said. "I'm hardcore." He didn't laugh. He didn't even look disappointed -- maybe more disgusted than anything. Whatever his spiel was, he didn't get a chance to deliver it, and he looked kind of lonely to boot: Either he'd been trying to preach to the converted all day, or he'd encountered too many devoted digital subscribers. Either way, I hope his lack of sign-ups was a good omen.

Of all the newspapers in existence, the Times is one that will surely survive, whether people read it the old-fashioned way or, now that the paper has finally -- finally! -- instituted a paywall, through paid digital subscriptions. But my friend in the park had every reason to be bulldoggish: The rise of allegedly free (and allegedly reliable) news sources on the Web has not only nearly killed off newspapers; across the board, it's devalued serious news reporting and investigative journalism -- somehow, a large swath of the population has become convinced that these things aren't worth paying for, especially when Arianna Huffington's corps of unpaid "citizen journalists" can apparently get the job done for nothing.

But no matter how drastically the news-delivery model changes, anyone who cares about journalism needs to care about newspapers; and anyone who cares about newspapers needs to see Page One: Inside the New York Times. When Page One screened earlier this year at Sundance, some of the early reviews carped that it was less a behind-the-scenes look at the so-called paper of record than a snapshot of where the Times stands at this crucial juncture in digital-age journalism. I'll take the snapshot: In piecing together the backstory of these past few rocky years at the Times, director Andrew Rossi focuses almost exclusively on the paper's media desk, which was formed only recently -- in 2008 -- to cover all things media-related. Those things would include, of course, changes at the Times itself, among them painful newsroom layoffs and the necessity of getting and keeping the fractured attention of readers. While the media desk isn't the whole of the New York Times, it does give Rossi a solid perch from which to survey the paper's recent and ongoing struggle for both relevancy and revenues. As media desk editor Bruce Headlam, who's featured prominently in Page One, recently told Adweek in an interview connected with the film, "We kind of represent the Times way of reporting; we just happen to be reporting on our own demise -- or, our own near-demise."

Though that quote didn't come from Rossi's film, it fits with the kind of gallows humor that's been an essential component of great newsrooms probably since the beginning of newspapers. Page One takes us on a hop-scotching tour of the trials and tribulations the Times has faced in the past few years, among them the Judith Miller and Jayson Blair scandals, the Times' role in the WikiLeaks controversy and the advent of those previously mentioned painful staff cuts. (In 2009, 100 newsroom jobs, out of 1,250, were eliminated.) Rossi's big failing is that he's a bit too starry-eyed about the Times' supremacy. It's one thing to respect the paper and the people who work there; it's something else again to stand by mutely while they tip-toe daintily around some of their bigger mistakes. For example, as Rossi outlines it, the Miller fiasco is treated as a bit of an "Oops!" moment, rather than an instance of a Times journalist abusing her stature, believing that the rules didn't apply to her.

Rossi doesn't have to be so fawning, because the heart of Page One -- the sections covering the day-to-day operations of Headlam's media desk -- offers a perfectly believable assessment of the way good journalists and editors are more keenly aware of their potential shortcomings than their strengths. Rossi -- whose previous directing credits include the 2007 documentary Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven -- isn't a flashy filmmaker. He sometimes tries to alleviate the potential boredom of tracking so many talking heads by introducing gentle jump-cuts; they're not a distraction, but they don't add much, either. Still, he keeps the gears of his movie running smoothly, without too much dragging. He devotes just the right amount of time and attention to the likes of Brian Stelter, the unassumingly flashy firebrand who was hired by the Times after attracting attention for his blog, TVNewser, which he started in college. As Rossi presents it, Stelter's hiring symbolizes the paper's willingness to keep reinventing itself now that we're well into the digital age.

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