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

Stelter may have been a canny hire for the Times, but he's not the kind of wackadoodle, wild-card choice that media reporter David Carr was. Carr is the de facto star of Page One, and he's the one figure Rossi's camera really warms to. Carr, with his egg-shaped head, diablo facial hair and strained rasp of a voice, is weirdly charismatic. He's thrilled and proud to be employed by the New York Times, but his enthusiasm comes off less as self-satisfied puffery than as outright gratitude and wonder. A former crack addict, as well as a single dad who suffered through some financially rough times, Carr doesn't take what he's got for granted. When he's asked what he fears -- particularly in the context of journalism disappearing as a profession -- he states that he's afraid of bats and guns. "I'm not afraid of anything else -- the advantage of having a textured life."

Page One is Carr's movie. It will probably do for him what R.J. Cutler's The September Issue did for Vogue creative director Grace Coddington. Suddenly, a mere byline or a name on a masthead emerges as an individual whose job we can understand and relate to. Rossi's camera follows Carr as he meets with some young editors of Vice magazine and deftly deflates their callow pomposity as they boast about how "in touch" they are with horrific world issues like cannibalism in Liberia. And in one of the movie's most understated yet most striking scenes, Carr gets on the phone to sweet-talk a Tribune Co. spokesperson just as he's about to drop a big exposé of Tribune CEO Randy Michaels. (Michaels would resign in the wake of the article.) In that voice -- the sound of a cartoon duck in need of an Ricola -- Carr handles his contact with delicate ferociousness, assuring him that the soon-to-be-published piece will be fair but also, you know, damning.

In Rossi's eyes, Carr is both an emblem of all we stand to lose if professional journalism dies and an example of how it might survive through perseverance and dedication. But even more than that, he's a living, breathing, cracking-wise example of the way great newspapers (and not just the Times) have always made a place for bright, passionate weirdos -- in some cases, people no other sensible employer would ever hire. Those of us who love newspapers claim we love them because we need the news. But we also love them for the element of surprise: The way one page might inform us of the indignities suffered by the Great Hamster of Alsace, while another might clue us in to the life of a female World War II pilot, an unsung heroine of sorts who would otherwise be unknown to us. Page One goes beyond the idea of the all-important front page and deep into the idea of the newspaper as a daily adventure for readers. The precariousness of keeping that enterprise going makes for a great story -- one that all surviving newspapers, not just the Times, are still writing.

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