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.
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.