Page One - Inside The NY Times

STOP THE PRESSES; THE NEW YORK TIMES HAS SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO SAY!

“The New York Times is now just one voice of many”

We open on a busy industrial printing warehouse churning out a swell of freshly inked dailies ready for circulation. Most of you will agree that the New York Times is a legendary establishment revered by any writer worth their journalistic salt. The papers popularity owes as much to its stubborn traditions as it does to the quality of its content, cementing it as a publication truly worthy of iconic status. Page One: Inside the New York Times takes us to the in-house mainstay and beyond in an effort to show the ever changing dimensional shifts of the media landscape and its widespread effect on newspapers across the US.

 Director Andrew Rossi documents every component of the NY Times machine, from the desk heads to the reporters to the writers themselves. We’re promised a revealing, balanced insight into one of America’s most beloved institutions.

Do we get it? Well, kind of….

 Page One is fraught with problems, both structural and narrative. But let’s focus on the positives, of which there are also many.

  The film begins well. Rossi appears to’ve been allowed unrestricted access to the editorial process during Bill Keller’s reign as chief editor. The newsroom is a dazzling site to behold when it’s full of busy writers pitching ideas and finalising scoops. Behind the mythic excitement of it all, there is a definite sadness surrounding the Midtown Manhattan building with the recent staff cut backs and continual outside pressure of internet sites like The Huffington Post and Gawker which threaten to plunge the entire industry into extinction. These are tough times for the times.

This is also where the film loses some of its balance.

Internet news sites are portrayed as soul hungry cyborgs created by illiterate computer nerds whose sole intention is to destroy the printed word.

You'll be glad to hear it’s not all anti-technological sentiment.

 We do see how the NY Times has tried adapting to technological advances - Twitter is even described as a “professional necessity”. The new alliance with WikiLeaks remains a contentious subject which has succeeded in dividing the staff but might just see them through this difficult economic climate.

  The pace here is fast and the bulk of information presented is strong enough to maintain even the most jaded of viewer’s interest. Like Rossi’s last feature - Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven - Page One also interchanges between fly on the wall and frequent use of interview snippets to good effect.

Then things threaten to really go pear shaped.

  Half an hour in and the documentary still hasn’t really decided where it wants to go. At times the continual talk of industry panic and financial restraints begin to wear a little thin but it plods along cosy in a cocoon of its own hubris. If we’re being brutally honest it won’t hold the full attention of your average cinema-goer with no prior interest in the subject being probed – until David Carr shuffles onto our screens with all his hoarse venom and deep-set eyes that tell more stories than the Times staff combined.

 Caught in the middle of an expose on the Tribune, Rossi’s documentary manages to glimpse the man at his most acerbic. Carr’s character gives proceedings a much needed injection of chutzpah between the stuffy monotone pen pushers and straight-laced office types. He’s in possession of all the string-vested obscene language that made outspoken drunkards like Charles Bukowski such a national treasure (referring to a group of journalists during his speech as “tenacious motherfuckers”). The candid Carr assumes narration and the documentary flickers into bright beautiful life.

 But every candles dancing flare must eventually burn out.

“Inside The New York Times” masquerades as a film about how the media will fair in the digital age but really it feels more like a gushing epitaph. It feels more like homage to an institution which strives for immortality but will inevitably fail to obtain it - the collapse of ad revenue should surely see their coffins sealed.

The bias of the filmmaker does sometimes leave us wondering about the true objective of the piece. After all, The Times aren’t all humanist, credible angels.

  The film merely flirts with controversial figures within the Times like serial plagiarist Judith Miller and the much criticised pay-wall system of their website, but we never really plumb their depths in any real detail.

  Page One is desperate to expose something amid the clutter - like a clumsy husband groping for a light-switch in his garden shed but grabs hold of an extension lead instead, bringing a whole shelf of power tools down onto his head. Far be it for this journalist to condemn Andrew Rossi’s agenda, his cause is surely explored with admiral respect for subject and his stylistic execution is solid. The result is uneven but nonetheless revealing, so for this Page One: Inside The New York Times does exactly what it says on the tin – with an added spice of partiality of course. That said, sanctimonious tone aside, Page One almost works.