Page One: Inside The New York Times

LITTLE ROCK — Unfocused, undisciplined and at times distressingly myopic, Andrew Rossi’s Page One: Inside The New York Times is a well-meant but only sporadically interesting documentary about how great The New York Times is and what a shame it will be if it succumbs to the new realities of the 21st century. Even those of us who are sympathetic to the plight of the Times and other newspapers might receive the film with a shrug.

The problem may be that Rossi prefers an old-school cinema verite approach - he holds the camera and people go about the business of putting out a newspaper as they chatter away about how terrible it will be if they lose their jobs. Even if you agree with them - and I do, the loss of The New York Times would have a terrible impact on our civic health - after the first five or six self-serving talking heads, it grows tiresome.The film also suffers from the fact that a lot of newspaper people (not all of them at The New York Times) have acquired the knack of coming off as self-important and self-pitying.

Except for David Carr, who emerges as sort of the anti-hero of the film. Maybe because Carr’s actually had some real pain and suffering in his life - before his self-reinvention as the Times star media columnist, he overcame a near-fatal cocaine addiction - he comes across as bemused and above it all, and his dogged, detail-obsessed on-camera reporting of the decline of the Tribune Co. is heartening. Carr’s example at least shows us why we need news-gathering bureaucracies. But not even Carr can be anything but starry-eyed about the Times - to work there was obviously his dream.

Otherwise, Rossi’s movie is sort of a mess, touching on the WikiLeaks controversy; Comcast’s purchase of NBC; Judith Miller; Jayson Blair; Gay Talese; the emergence of Twitter; a notoriously wrong 2009 Atlantic article predicting the Times would be out of business within four months; and the idea - presented as revolutionary out-of-the-box thinking on the part of Timesmen - of charging for content on the Internet.

And then, here comes the iPad. Salvation?

Look, I can (and do) recommend the movie to anyone who wants to know how desperate it feels working for a newspaper in these economically uncertain times. But there’s no real strong narrative line here, and you’re likely to leave the movie more confused about the issues facing newspapers and why you should care about them than before. You may leave the movie feeling vaguely depressed or vaguely encouraged, but I doubt you’ll really learn anything - you’ll just be treated to a series of impressions.

And you might be struck by how white and how male the Times still seems. Though Jill Abramson is poised to become the first woman ever to become the newspaper’s executive editor in September, she’s only glimpsed in the background of a couple of scenes. Digitally add a little cigarette smoke, and you could imagine some of the editorial meetings being held in the 1960s.

Page One: Inside The New York Times 81

Cast:

Documentary with David Carr, Brian Stetler, Bill Keller, Carl Bernstein

Director:

Andrew Rossi

Rating:

R, for language

Running time:

88 minutes