Wither The New York Times?

A common topic that would pop up amongst my journalism class last year was will journalism survive? What’s the future of journalism? Or some variation on that question. Now we have a movie to look to for answers. Page One: Inside the New York Times asks that question about the “newspaper of record,” although answering it proves nearly impossible.

The film is a modern history of The Times in the midst of an existential crisis. Focusing on the media desk, the filmmakers jump from one issue to another in The Times’ history over the last few decades. There’s very little in-depth exploration of any of the issues it touches on, from the recession, to the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, to Judith Miller’s shoddy coverage of Iraq’s possession of WMDs. Any one of these issues could fill up a documentary on its own, but the filmmakers look at them too briefly before moving on to another story.

Anchoring this film is David Carr, an old-school journalist who fiercely defends The Times from criticism. He’s a tall and lanky fellow, speaking in a gruff tone of voice. Clearly the filmmakers chose him to be their star because of his no-BS approach to reporting. I loved watching him school some editor from Vice magazine about the New York Times reportage in war-torn parts of the world. I also loved how he conducted interviews, telling a source at one point “we’re just two girls talking here.”

I know a few critics were unhappy with the film’s leapfrogging from one story to the next (The Times own film critic is actually pretty negative despite the film’s fairly pro-Times slant). Page One doesn’t really have a strong narrative so to speak, but I liked how it showed these journalists doing what they do, which is basically reporting the news. All the hub bub about where the future of journalism or The Times is heading is sort of getting old. Technology is changing and information is being dispensed in different ways, yeah yeah. But if The Times were to disappear tomorrow, something else would take its place. You can take away where people work, but not what they do. There will always be muckrakers like David Carr out there holding people’s feet to the fire, and I think we should take solace in that at least.

(On a personal note, it really annoyed me seeing how white and male The New York Times is. If newspapers are going to survive, they need some diversity up in there.)