Review of "Page One: Inside the New York Times"

In the weeks before the release of the documentary Page One, New York Times columnist David Carr, the film’s unofficial star, attracted a bit of publicity by appearing on Bill Maher’s HBO talk show, where he called the residents of America’s “middle places” – the “red” states, and Kansas and Missouri in particular – participants in what he called “the dance of the low sloping foreheads.” He was responding to Maher’s assertion that these are not America’s “smart states,” and allowed himself a bemused, self-satisfied smile as he basked in audience approval after his observation, doubling down on the gibe by coyly adding “Did I just say that aloud?”

People who didn’t have a clue who David Carr was before buying a ticket to see Page One are now aware that the writer – a Minneapolis native, by the way – regards at least half of his fellow citizens as mentally enfeebled, and might wonder to themselves how this could inform his work for the media entity that still regards itself as America’s “paper of record.” As Page One unfolds and Carr consistently takes centre stage, it’s the sort of information that seems conspicuously missing in a feature-length movie portrait of a newspaper – and an industry – in what might turn out to be a terminal crisis.

Subtitled “A Year Inside The New York Times,” Andrew Rossi’s film begins at the paper’s printing plant, the camera following huge rolls of newsprint on their way to becoming the next morning’s edition of the Times. This is the physical incarnation of institutions like the New York Times, with their insistence on remaining once daily, pulp-and-ink, top heavy, capital intensive operations in a digital age without deadlines or time zones, where a billion-dollar enterprise with lovely new offices in midtown Manhattan can be scooped by a blog published from a laptop in a coffee shop.

This dismal prognosis is where the film begins, at the end of 2009, the old media’s annus horribilus, when venerable papers seemed to go out of business or vanish into the online ether every month, and the Times itself saw its stock price drop below the cost of a newsprint copy. Times management were forced to sell a sizeable stake in the paper to Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim, while essentially mortgaging their fancy new office tower to keep the lights in the newsroom lit – a newsroom that becomes more sparsely populated after a round of buyouts and layoffs. (It’s a year I won’t forget myself, as it’s the one where I was laid off from the daily where I’d worked for over seven years.)

Page One focuses not on the Times’ city or national or foreign editors and reporters, but on the men – and it’s still mostly men, it has to be noted – who work for the paper’s Media Desk, essentially tasked with looking anxiously over the paper’s shoulders at their colleagues and competitors, trends and business deals, a job that’s like iceberg watch the Titanic. Carr is the star reporter on this desk, the guy who does the TV shows and represents the Times on visits to places like Vice magazine, where he’s shown browbeating the mag’s bearded young hipster publishers for presuming to have unique insights on Liberia, in defiance of the Times’ years of authoritative, expert coverage of such African hellholes.

Carr presents himself as a scruffy, insouciant ageing hipster, from the Times but not of the Times, but also admits that, since getting his gig there, he’s gotten religion about the paper, and takes every opportunity he can to defend it. The paper needs defending, obviously; liberals still haven’t forgiven it for building the “weapons of mass destruction” case in the lead-up to the Iraq War, an episode that cost Times veteran Judith Miller her career, while conservatives have long since lost faith in its objectivity (to wit: “low sloping foreheads”,) a disillusionment that either began after 9/11, or back in the 1930s, when Times Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty became an apologist for Stalin, covering up his bloody purges and genocidal famines and winning a Pulitzer in the process. With factors like these, it’s no wonder that the paper has seen its circulation plummet.

Over the course of the year Rossi’s cameras follow the Times Media Desk, Carr and his fellow reporters cover the debut of Wikileaks, NBC’s stage-managed ersatz “end of combat operations” in Iraq, and the bankruptcy of the Tribune newspaper chain. Assigned the Tribune story, we see Carr spend at least three weeks working on his feature, cajoling sources to go on the record while openly telling them what sort of holes he needs them to fill in his piece.

You can’t help but wonder at the ethical pitfalls of his approach, which suggests an agreed narrative in need of bespoke facts. You also wonder if a series of timely postings might have kept the story fresher than a weeks-old post-mortem, though it’s exactly the sort of in-depth, long-form legacy media product that we’re told, over and over and at least once in the course of Page One, is the sort of thing that newspapers do so much better than blogs or websites, though there’s scant evidence that they’re esteemed by anyone but other journalists.

The fact is that, at this stage in its decline, there’s not a lot more to say about newspapers or their future, at least until the next rash of closures and bankruptcies begin. Which is probably why Page One allows itself to detour into David Carr’s story; a promising young journalist in Minneapolis in the ‘80s, Carr lived on what we once called “the edge” with some ill-disguised envy. He also developed a raging crack habit that, like most former addicts, he’s unable to recall without some trace of belligerent pride. He bottomed out and went to rehab before pulling himself together enough to end up at the Times and, even more amazingly, raise two children as a single parent.

It’s a hell of a story that, not surprisingly, Carr turned into a book, and it’s one that Carr is willing to use to wring something like respect from younger reporters who, by and large, are far more stolid and boring than their colourful senior colleague. There’s Brian Stelter, who leap-frogged into a job at the Times Media Desk from an anonymous media blog he ran in college. Carr refers to Stelter as “a robot assembled in the basement of the New York Times to come and destroy me.” Stelter, for his part, tweets his diet over the course of the filming and loses nearly 75 pounds onscreen; the age of the gonzo journalist is clearly over, and a good thing, too, though it might be too late to really matter.

Carr is the sort of boldface character that once thrived in newsrooms, but he’s clearly a rare creature in the new light and spacious Times newsrooms where Page One unfolds; even then, he comes off as a second-tier specimen of the type, recycling his quips and turns of phrase and selling his unearned snobbery to the rubes in Bill Maher’s audience. The Times plays a big part in the story of Carr’s redemption, so it’s no surprise that he’s willing to go to the wall defending it, and the whole teetering edifice of legacy journalism – without its reputation, or the simple context of a newsroom, he’s just another irascible, fading hipster hack who very nearly ploughed his life into the guard rail. He has the romantic cynic’s easy recourse to bitter outrage, and he uses it well to belittle the arguments of people who see the precarious state of his industry. But the numbers keep falling and the economics get more dire and people like Carr and his colleagues – and even some of their critics – still can’t see the difference between a service (reporting news) and a product (printing a newspaper.)

At one point in the film we see Carr and his Media Desk colleagues standing around talking about the end, should it come. For Carr and a few newsprint geezers, retirement is close enough that they might ride it out before it before the endgame, but they can’t help but rib the young reporters about their potentially dire prospects. As a scene, it goes a long way to explaining why the elders at the helm of places like the Times might be oblivious – or impervious – to the churning, revolutionary changes happening all around them, but there’s never much evidence that their younger employees could summarize what’s happening to their industry in a concise lead paragraph.

Criticism of Page One – and there’s been some – complain that the film lacks focus and inadequately tells the story of what the Times does well. They miss the point that this was never what Andrew Rossi’s film was about, but if it still fails to tell that story of change and anxiety and the passing of an era, it’s because it’s all still in progress and no one, especially those caught in the middle, have any idea what’s going to happen next. What we’re left with is people like David Carr and the Times’ loyal but dwindling readership, who have a lot invested in a romantic vision of journalism, even if that vision is largely a flattering and fond reflection. For the rest of us, it’s all just a prelude to a day when the object celebrated by the film’s title – that broadsheet icon of print journalism’s daily assessment of what’s timely and important and worthy – has already started to become a quaint and curious relic.