An engaging, fly-on-the-wall documentary about the New York Timestakes you deep into the bowels of an industry in crisis. Director Andrew Rossi talks to TARA BRADY
IN EARLY 2009 an article appeared in the Atlanticmagazine under the dramatic heading "Endtimes". The piece, written by Michael Hirschorn, outlined an alarming hypothetical: the New York Times, print journalism's Grey Lady, could close its doors within six months.
The story was a sensation. Hirschorn was roundly chastised for his supposed heresy yet there was little in his argument that could be easily dismissed. The New York Timeswas, indeed, in crisis, the days of physical newsprint, were, indeed, numbered and the inevitable move to web-based content could likely only account for 10 per cent of the running costs required by a labour-intensive, news-gathering service like the 160-year-old imprint.
For film-maker Andrew Rossi, this grim report triggered a "lightbulb moment". Having already enlisted the incomparable crack-addict-turned-ace-NYT-writer David Carr for duties on another project, the Le Cirque: A Table in Heavendirector couldn't resist asking some questions.
"I talked to David about it and immediately realised the value of telling the story of the perils the Timesfaced," says Rossi. "He thought it was a good idea and basically referred me to his bosses assuming they would probably say no." They didn't. After months of negotiations Rossi was granted unprecedented access to the very bowels of the organisation. The film-maker would shoot solo in and around the Timesfor 14 months, generating "only a tiny footprint" while gathering hundreds of hours of vérité footage and archive material. Working with three editors, Rossi would eventually whittle the material down to a neat, engaging feature-length documentary called Page One: Inside the New York Times.
Rossi’s marriage of to-camera interviews and patient, post-Fred Wiseman fly-on-the-wall shooting proves an intimate portrait of a newspaper that’s sure to appeal to both journalists and hack-haters alike.
Media columnist David Carr, who occupies a central role in the picture, champions his imprint while questioning "decades of hubris" and an old-school sense of entitlement that continues to pervade his place of employment. Brash young bloggers like Vice co-founder Shane Smith wonder why the Timesfailed to cover the African issues that really matter: "Everyone [there] talked to me about cannibalism! That's fucking crazy! So the actual – our audience goes, 'That's fucking insane, like, that's nuts!' And the New York Times, meanwhile, is writing about surfing, and I'm sitting there going like: 'You know what? I'm not going to talk about surfing, I'm going to talk about cannibalism, because that fucks me up'."
"I think it can only be healthy that the Times'sense of invulnerability has taken a significant hit," notes Rossi. "I think that the reporting in the run up to the war in Iraq provides reason enough to be as educated a consumer of media as possible and not to allow any one outlet to govern the conversation. The insurgency of technology provides a great competitor but it's also a great thing for readers because it allows them to access original documents. It allows them to question the dominant view. They don't have to be passive readers or listeners."
Page Onecharts an extraordinary year and a subtle, irreversible shift within the titular institution and, more generally, in news consumption.
“When I started shooting it was just a couple of weeks before the newspaper had that historic round of layoffs eliminating 10 per cent of its newsroom,” says Rossi. “The tension and sense of looming apocalypse at that moment at the end of 2009 was definitely consistent if not worse than what Hirschorn was describing. Things did pivot a little over the course of the film, not upwards but at least towards something like stability.”
The years 2009 and 2010 turns out to be an eventful stretch for a media outlet responding to falling sales and collapsing advertising revenues. Romantically speaking, the essence of the job remains the same: get it on record and get what interviewee Carl Bernstein calls “the best available version of the truth”.
The system is the best we have but it’s not perfect. Rossi’s film duly recalls recent scandals in the paper of record’s history: in the early part of the century erstwhile Washington correspondent Judith Miller’s unseemly cheerleading for the WMD “hypothesis” lent credibility to those seeking war in Iraq; in 2003 former reporter Jayson Blair was caught fabricating stories and plagiarising the work of former colleagues.
Various talking heads speculate about the long-term damage these former contributors may have inflicted. But the New York Times, in its inkiest form, faces an even graver threat: progress. If aggregate news websites have already been superseded by aggregate news algorithms then whither fish and chips wrapping? For Rossi and his more forward-thinking documentary subjects, it's crucial to view the New York Timesas something more than its outmoded physical edition.
"Nostalgia for the printed product is really just a distraction," says Rossi. "It's more important that we can hang on to original reporting sources. I really feel that Twitter and Facebook would come to a grinding halt if you don't have places like Reuters and AP and the Times. Whatever the original reporting source is – name it."
In this spirit, Rossi’s documentary slowly coalesces into a defence of traditional journalism. Web 2.0 may have speed and accessibility but it does not trade in 5,000-word stories like the one Carr writes on mismanagement and sexual impropriety at the Tribune Company.
"It's not simply about the New York Times," says Rossi. "There's a brainpower and skillset that is contained in institutions like the Times. And even though the Timeshas this reputation and mystique this still could have been made in many other original reporting organisations. This is a movie that's trying to document a specific moment and also to raise awareness about what original reporting can mean."
Rossi admits his film “doesn’t really come up with any neat solutions or resolutions” regarding the future of the fourth estate but, for the moment, new deals with new media have offset some of the rot.
"One thing that does seem very clear is that hybrid models and collaborations between unlikely partners is the only way forward," notes Rossi. "The New York Timescollaboration with WikiLeaks on Afghan war state secrets demonstrates that traditional journalism can work with new media. And those stories dominated the world conversation for several weeks. They ran on the front page of the Times, the Guardian, Der Speigeland later El Paisand Le Monde."
A little over a year ago, Rossi witnessed the announcement of the Times'low-cost online pay-wall, a strategy he believes is both canny and crucial to the imprint's survival.
"It's a question now of which models survive, but in the case of the Timesspecifically it looks as if the modesty of their pay-wall has made a difference. It's not trying to make somebody pay a massive amount of money for immediate access. It's a very porous wall they've created. You can still access pages from Facebook and Twitter and those links won't tally toward your 20-story limit. The fact that you can tweet and e-mail on a certain number of pages without paying anything keeps the Times'srelevant; they've only had a 10 per cent drop-off in terms of monthly traffic. And 200,000 subscribers have opted in.
“That’s impressive for a sector some people think is dead.”
