Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times

We enjoyed this insight into print journalism although we though it did not go into great depth. We had seen David Carr on Real Time with Bill Maher the week before which made us interested in the film. The film did not not toot the NY Times horn to much excess and gave us some insight into how a paper operates in today's recessionary world. Beat going to see "Transformers".

Excellent documentary about the attempts of the New York Times to keep its moral, professional, and financial balance in a time of declining ad revenue, the death of other big-city newspapers, alternative news presentation sources, reporter error(Judy Miller), journalistic fraud (Jayson Blair) and questionable partnerships (Wikileaks). On the whole, the documentary was credible and thought-provoking. It's true that David Carr, the featured NYT reporter, was a larger than life figure and that the rationale for using the Wikileaks material was a bit hard to accept, but there were many, many memorable moments: the look on an aggregator's face as Carr showed him what percentage of his "publication" would remain if his traditional media sources were removed; the confrontation between a new Tribune publisher and Tribune staff; the interaction among section editors as page one space was allocated. I am not a regular reader of the New York Times, but this documentary reminded me that there IS a critical mediating function to be carried out by high-quality investigative journalism. I hope the NYT finds it way and is still investigating and publishing--in some form--at the beginning of the 22nd century. Highly recommended.