End Times: Saying Goodbye to the Gray Lady...?

Would the end of the New York Times be such a big deal?

This is the provocative question at the heart of director Andrew Rossi's compelling new documentary "Page One: Inside the New York Times.”


Forget for a moment that the New York Times, far from being a “liberal” newspaper (whatever that means), tends to toe the status quo imperial party line on issues ranging from cheerleading for neoliberal corporate-friendly globalization (Thanks, Tom Friedman) to generally supporting the U.S. of Empire’s God-given right to make piles of money for the military-industrial-media-energy complex by invading other countries, blowing up their stuff (and people, who equal “collateral damage”) and rebuilding (and privatizing) whatever remains.

Let’s assume, instead, that the New York Times is U.S. civilization’s most important daily “newspaper of record” (whatever that means), and that sustaining “all the news that’s fit to print” really matters.

Big picture, for a moment. As even casual observers know, the newspaper industry is in a deep black-and-white dog pile. New media NYU professorial cheerleader Clay "Here Comes Everybody" Shirky pegs this journalism crisis to two general trends: the free-fall collapse of print-based advertising, a newspaper's lifeblood, and the meteoric rise of the participatory Internet, which has stolen advertising (thanks, CraigsList and Monster.com) and eyeballs away from slower-moving traditional print newspapers. "The newspaper is dead," notes news critic Jeff Jarvis at film's beginning, but “news," on the other hand, is very much alive and well. Perhaps the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in the delivery mechanism (trees to paper to print to your doorstep - so slow, so 20th century), or so conventional logic would have it.

If the New York Times is on the analog (read: ass) end of these monumental changes, Julian Assange's Wikileaks web site represents the prototypical beneficiary in "Page One" - digital, fluid, mobile, and instantly global in the sense of being everywhere and nowhere all at the same time, thanks to the world wide web's ubiquity. Assange's high profile and controversial emergent media news outlet serves as a foil for the Times, illustrating the technological and cultural impact of the past 2 decades on a rapidly evolving news and information environment.

The fun of “Page One” lies in Rossi's insistence on taking us into the daily workings of the Times - the personalities, the problems, and, most of all, the process of news gathering, shaping, and distribution (the elephant in the living room, in terms of both speed and cost). Old curmudgeons like David Carr (who is mesmerizingly funny), new media acolytes like Brian Stelter (“I don’t understand why every journalist is not on Twitter”), and hoary editors like Bill Keller all weigh in on the Times inevitable (?) demise, and argue for the importance of the editorial process in a hyper-mediated age in which anyone with access to a free Internet blog site can essentially say whatever they damn well please. True, national NYT news scandals surrounding Jason Blair (who fabricated NYT stories) and Judith Miller (who continually reported what turned out to be faulty intelligence information about Iraq pre-U.S. Invasion) haven't helped the Times’ image in recent years, but “Page One_ takes a surprisingly nostalgic look at the culture of the Times and manages, amazingly enough, to make us feel wistful about the hole dug for it by the turbulent communications transformations of the past 2 decades.

And then there is the lip service paid to journalism’s most important job. Remember? "The function of journalism is to publish the best obtainable version of the truth," explains famed Washington Post Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. "We need institutions that can, both financially and culturally, bring news that other institutions can not." Or, as Bill Keller notes, "News sources that gather and report information are essential to a functioning democracy," a fact lost on Sam Zell, Rupert Murdoch, and any other media mogul who elevates profit maximization over factual verification and truthful storytelling. Or so conventional thinking goes.

In "Page One," we attend a "Media Armageddon: What Happens When The New York Times Died" workshop, the humorous name given to a conference plenary hosted by SxSW on the future of the Gray Lady. And, more seriously, the forum title may one day pass as the obit for one of the oldest and most influential daily print newspapers in the United States. I’m not sure I’ll be as sorrowful as our filmmakers will be, if and when that day comes. But will it be a milestone in journalism history? Undoubtably. And “Page One” may be remembered as the film that captured these “End Times.”