Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 95
Language: English
Director: Andrew Rossi
Plot: Through the years, the fly-on-the-wall documentary has taken us on the presidential campaign trail, into the foxholes of war and behind the curtain with performers. In the spirit of that tradition, PAGE ONE goes inside the newsroom at The New York Times during the most tumultuous era for journalism since the printing press was invented to reveal a disarmingly candid portrait of the paper of record.
Over the course of a year when WikiLeaks and Twitter emerged as household names and publications like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Washington Post either folded or significantly reduced their operations, director Andrew Rossi gains unprecedented access to the country’s preeminent news factory. Can the foot soldiers of this bastion of old media keep up with the fire hose of information that is the world wide web?
Inside the Times newsroom, journalists on the media desk grapple with the implications of their paper’s decision to work with whistleblower Julian Assange, the collapse of traditional models for network television and print advertising, challenges to the Times’ authority in the wake of reporting failures during the run up to the war in Iraq and the emergence of the blog voice in the pages of the Gray Lady as exemplified by writers David Carr and Brian Stelter. Meanwhile, they continue to uphold the values of the old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting that’s now on the endangered list.