Page One Asks Us to Take a Hard Look at Ourselves

Pete Hammond interviews David Carr and the LA Times’ Jim Rainey

If Microsoft never saw the internet coming, and Google never saw Facebook coming, and Facebook never saw Twitter coming, it is chilling to imagine what newspaper publishers never saw coming: all of the above.  The movement towards “citizen journalism” coincided with the movement towards “reality TV,” as we find ourselves in an age of self-made stars, writers, bloggers, photographers, YouTube stars, chefs, and anything else you can imagine: it was, to a degree, a cultural mutiny, an insignificant revolution where the mob rose up and decided to take their entertainment into their own hands.

The reaction to this has been divisive.  Some just don’t want to know – as in, they don’t want to accept the reality of the shift. They disdain Facebook, Twitter and bloggers.  They don’t even turn on the television anymore.  They will hold steadfastly to what came before.  There are those who embrace the new, as monstrous and repulsive as it can sometimes be, while also being refreshing and visionary at times.  And there are those who actively try to attack so-called “new media.”  They will dismiss the way people communicate now as one grand “hall of mirrors,” where we massage our narcissism on a daily basis.  All of these reactions are fair.  We must try to understand how the world has changed.

So, in Andrew Rossi’s excellent new documentary about the call to arms to help save the New York Times, they confront the notion that Twitter is a faster and more reliable news outlet than the Times.  Take it a step farther, as the documentary asks you to do, the sourced news IS what Twitter is reporting. If that news goes away, Twitter becomes useless.

How to keep the New York Times as relevant now as it’s always been?  Engage new and young audiences.  How do you do that? By making the New York Times itself a pop culture icon.  Page One does that.  It does it by introducing audiences to charismatic characters, chief among them, David Carr, the Times’ media reporter.

We all know what David Carr used to do as the Carpetbagger, which he was ridiculously successful at doing. But Carr likes to work and he’ll work if it puts food on the table – that he was the Carpetbagger only shows that he is good at whatever he focuses his attention.  Lucky for the silly Oscar race, Carr paid attention to it for a little while, but it’s clear from Page One that the dude’s got life in perspective – you know, Life – all of it. The tragic and the beautiful — when you’ve spent many days on your back slipping against the underbelly of the worst of it, you appreciate it when you are back on top of it, looking out at the Manhattan skyline, grateful for your job at the Times and for your family.

But Carr isn’t the only thing Page One has to offer, though he’s probably the most watchable.  Carr as a movie star has always been apparent, starting back from his Carpetbagger videos – the camera loves  him somehow.  As beat up as he is, he never tries to be anyone else.  Watch Page One with a big crowd and Carr will get most of the laughs, though his editor gets a few too.

Page One doesn’t state that things have become so dire for newspapers because it doesn’t have to.  But it might nudge a few of the most stubborn to pony up for the paywall.   Yes, information wants to be free but you can’t always get what you want.  Someone has to pay for it eventually – and to not pay now means to pay too high a price on down the road.

So, why should any of us care if a bunch of journalists find themselves out of a job? Why should most of America, who would rather watch Kim Kardashian get her teeth cleaned in a bikini, want to keep the New York Times afloat?  They don’t.  And they won’t. So it’s up to those of us who do care.  To live in a world where there aren’t hard working, honest journalists on the ground reporting stories under the watchful eye of an editor? I don’t want to live in that world.  I can barely live in the one we’re living in now.  I am disgusted with 80% of the news stories I read now. They spill out on Twitter, hog the front pages of Gawker, and cover magazines in the grocery store – Anthony Weiner’s big hard cock, Pippa and Kate, Kate and Will, Jennifer Aniston, so and so’s pregnancy.  Look, it isn’t hard to get people to look.  It’s much harder to get them to listen.

Page One will have a hard road to hoe where Oscar is concerned.  We know this because documentaries that are popular like this one is destined to be (major publicity tour for it) ignored by the voting committee.  It doesn’t involve tragedies in other countries – it only involves a potential tragedy here in this country.

So you might say, oh, it isn’t a tragedy.  Things will pull back in the other direction once real reporting goes away.  And maybe that’s true.  But worry when that high standard is eroded.  Worry when people don’t care that no one else cares.

Page One addresses the accusations made by bloggers against the paper – like Judith Miller and the war in Iraq, Jayson Blair.    If I were editing it I would have axed the stuff that too easily dismisses their participation in taking us to war: that is a bone of contention, even still, against the Times, by people who actually do read it.  It’s one thing to alienate people who think it’s a paper for elitists and liberals; it’s a whole other thing to alienate people who rely on the paper for their news and objectivity.

I personally felt that Rossi didn’t do enough to delve into the opposite perspective on that – the bloggers, like Daily Kos, come off looking foolish when we know they aren’t foolish.

The other weird thing was that the Times didn’t have their critics review the film. Okay, fine. But the person they did hire was clearly someone who wasn’t tapped into the urgency of the subject matter.  Page One is a snapshot right before the Titanic hit the iceberg.  We hope, I hope, that the New York Times steers clear of it; we know it has seen it in time.  But to not notice the urgency about this film, and why it’s being released right now, is to miss everything that’s important about it.  Michael Kinsley wrote:

Having seen “Page One,” I don’t know much more than I did before. The movie, directed by Andrew Rossi, is, in a word, a mess. It is done in the documentary style of his 2007 film, “Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven,” in which fly-on-the-wall scenes are interwoven with direct-to-the-camera interviews. This style is now often imitated, or parodied, in TV sitcoms like “The Office” and “Modern Family.” It keeps things moving but requires some discipline, which “Page One” utterly lacks. It flits from topic to topic, character to character, explaining almost nothing.

There are bones to pick with the film – there always are.  He’s not wrong about this – but he misses the big picture.  One hopes that if the modern age has taught us anything it’s that you miss the big picture at your own peril.