In his review in the New York Times today, Michael Kinsley calls Page One, the documentary about the New York Times, “a mess.” He’s right, but not in the way he thinks it is.
This is a movie about the news industry: of course it’s messy. Director Andrew Rossi leads his audience across the wasted media landscape, with stops along the way, writes Kinsley, at “WikiLeaks; the Pentagon Papers; more WikiLeaks; the survival issue; Gay Talese and his famous book on The Times, 'The Kingdom and the Power;' Comcast's purchase of NBC Universal; the impact of Twitter; the danger of not sending reporters on trips with the president; how ABC has had to lay off 400 people.”
Apart from the messiness of the story itself, there’s something nice about a sprawling approach, especially when our stories so often come in the form of Tweets, updates and headlines designed to be clicked on. It’s satisfying to see a fly-on-the-wall account of the business (and one of its epicenters) at a moment when transparency is king, but it’s also nice to be reminded about how good stories can be told. It can be hard to remember in the chaotic ecology of the Internet, where we follow links down their rabbit holes towards not wisdom, not opinion, not reporting – but information that’s crowd-sourced, aggregated, liked, and thus given a stamp of “relevant,” “important.”
By Kinsley’s account, the movie, with its impressionistic, rambling portrait of the news business, sounds a lot like the Internet too, born of a style that “keeps things moving but requires some discipline.” Discipline is what serious journalism has, and this, he’s clear, is not it: “It flits from topic to topic, character to character, explaining almost nothing.”
But the movie is a portrait of chaos, and a compelling one at that. It’s not a newspaper article or a well-structured op-ed. It’s a testament to the sort of journalism that still matters, that still separates Page One from the Internet’s homepages. It’s proof that in whatever medium you’re working – and there are a lot to choose from now – stories matter, and so do their sources and their subtleties. “Page One” may explain almost nothing, but some things aren’t so easily explained. Some times they have to be seen, and thought about, and discussed.
Kinsley’s bitter assessment then serves as proof of precisely the kind of journalism that the movie documents. In the interest of avoiding a “conflict of interest,” here’s the Times striving for as much distance as it can on a documentary about its own newsroom. Kinsley (who works for Bloomberg) goes out of his way at the start to indicate there is no conflict here, which was presumably why he was asked to write it (despite not being a film critic at all) and why he sounds nearly indignant at the film’s emphasis on “a media columnist and reporter named David Carr,” who is guilty, apparently, of loving the Times.
Given all of its (defensive) sense of self-importance – one stoked now more than ever, by, for instance, what some indignant Times partisans in the movie call “stupid” rumors of the newspaper’s demise – it’s not surprising to see a writer in the Times flaunting the paper’s concerns over integrity, like the righteous golden boy that new media expects it to be. “The Times deserves a better movie,” writes Kinsey imperiously, before adding the exortation, “and so do you. See ‘His Girl Friday’ again.”
Nerves have been touched clearly, and Kinsley’s review is only further proof, again, of a point that the movie is trying to make: if it’s not fighting for its life, good, level-headed journalism is on a mission to prove itself worthy in the heady, loud age of the Internet.
Carr is a fantastic spokesperson for that mission (and for the paper in general) and for the meta concerns at the heart of a shrinking newsroom. “There was just this sort of decades of organizational hubris about, you know, our own excellence and our own dominance,” he tells the camera early on in the film. “And then in a matter of like 18 months, all of a sudden…everybody started like asking a question: could The New York Times, like, go out of business?”
In an effort to remain balanced and fair and critical, papers like the Times aren’t competing against a “new media” boogeyman. They’re already deeply and often smartly embedded in the Internet themselves, and that’s where things get messy. Struggling with new modes of reporting, Internet economics and increasingly fuzzy lines between the demands of advertising and the demands of editorial, the corporate structure of news – “the muscles of the institution,” as Carr calls them – presents its own challenges to the newsroom. Through the collapse of the Tribune company and the Comcast NBC merger, the film points at these challenges, without making any claims. The story is still developing is the point, and it’s complicated.
Read the rest of this piece at Motherboard
For more on the media, technology and science, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and get our weekly newsletter.