The New York Times published a review today about the movie, Page One: Inside the New York Times. I COMPLETELY DISAGREE WITH THEIR REVIEW.
Here’s my review:
“I expect to take version 7.0 of the iPad, place it under my butt and have it take me like a hovercraft
to work,” said Times media journalist David Carr in the new movie PAGE ONE.
Carr’s world—25 years of in-depth reporting—got by fine without tweets, blogs and Wikileaks.
PAGE ONE begins with archaic-looking conveyor belts chugging along. The camera pans back to workers on beaten-up motorized carts that strain to lift stacks of newspapers and load them onto wheezing trucks readying for their morning deliveries. The whining and creaking of old equipment sadly conveys a dying industry.
Carr is typing a story by punching keys and looking obsessed. With a voice more gravelly than Tom Waits, he said to the camera, “News is not dying. The medium is not the message, and the message is not the medium.” He’s referring to the opposite sentiment made famous by writer Marshall McLuhan in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
Carr’s young coworker, Brian Stelter, is shown at his Times desk surrounded by electronics—a CPU with large monitor, a laptop, an iPad, and some type of video-phone-with-keyboard gadget. In stark juxtaposition, he is speaking into a Times office old-fashioned phone with spiral cord.
Stelter is in the enviable spot of having grown up in the world of social media and he embodies his generation. “I don’t know why anyone who is a reporter isn’t on Twitter,” said Stelter. Here’s a guy born in 1985, who started a news blog in 2004 called Newser. Mediabistro.com took notice and quickly hired him to keep on writing it. The Times, realizing they needed a voice for the future, recruited him in 2007.
“I can’t get over the feeling that Brian Stelter was a robot created to destroy me.” Carr said.
Carr rants about how rude it is to text during a conversation. He doesn’t “get” how close-to-impossible it is to ignore incoming texts and refrain from texting back. That is the norm now. He is, however, smart enough to know that the world of technology waits for no one and those that don’t keep up will become obsolete. When Carr is asked if he’s scared of the Times going under, he sneered, “I’ve been a single parent on welfare, this is nothing.”
Andrew Rossi, director of PAGE ONE said Carr is, “the kind of character a documentary filmmaker dreams of finding.”
“At the tender age of 31,” Carr said, “I still had a year left of being the violent, drug-snorting thug, before I found my way to this guy—the one with the family and a job at The New York Times.” Carr is a former crack addict and author of the memoir, Night of the Gun. He is also known as a hard-working, fair-minded journalist on staff at the Times since 2002.
Andrew Rossi and Kate Novack gained access to film The New York Times newsroom for one year, providing an unprecedented keyhole view into this iconic American institution.
In our world of sound bites and 140-character attention spans, is there still a place for in-depth reporting? PAGE ONE attempts to answer that question.
This review by Dorri Olds appears in the June 2011 issue of the NY Resident magazine.