In 2009 filmmakers Andrew Rossi and Kate Novack set up cameras in the newsroom of America's greatest newspaper. The resulting documentary, Page One: A Year in the Life of the New York Times, investigated and observed a staff confronting tectonic shifts in their own industry and in the way humanity communicates and receives information. NPR's David Folkenflik edited a companion book (published by Public Affairs) illuminating the film's topic and going wider to encompass the experience of other “legacy media outlets” as they navigate the Wikiworld of social networking, blogging and “content aggregators.”
For those who worry about the death of newspapers, there are reasons in Page One for taking heart. As former Chicago Tribune reporter James O'Shea writes, the highest profile media flameout in recent years involved the Tribune Company whose circumstances were unique, given its buyout by the hedge-fund manager of publishers, Sam Zell. Zell's recipe for failure began with a checklist of all the recent mistakes made in the industry, including the diminution of news in favor of fluff and cutting staff to bare bones, to which he added his own brand of smothering greed and arrogance. The Tribune blow-up is no marker of where the industry is headed, but only an object lesson in where not to go.
In his essay, Alan Rusbiger insists that the web has transformed his paper, The Guardian, from a niche British publication into a global powerhouse second only to the New York Times in the English-speaking world. He advocates keeping online content free rather than slashing the number of readers in exchange for modest subscription fees. After all, why wouldn't advertisers, the source of the real money, want to reach such a huge audience? Page One includes some good arguments for the advantages of the digital era. Relying on “user generated content” can be dicey, but judicious employment of “citizen journalists” can expand the scope and depth of a newspaper if balanced against the editorial skills of a trained, seasoned staff. SB Nation's Jim Bankoff defends the Huffington Post against an editorial by the NY Times' Bill Keller, who essentially accused the Post of theft by piggybacking on the expensive reporting and editing of real newspapers. Bankoff's rejoinder is that when the Huffington Post references and links to the Times or any other source, “it drives traffic to the originating outlet.” And traffic, like old school circulation, drives advertising.
Some of the most eloquent writing comes from one of the prominent faces in the Page One film, the Times' media critic David Carr. After admitting his astonishment that Rossi made a movie out of “a bunch of doughy middle-aged people sitting in cubes with headsets typing on desktops,” Carr goes on to make his case for the Times' continued importance. The editorial process, where ideas and words are tested collegially before being printed or posted, is crucial. “The paper matters precisely because people don't just push a button when they have a random thought or merely give some Twitter-driven topspin to a nice little bit of news they see floating by on the web,” he writes. It's the process of curating and filtering, “of scrutinizing and challenging underlying assumptions, even at the speed of the web, that gives The Times added value in an age when information is a commodity.”
