ASSIGNMENT - "Page One" Movie Review for Journalism

On Friday, my fellow first year Cre Commers and I went to see a documentary called Page One at the Cinematheque.

Poster for Page One.



The film looks at the inner workings of the New York Times and poses the question: is the news paper dying?  It follows New York Times writers Brian Stelter, Tim Arango, and my favorite, David Carr.

I enjoyed the movie as a whole, but Carr really makes it worth watching all on his own.  His down to earth nature and wit are hilarious, and somewhat surprising for me to see at such a prestigious news paper.  Carr is completely blunt while conducting interviews, sometimes swearing like a sailor.  I would have thought that would get you fired from a company like the New York Times, but he creates great work with his style.

The documentary mainly focuses on the battle between online information and the newspaper, a battle the newspaper is apparently losing.  But that being said, the newspaper has been apparently losing since it was created.

In my opinion, the newspaper does provide something blogs and twitter don't, and that's a sense of verification.  I feel like newspapers can be trusted because they work very hard to keep that true.  Also, bloggers and people tweeting don't tend to actually go out and experience the things they write about, whereas newspapers have an entire team of people gathering information for their stories.  This leads me to believe that a lot of things on the internet are probably just rehashed from the paper.

That being said, there was a very good line in the movie that went something like "there is a difference between newspapers can't die, and newspapers shouldn't die".  While I agree newspapers have their purpose, I can't guarantee that will keep them around.

Overall I felt Page One did a good job shedding light on the situation and I'd recommend anyone to go see it.