Lecture 12: 'Page One - Inside the New York Times'

‘Page One – New York Times” is a documentary of the work place in the New York Times and their struggle and adaption in the constantly evolving digital world. For so long newspapers such as The New York Times were an essential part to news reporting and journalism, however with the introduction of the Internet its role as critical news source is diminishing. This is reflected in this documentary as they talk about how the Internet has changed news reporting and journalism and their efforts to adapt to it through the use of social networking pages. Throughout the film they delve into a few particular issues including WikiLeaks, the Jason Blair scandal and the US military involvement in Iraq.

 In this film there is a focus on how journalism can survive in this new digital world where there is more importance on the speed in which news comes out rather than the content of the news itself. More specifically it focuses on the journalist who work in the paper’s Media desk, which is designed to follow changes and trends in the media industry. This movie was great in showing to journalism students are real insight into the way journalism actually works and functions. Although this description may seem as if the movie would be simple documentary of a news room, it present little quirks throughout which adds to its success in my opinion

 I think this movie link directly to what we have been talking about in this subject in particular Lecture 6, which was all about web news. Additionally the assignment for this subject on our media use very much reflects some of the key aspects of this documentary. In this lecture we talked about how the web is constantly evolve from Web 1.0 (Information Web), to Web 2.0 (New Media – Social Networking) then to Web 3.0 (Semantic Web). This change in media use, also exemplified in the media use diaries, demonstrates how print news is slowly decreasing which present a problem to the New York Times. The example Dr. Redman did with the jellies bean in the lecture in which he showed us that when we have something for free for so long we feel that it is rightfully owed to us. This idea is shown in the film in which online news, which is free, is or will be putting journalist out of jobs.

Overall I found the moving very interesting being able to have insight to the world of journalism that you would never normally see. Here is the trailer for the movie for a little preview.