Page One: Inside the New York Times

Hear ye, hear ye, read all about it!

Well, in the case of this week’s lecture, we moved outside our usual lecture theatre to instead watch all about it!

As a first year journalism/law student I constantly vacillate between harbouring hopes of being a journalist to wanting to pursue law (usually determined by the amount of assessment each subject is throwing at me!). So this week’s journalism lecture, in which we watched the American documentary ‘Page One: Inside the New York Times’ was fantastic, as it gave me a real life, fly-on-the wall insight into the sometimes wild and wacky world of journalism.

‘Page One’, which was released this year, gains unprecedented access into the New York Times newsroom for a year. It specifically focuses on the journalists in the paper’s Media Desk, a department assigned to following the continual transformation of the media industry.

This documentary gave what we have been studying in journalism for the past twelve weeks a real life context, enabling me to see the principles we’ve learnt about (and blogged about!) play out in one of today’s most prominent papers. ‘Page One’ contextualised, in particular, the struggle of old media in dealing with the juggernaut that is modern technology and new media. It exemplified the Times’ fight to survive in the age of the Internet, as it tries to counteract the impact of new media presenting free and readily accessible news.

The documentary includes the coverage of issues such as WikiLeaks, the Jason Blair scandal and the end of US combat operations in Iraq, and is peppered with eccentric characters such as the ‘past cocaine addict’ David Carr, a sharp as a whip media columnist with a voracious appetite for news.

All of this made for extremely enjoyable viewing, but I have no doubt that this course definitely helped me to fully appreciate this documentary, as I had a far better grasp on the conflict between new and old media than I would ever have had otherwise.

I would definitely recommend ‘Page One’ to anyone else with an interest in journalism and communication!