Movie Review: The Gray Lady Takes Center Stage in Media Doc

Media columnist David Carr is the feisty heroic center of Page One: Inside the New York Times, a love letter to the Gray Lady and to the value of old-fashioned newspapering — even in a world where the paper and ink have gone out of a style. It’s fun to spend 100 minutes watching smart people with a passion for their craft push themselves to produce extraordinary work. The points that the film makes about the industry’s troubled finances, and the questions it raises about how well we’re served by a new media landscape dominated by aggregators and rumor mills (like Gawker and the Huffington Post), cover no territory unfamiliar to anyone who pays even a little attention to the state of the media business. The movie offers no solutions for how we can guarantee the future of institutions like the Times, because no one has those solutions. But seeing a small segment of the paper’s dedicated reporters and editors hard at work can’t help but give you hope.