"Page One: Inside The New York Times," produced by Kate Novack '94 and directed by Andrew Rossi, offers an innovative look into news giant The New York Times as it responds to the challenges posed by a rapidly changing media industry. The film, which will screen at 7 p.m. on Friday in Spaulding Auditorium, paints a vivid image of The Times as it works to maintain its delivery of news while also adjusting to competition from emerging media outlets.
"We saw a lot of journalists around the country getting laid off, papers going out of business," Novack said. "It was a scary moment in journalism. Facebook was becoming bigger, Twitter becoming a household name. And we thought, this is where the story is, we have to go inside the paper and document this historic process."
The film began as an HBO project that followed young entrepreneurs using social media to reshape the digital world, Rossi said. At a dinner attended by several influential members of the media, the conversation over dessert turned to the future of media outlets in particular, that of The Times.
"There seemed to be a real sense, in a room of some very smart people, that there would have to be some dead bodies on the side of the road on the way to the future and that The Times might be one of the casualties," Rossi said in an email to The Dartmouth. "My thought was that if I could ever get access to the paper's newsroom, I could document what was clearly a time of historic transition and transformation."
For Novack and Rossi, who are married, it took six months of meeting with various leaders of The Times before then-executive editor Bill Keller finally gave the team the green light, Novack said.
"He felt confident that if the camera was really observing what the journalists were doing, their work would speak for itself," Novack said. "I think another reason he agreed was because he didn't see an agenda, because we weren't there to prove a thesis."
Filming began in late 2009 and continued for 14 months, Novack said.
Novack said that Rossi took care to show a side of Times journalists that the public wouldn't otherwise see.
"He really wanted a movie that showed the humanity of the reporters at the desks," she said.
To introduce reporters to the filming process, Rossi spent the first few months simply observing the writers with his camera as he sat on filing cabinets inside their cubicles.
"That's where you build trust," Novack said. "Some were hostile to [Rossi], but over time they forgot that the camera was there."
The result was an intimate profile of the journalists behind the paper, Rossi said.
"My goal was to create a naturalistic, cinema verit portrait of a newsroom that very rarely opens itself up to cameras," Rossi said. "So I spent a lot of time building relationships of trust with my subjects. It wasn't wasted time though, because when big events did break like David Carr's investigation into the Tribune Co.'s bankruptcy, the withdrawal of the last' combat troops from Iraq and the WikiLeaks disclosure the reporters hardly noticed I was there."
Novack said that one of the most telling scenes in the film shows The Times' decision not to run a story on the "last" troops pulled from Iraq even as numerous media outlets were broadcasting the news. Journalists at The Times worked through their sources, trying to determine if the story was true or published simply as a "great television image," she said.
"The compelling thing for me is deciding that something is not a story, and the work that they put into something that didn't even end up in the paper," Novack said. "That's a function of reported, edited news that remains important."
When WikiLeaks broke last November, comparisons were immediately drawn to the Pentagon Papers, with one notable exception, Rossi said. While Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 directly through traditional news outlets like The Times, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange went to YouTube before communicating with more traditional media.
"Julian Assange of WikiLeaks chose to go through The Times and other mainstream media in order to, among other things, amplify his message," Rossi said in the email. "It actually was a vindication of the power of mainstream journalism."
The Times and other newspapers across the country are currently facing a drastic upheaval in the way they shape and deliver content an upheaval that is not just the result of an economic recession, Rossi said. The Times began limiting online access this year, and individual reporters are finding various ways to respond to changes.
"At the age of 52, [media columnist] David Carr somewhat unexpectedly and reluctantly becomes an avid Twitter user and now has a following the size of a good-sized regional newspaper," Rossi said. "It's important to point out, though, that alongside these steps to adapt, we see a continued commitment at the paper to a fundamental value of original, on-the-ground reporting and thoughtful editing."
The change in news format also impacted structure within The Times, which offered its employees buyout packages in October 2009, according to Novack.
"People were getting laid off instead of taking the buyouts," Novack said. "There was a bit of a sense of apocalypse at end of 2009."
Dartmouth Film Society director Tien Jong '10 said that the film opens up a new side of the newspaper industry.
"It's a special project because The New York Times is arguably the most influential paper in the country and one that is pretty secretive about how their daily process works," Jong said. "It's kind of mystical both because how renowned [The Times] is and how they allowed access to [Rossi and Novack] for an entire year."
Dartmouth Alumni Magazine leaders who knew Novack initially proposed bringing the documentary and its filmmakers to campus this summer, according to Hopkins Center film manager Sydney Stowe. The event was postponed until more students returned for Fall term.
"We knew we wanted to play it, and when the Alumni Magazine came to us it was kismet," Stowe said. "It was the icing on the cake to be able to offer the movie and the people attached to it."
The film screening offers a chance for the filmmakers to interact directly with students, Stowe said. Rossi and Novack, as well as Christopher Wren '57, a former bureau chief for The Times, will meet with film students and hold a discussion after Friday's screening.
"Any theater can play a movie, but what we try to provide for the campus is an enhanced experience," Stowe said. "Audience and students get a lot more out of it when they meet the people who directed or produced the films."
Jong said that the opportunity to meet the people behind the film was the event's greatest appeal.
"I'm even more excited for that than seeing the film, because it'll be interesting to hear about how they came to this extraordinary experience and what they saw," she said.
