Street: What made you want to investigate The New York Times? Andrew Rossi: So I began investigating what was happening in the media from the perspective of entrepreneurs in the web 2.0 space, including people like Dennis Crowley and Chris Dixon, who are all leveraging social media and low overhead to power these websites and services which are part of a digital revolution taking place, and I was interviewing David Carr about this topic, and David I know from previous projects. It was right around the time that The New York Times was speculated to go out of business, and in the middle of talking to him about it, I realized it was another window into this theme of what might be the consequences of the digital revolution. I asked him if he would be interested in doing a movie about him and The New York Times Media Desk. So that’s how it started.
Street: You basically had unprecedented access to The New York Times newsroom. What was it like building relationships with the reporters? Were they wary at first or pretty open to you coming in? AR: So I shot by myself with a Sony ES1 camera, and I had a very small footprint, so I was able to develop trust with the subjects in the newsroom just by spending time there. [...] In terms of getting the access, it took about six months of discussions and meetings and ultimately, I think it was the fact that my approach is observational documentary, and the fact that I wasn’t coming in with an agenda, per se, that made Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, authorize the project. He told me that he’s proud of his journalists and he would like the world to see them.
Street: How did you choose the Media Desk, and how did the main characters of the documentary come out in film? Did you choose them or did they choose themselves? AR: The Media Desk seemed to be the perfect platform through which to tell a play within a play, where all the stories that the media writers are producing for the paper illuminate a different aspect of the disruption taking place all across the media landscape, while the macro play of what’s happening at The New York Times and in the lives of the characters has it’s own art and tells us something. The specific writers who emerged as major characters in the film I think reflect different aspects of how the world of journalism is adapting to digitization. You have Brian Stelter, who was hired by The New York Times right out of college after being a blogger writing his tvnewser blog and who admonishes his peers to be on Twitter — and as David Carr says, he’s sort of like a robot manufactured in the basement of The New York Times to come and destroy him. And then David is somebody who came up among alternative weeklies and has a great, deep experience in traditional media but also has sort of had a conversion to new media as he describes in the movie, and now has a ferocious presence on Twitter with over 300,000 followers and does lots of short–form video on the web. So I think the two of them are great foils to one another. Then Tim Arango, is sort of in the middle as somebody who’s young but really romanticizes in many ways the traditional sort of mythology of being a New York Times writer who can have tenure once he’s there and write books, and now is sort of pursuing that model of having various different beats and is a correspondent in Baghdad.
Street: How did things play out based on your preconceptions coming in? Any surprises? AR: I think I was struck by the degree to which the collaboration between editors and writers really is at the root of the stories that are in the paper. It’s the space between journalists that produces the stories that we see in the newspaper and that was one of the most interesting things to learn. Generally, all the resources that it takes to fund and to manage an institution like that.Street: Is what’s happening at the New York Times representative of the overall revolution in media?
Street: Is what’s happening at The New York Times representative of the overall revolution in media? AR: I think that there is a very painful disruption happening in several different industries. It’s happened in the music industry, it’s happening in the film industry, it’s happening across the board in print, but the sort of apocalypse that was occurring in the newspaper industry was even more deeply troubling because you know newspapers and the institutions which have as their mandate original reporting, on–the–ground reporting, are really powering a lot of the very important conversations that we’re having in our society, and people seem to have the conventional wisdom that if digitization disrupted or killed certain old media institutions, that would be okay. But when that applies to certain journalistic institutions, I think the consequences are much more grave. It seemed at least worthy of investigation whether there would be consequences, and so that’s what we tried to do with Page One. We tried to give viewers a front row seat to how journalism gets made at a place like the Times. It could have been the WallStreet Journal, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Reuters, or AP — an institution of that sort — and let viewers decide from what they see, whether what’s going on at those places is archaic and bloated and unnecessary, or whether it’s vital. It’s for viewers to decide.
