SXSW Review: Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times

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Page One

There could not have been a more timely documentary to show at SXSW 2011 than Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times. The first three months of 2011 will go down as a major turning point in the worlds of social media, online news reporting and SEO (search engine optimization) and The New York Times seems to be at the center of it all in one way or another.

Page One shines a light on the difficulty of real news reporting in the world of media convergence and content aggregation. We see new media evangelists trumpet the demise of the "old media" while harvesting the old media's content for their own purposes. We see reporters work on pointed and difficult stories. We see how stories are crafted from ideas, carefully researched and turned into stories. We see the triumphs and the stark realities facing news organizations today. We see the reality of The New York Times in 2011.

Arguably the most compelling character in the story is David Carr. David is a well respected writer for The New York Times and former speaker at SXSW. Throughout the movie we see David defending the track record of The New York Times against new media upstarts. This movie takes us into the mind and process of a quality reporter who cares about getting stories right and does not shrink in the face of adversity. If The New York Times ever needed a defender, they definitely have their man in David Carr.

I think that the most important thing we can take away from this documentary is that our society needs a source of well researched and thought out content. We need to learn the "mundane" subjects like how building codes and engineering saved lives in the recent Japanese earthquake, we need to learn how corporations like the Tribune Companies are driven into the ground by poor caretakers. We need organizations like The New York Times and the people that work there.

Mark Twain once said "The report of my death was an exaggeration," and the same can be said about The New York Times. Page One is a great illustration of how great companies like The New York Times can transform themselves in the new world of media convergence.

Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times plays SXSW again on Monday 3/14 at 11 am at the Paramount, and Thursday 3/17 at 11 am at the State.