New Media Meets Old-school Journalism

At a dead-end mall – easily a decade-and-a-half past its last serious Christmas rush – I sat with my colleagues on PlattForm’s Marketing-Communications team Tuesday afternoon in a theater showing art films. In the 1970 and 1980s, this venue presented the original blockbusters but have since come to irrelevance due to their unfortunate attachment to dying malls and the invention of vastly superior home technology.

We’d come to see a film called Page One: Inside The New York Times, a 90-minute documentary about the beacon of the journalism world, the newspaper industry’s grand “Gray Lady.” I’d been told the film was an inside-the-cubicles look at how editors at The Times decided what stories made it onto the front page, and it was. But it was also a revelation for me, someone caught between the fundamental beliefs of old-world journalism and immediacy of new media.

Like many other journalists, I witnessed the Internet’s arrival and newspapers’ reluctance to embrace it. Old-school editors at many sizable papers in the late 1990s turned a defiant shoulder to what they saw as a passing phenomenon until the Web started to eat into their bottom lines and staff dismissals became real solutions.

Page One’s focus was the survival of America’s most iconic newspaper with the rise of the Internet and online journalism cast against a stressed economy. The film depicts the bullpen conversations and the journalistic efforts of reporters who find their jobs more difficult to do as ad revenues and staffs shrivel. An interesting dynamic is also presented between tenured journalists and their newer, younger brethren. How can The Times endure when the gatekeeper has been removed by bloggers, tweeters and while websites like WikiLeaks change the world?

I came into the theater not expecting much: the 1:05 start time, I thought, would get me home 45 minutes earlier than a normal week day. A few minutes into the film, I began to realize that the characters were larger than life.

David Carr, who writes media and culture articles for The Times, plays a central role in the film. He’s depicted covering the fall of the once might Tribune Company and traveling to various conferences to defend old school journalism principles in the wake of new media. Carr deftly explains how news aggregates and other blogs feed off The Times and other ground-level news organizations that contribute original reporting and writing into the media beast to be blasted out to the masses, commented on, summarized, and made to sound original.

The reporters on The Times’ Media desk make the two worlds co-exist. The fundamentals of traditional journalism are in fact more critical with important with the technology available today. The world of Twitter provides more information from scrolling through a screen’s worth of updates than a read of a full newspaper, which is a point made in the film. But the news comes from somewhere, and it has to be reported accurately, though not necessarily in a traditional way.

Carr caught my attention like the fictional characters I’d watched on screen in theaters way back when my imagination was developing. His strange look, his strained voice … I quickly came to see him as something in my strange adult profession that was as strange as the inhabitants of the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars.

Journalism is still in my bones. I am the editor of a news aggregate site, www.CareerCollegeCentral.com, and we struggle to develop our own original content. My role also involves leading our magazine’s social media efforts. I’d never say I was an expert. I dabble in it, daily. As a byproduct of the traditional newspaper world, I’ve never been sure how to feel about it. We puzzle over the same new media issues as The Times, albeit on a smaller scale. The film spoke directly into me, and the next morning, I’d tweeted four times before finishing my coffee.

We left the theater and I saw the mall in a different way. Across from the lobby, a brittle-boned woman had been pushing a mop across the sparkling tile of the food court. Newspapers, if they’re not careful, will go the way of the shopping mall. The Gray Lady has taken precautions for a more glamorous fate than polishing a vacant building beyond retirement age.