Exclusive TakePart Interview with ‘Page One’ Filmmakers Kate Novack and Andrew Rossi

For the making of Page One: Inside The New York Times, director Andrew Rossi and producer Kate Novack gained unprecedented access to the New York Times newsroom and the inner workings at the paper’s media desk. With the Internet encroaching upon print as America’s primary news source, and newspapers all over the country going bankrupt, Page One chronicles the transformation of the news media at a peak of great turmoil. As their paper struggles to stay vital and solvent, Times writers like Brian Stelter, Tim Arango and the salty but brilliant David Carr track print journalism’s metamorphosis, even while their editors and publishers grapple with emerging issues, such as controversial new sources and the implications of an online pay-wall. In this exclusive interview, Rossi and Novack tell TakePart about making their documentary and what they hope audiences will walk away with after seeing the film this summer. TakePart: Why spend a year with the NYT? What inspired you to make the movie? We saw newspapers across the country folding, bureaus closing and journalists losing their jobs. At the same time, new media platforms like Twitter were becoming household names. So it was clearly this moment of both peril and opportunity for journalism. The idea was to witness the transformation through the prism of the journalists who cover the media for the Times. But we never imagined that our year inside the Times would include the emergence of WikiLeaks as such a force in the news landscape, or give us a front row seat as the Times uncovered the bankrupt culture at the Tribune Company. To view the entire article, please click on the following link: http://www.takepart.com/blog/doc/2011/05/18/kate-novack-and-andrew-rossi-page-one-filmmakers-talk-news-and-new-york-times