Like most people who love to read I've always been fond of newspapers. There's something calm and reassuring about small black type on a pale-grey page, the way you are free to roam around, picking and choosing what to focus on. Television news can often be emotive or shocking, strong visual sequences telling a powerful story, but newspaper journalists have to rely on language, sometimes with a carefully chosen photo, and active participation rather than passive consumption is required on the part of the reader. That said, I can never quite believe just how much content there is in a daily newspaper, and as 'Page One', a new documentary covering a year behind the scenes at the New York Times, makes clear, the time may fast be approaching when printed newspapers are a thing of the past. Suddenly we find ourselves in an age where people prefer to keep up with their news via Twitter and the internet, sites like the Huffington Post and Gawker vie with innumerable blogs for our attention, and ipads offer a new way of consuming this internet content. Add to this plummeting advertising revenues and it's easy to see why newspapers might be in trouble.
'Page One' doesn't come up with a solution, but it does illuminate the problems very nicely, and offers instead something of an elegy for the 'newspaper of record', invoking a tradition of fine print journalism going back to Woodward and Bernstein and their uncovering of the Watergate scandal. Would the New York Times ever be allowed to fail? There's an underlying sense of hope in this film that people will start to realise what they may be about to lose (as the charismatic media reporter David Carr comments, are we really going to leave it to facebook to tell us what's going on in the world?). I was struck by the beauty and simplicity of the Times's layout, often with a single stunning image to illustrate a story. And I thought, also, of my parents with their heads together over The Telegraph crossword, or my dad pouring over the sudoku for hours. And even though recently I've been starting to use The Guardian's excellent ipad app, I felt reinspired to continue to try to buy a printed paper while I still can.