‘Page One’ reports on life at the newspaper

It is perhaps impossible to expect a newspaper writer to review “Page One: Inside the New York Times,” a documentary that examines the question of whether newspapers can survive the current media climate, without a wee bit of bias creeping in.

(You don’t expect me to be rooting for the death of newspapers, do you?)

Andrew Rossi, director and cameraman of “Page One,” has a clear point of view: He’s filming at the New York Times because he thinks that what its journalists are doing is of value and hopes that audiences of the film will agree.

The result reminded me of “The September Issue” from 2009, in which a documentary filmmaker “embedded” himself at Vogue magazine to examine the culture there – and made an unexpected star of Grace Coddington, the magazine’s ethereal yet spiky creative director.

Rossi, likewise, hauled a camera around the Times’ Media Desk for a year, watching reporters capture stories, argue with editors, conduct interviews, share angst.

And while you’d think that his movie’s emerging hotshot would be the Times’ young blogger- turned-newspaperman Brian Stelter, the Grace Coddington of “Page One” is actually the middle-age, raspy-voiced writer David Carr, who’s able to say things like “Brian is a robot created by the New York Times to destroy me” in a way that’s weirdly endearing.

Carr, author of a candid memoir (“The Night of the Gun”) about his history of addiction, has enough raw charisma to carry a documentary all by himself. But “Page One” only lightly touches on his biography, instead relying on him to act as defender of traditional journalism, which he does with wry aplomb.

At a debate, he shows off a printout of a news-aggregator website cut full of holes (each gap representing a story taken from a newspaper); at the office, he eyes an iPad and comments, “You know what that reminds me of? A newspaper.”

Stelter and the other reporters move to the background, though he has one telling moment, commenting that he’s of the generation that grew up reading news online for free – and then corrects himself: “seeming” free.

There are moments when “Page One” gets a little too inside-baseball: the editorial meetings shown are fairly dull (not that I’ve ever sat through a dull editorial meeting) and quick references to past Times scandals (Judith Miller, Jayson Blair) assume much prior knowledge.

But ultimately, Rossi accomplishes something meaningful: capturing the sense of a workplace during a time of great transition, and, simply by showing us the day-to-day grunt work of finding a story, argues for the future of an institution.