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Even Impressionist paintings have a subject, but this collection of vignettes about the New York Times went all over the place. Was this film about how the Times now covers the media? about the Times’s uneasy relationship with new media? about the troubling economics of print journalism? how a story – e.g., the rise of WikiLeaks or the fall of the Chicago Tribune – gets reported? or a profile of David Carr, with a sidebar on Tim Arango? As previously discussed (see Buck, below), a documentarian is at the mercy of events, and if nothing dramatic happens during your year of filming, the result can come out a little flat. If there were big events at the Times last year, the filmmakers missed them. The central points – the world of information is changing, traditional newspapers are struggling to make ends meet, and we need the Times’s reporting – are so well-worn and obvious that they can’t carry a movie without more focus and drama. The only surprise for me in the whole film was seeing our old friend Katherine Bouton leaving her job of many years. The only fun insight: seeing what the names familiar from bylines – like David Carr, David Remnick, Nicolas Lemann and Tim Arango – look and sound like.

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