One of the more interesting movies at the 11th Sundance Film Festival, which opens today in Park City, Utah, will be “Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times.”

The documentary is by Andrew Rossi, who spent a year following reporters and editors at the famed newspaper, even as the media landscape shifted dramatically due to the impact of digital technologies.

Here’s the program description from Sundance:

With the Internet surpassing print as our main news source, newspapers going bankrupt, and outlets focusing on content they claim audiences (or is it advertisers?) want, PAGE ONE chronicles the media industry’s transformation and assesses the high stakes for democracy if in-depth investigative reporting becomes extinct.

The film deftly makes a beeline for the eye of the storm or, depending on how you look at it, the inner sanctum of the media, gaining unprecedented access to the New York Times newsroom for a year. At the media desk, a dialectical play-within-a-play transpires as writers like salty David Carr track print journalism’s metamorphosis even as their own paper struggles to stay vital and solvent. Meanwhile, rigorous journalism–including vibrant cross-cubicle debate and collaboration, tenacious jockeying for on-record quotes, and skillful page-one pitching–is alive and well. The resources, intellectual capital, stamina, and self-awareness mobilized when it counts attest there are no shortcuts when analyzing and reporting complex truths.

What is probably most interesting is that many of the stories covered by the Times in the film are about the technological forces that have put it and other traditional media organizations through the digital ringer in recent years.

And, as someone who made the move away from a big mainstream newspaper to an online-only publication, I experienced some significant déjà vu watching clips in this interview with Rossi below, especially of the editor-centric tone of the newsroom and the franticness of reporters to get a story on the front page.

Which these days feels like such an odd and ancient way to think of journalism and which I also don’t miss for a second. (By the way, you can do “rigorous” journalism online too and without all the endless meetings.)

Check out Rossi (and that’s the very funny NYT media columnist David Carr in the photo below):

“Ten of the 13 root name servers in the world are located in the US. They are the top hierarchy of the Internet, which means by controlling them, the US can define the freedom of the Internet. How can Clinton guarantee you a freedom if her country has the power to unplug you?”

– Yu Wanli, an expert on international studies at Peking University

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on Internet censorship Thursday and her call for an investigation into charges that Chinese-backed hackers attacked Google have met with a bristling and indignant response from Beijing.

In a statement posted to China’s foreign ministry Web site, Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said the United States should “cease using so-called Internet freedom to make groundless accusations against China. The US has criticised China’s policies to administer the internet, and insinuated that China restricts internet freedom. This runs contrary to the facts and is harmful to China-US relations. We urge the United States to respect the facts….China’s Internet is open.”

Well, that’s an interesting perspective on the country’s legendary Internet filtering system. Evidently, the vast infrastructure of technology that has made online dissent an impossibility doesn’t exist!

Ma’s criticism of Clinton was echoed in the China’s state-run media, which refers to the current debacle as “the Google farce.” An editorial in the Global Times today denounced Clinton’s call for free access to the Internet to be a foreign policy matter as a form of “information imperialism.”

“The U.S. campaign for uncensored and free flow of information on an unrestricted Internet is a disguised attempt to impose its values on other cultures in the name of democracy,” the editorial reads. “The U.S. government’s ideological imposition is unacceptable and, for that reason, will not be allowed to succeed.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Clinton Calls on China to Probe Google Hack
• China to Google: No Worries, We Were Planning to Clone Those Android Phones Anyway
• U.S. State Department to Complain to China About Google Hack. Not That China’s Going to Listen.
• Microsoft: “Don’t Be Evil” Is Google’s Motto, Not Ours
• China’s “New Approach” to Google: Bai-Bai
• What’s the Chinese Word for Bing? Google Threatens to Leave China.

Mr. Schmidt was part of a delegation, led by Peter Pace, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to encourage business development in Iraq.

“After this tremendous investment in Iraq, we see business recovery finally happening,” he said in a video interview provided by the U.S. Army. “The creation of a new Iraqi state ultimately means business opportunities for global firms.”

“Google’s interested in making sure that Iraq ends up being an open and transparent democracy–after all, information makes a big difference in everybody’s lives,” Mr. Schmidt added.

The delegation met with both military and civilian leaders in Baghdad, he said. “It’s clear that the government is reaching out now to business, to try to get us to begin our part in the reconstruction of Iraq.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“In the end, in attempting to ‘do no evil,’ Google has done exactly that. I say this not just as someone running a content site but also as an end user. If this inequity of support continues along these lines, we will see a continuing destruction of our journalistic enterprises–enterprises that are one of the core building blocks of our democracy. Last year, while addressing the magazine publishers and editors of the MPA at the Google Campus, Eric Schmidt suggested that the Web was a ‘cesspool’ and that it was up to the major journalistic brands to clean it up. Well, Eric, in a great many ways, Google has helped to create that cesspool, and as such I would hope that it can be part of the solution.”

– Forbes CEO Jim Spanfeller