Inherently, documentaries — like journalists — ask difficult questions. Any good documentary, like any good journalist, seeks the most functional version of a truth available at a given time.

So when director Andrew Rossi wondered how The New York Times — and, by extension, all legacy newspapers — is adapting to the perilous, exciting revolution of the Information Age, it follows that, like a good news report, he can only speculate at the future from what facts he gathered.

And what better way to gather facts about anything than spend a year inside The New York Times’ newsroom?

In "Page One: Inside The New York Times," Rossi and a camera crew specifically followed The Times’ media desk as they report on Julian Assange’s burgeoning WikiLeaks project, Sam Zell and Randy Michael’s mismanagement of the Tribune Company and other symbols of traditional media’s seemingly steady decline to irrelevancy.

It’s pretty depressing to watch a newsroom that once so mightily published excerpts from the Pentagon Papers be forced to lay off employees who had worked there 20- and 30-plus years. An opening montage of TV news stories reporting the decrease of newspaper circulation and advertising revenue casts a foreboding sense of decay over the whole documentary that festers each time a stressed-out reporter rubs his or her forehead or lights up another smoke.

But cranky, crusty media reporter David Carr emerges to remind the world that The Times is still landing on doorsteps and being pulled up on computer screens across the country. Rossi follows Carr as he speaks with sources and at conferences across the country, reminding new-media practitioners of the need for a strong institutional ethic predicated on providing a citizenry with the information it needs to be self-governing.

Rossi’s access extended well beyond The Times’ newsroom, securing him interviews with such new-media moguls as the founders of Twitter, Wikileaks, FourSquare and Gawker, doing well to depict how each settles into the modern media landscape. Similarly, the documentarian’s depth of research was astounding. He allows each character and institution to speak for itself, whether with exclusive interviews, previous reports or numbers that say what they won’t.

The end result is a documentary film that identifies The Times as a necessary institution struggling to maintain its journalistic ethic in an age where its competitors call it arrogant for doing so.

Rossi does well to capture the general sentiments of those employed at The Times, notably executive editor Bill Keller, media editor Bruce Headlam and media reporter Brian Stelter. While The Times’ future is in question, its leaders are doing everything they can to continue to serve their audience and adequately fulfill their democratic role as independent auditors of power.

— Matt Carney, professional writing graduate

» Watch New York Times media reporter David Carr defend traditional media at Intelligence Squared (start at around the 1:42:30 mark and watch for a couple of minutes)