Read More: Inside The New York Times (Interview with Andrew Rossi); How to Leave Twitter.

The pen is mightier than the sword, but is the printing press greater than the CMS?

Page One: Inside the New York Times opens inside the mammoth New York Times printing press – a sight to behold for life-long online journalists. Alongside it, the stately monolith of the New York Times headquarters located in Midtown Manhattan is a statue to the legacy of the iconic daily newspaper. In the face of open access to information, new authorial voices online, and a decline in advertising revenue, online presents a new apparatus of accountability in journalism.

When, in January 2009, The Atlantic’s Michael Hirschorn published an article citing the end of days for New York’s sacred text, the newsroom was rocked at the insinuation.

As documentarian Andrew Rossi worked on a documentary about Web 2.0 for HBO, the article acted as a catalyst for a conversation with New York Times reporter David Carr about the media’s utopian future. Following the breadcrumbs, Rossi stumbled into a legacy.

“The conversation I was having with David Carr suddenly took this sharp turn toward a conversation about what the future for legacy media would be, and what was going to happen to the Times,” says Rossi. “I realised that following his story through this change of digitisation and technology could be really fascinating. Drawing the story out towards the future of journalism and what’s happening to newspapers and what the implications are for those people was another approach, versus, for example, following an entrepreneur who is starting their own company and has a sort of wide-eyed take on everything.”

Rossi acted as the Times HQ’s fly on the wall, working to emphasise verité. Taking us behind the news desk with former crack addict and veteran journalist David Carr and blogger-turned-reporter Brian Statler during a turbulent year of leaks and take-downs, it’s a personality-driven piece on the now-threadbare existence of the world’s best-known newspaper.

In the face of Twitter reporting, online news aggregators, and WikiLeaks, will the New York Times become, as David Carr inquires of the iPad, “a bridge to the future or the gallows”? “I think that [Gawker and The Huffington Post] are websites which have a lot of value add for their readership. Maybe the Huffington Post has a lot of people in democratic politics who look to it on a regular basis, but I don’t think they’re doing any investigative pieces that are changing the world.”

Having captured the revelation of WikiLeaks from within the newsroom, however, the journalistic process takes on a new set of parameters online. Is it unedited journalism, or a simply a source? “WikiLeaks was something that nobody could have predicted would become such a huge story and really dominate the conversation,’ says Rossi, ‘not only in the media, but also in geopolitics. That was definitely a surprise, and a wonderful one, because it’s one which I think really crystallises all the themes in the movie.”

The Times subsequently partnered with WikiLeaks to release a series of daily headlines. This is where free information and the arbiters of what’s news collide.

The proliferation of news media has blinded us to the sheer amount of new media content that is produced by mainstream sources and aggregated online. We’ve seen how legacy journals have fallen in the hands of malfeasant executives, but here the New York Times represents a crew prepared to go down with its ship, which in turn refuses to sink. Can the news world strike a balance between strong investigative journalism in the face of free, to-the-second online content?

“The New York Times do still set the agenda,” says Rossi, “but I think that it’s very important for people to be educated news consumers. People can access original documents and can fact-check stories that they see themselves. They don’t have to be a slave to one piece of paper that gets printed on a daily basis. 24 hours a day, they can write comments and talk back to the paper.”

Agenda-setting is no longer a one-way street. “I think something that we learn [in the film] is that it’s a 2-way street, and there’s a way to guide the global conversation on different topics that accommodates counter-voices.”

In a culture where everything is perceived to be free, are we ready to learn the cost of losing the New York Times?

Page One: Inside the New York Times is released Friday 23 September and screens in the UK throughout September and October. Out on DVD 14 November. Find screenings in your area here.

You can pre-order Page One on DVD or stream it online through Dogtooth.tv by clicking on the player below.

A version of this feature is published at the Spectator Arts and Culture blog.

Read more on Uncultured Critic: Blogger Outreach at Social Media Week; FilmCamp at Social Media Week Glasgow.

Modelled after BarCamp’s ‘un-conferences’, FilmCamp is the third event of its kind organised by the staff at Glasgow Film Theatre. Designed to facilitate the sharing of ideas in an open environment, today’s FilmCamp celebrated Social Media Week with three talks.

Kicking off at 2pm, the first event invited Netribution’s Nic Wistreich to speak about the ongoing revolution in film distribution. Citing exciting film distribution projects and events like Age of Stupid’s indie screenings and Secret Cinema, which take films out of the cinema and into new event spaces to create new filmgoing experiences. Despite the economic downturn, distribution is on the rise and, as he sagely noted, you can’t pirate a social experience. The media revolution has already happened, and film distributors must find new and creative ways to distribute their films before tech companies create monopolies on the market. This raises the question of how to stand out online, which Ben Kampas from the Scottish Documentary Institute went on to discuss.

Since the draw of documentaries is in good subject matter rather than names and reputations, it’s a challenge for documentarians to stand out online. Using a model employed by Virtuous Circle – a Creative Scotland initiative that specialises in audience engagement and retention – documentary filmmakers are beginning to employ campaigning software like NationBuilder to promote their films and ongoing projects. Rather than waiting until the distribution stage to woo audiences, Kempas says, “the film community can really learn from [SNP campaigns using NationBuilder] and we can all build our own nations”. Combining the crowdfunding power of Kickstarter with the campaign tracking capabilities of NationBuilder, filmmakers are now able to identify their biggest supporters and encourage their involvement. While this encourages growth for turned-on filmmakers to build communities and returning audiences, it does not necessarily allow entry into mainstream cinematic distribution. Whether or not the crowdfunding model is sustainable remains to be seen, and while there is potential for local distributors like Distrify to increase the availability of film on demand and direct-to-DVD, it’s a niche market whose potential is still being discovered.

Another project with great and growing potential is local start-up blipfoto. Founded by Joe Tree as a picture-a-day project, it has become his full-time job. Now operated by a team of six in a small local office, the website boasts 201,000 uniques per month, 1.3million images (each representing a day in a user’s life), and each photo has an average of 6 comments. Tree describes the site as, “social networking for people who don’t like social networking,” and testimonials from a dozen of his users exemplify this. Blipfoto has become a safe haven on the net for creative individuals with the desire to record their lives, one picture at a time.

Blip’s user retention rate is something of a marvel, with 48% of users who upload one picture returning; a number which grows exponentially with the number of photos uploaded. Tree describes this user experience as an emotional transaction, and by charging a small annual fee for extra features on the site, Blip sees its users’ payments as a way of forging a greater sense of ownership over their online profile. The CEO also expressed a feeling that Facebook doesn’t add value to people’s lives in a way that Blip can and, in a similar fashion to FourSquare badges, Blip takes the appeal of the added reward and crystalises it with ambition. As users take more pictures, receive comments, and begin to interact with other users, the commitment to taking daily pictures and becoming a part of the community becomes its own reward. By building interest and reward over time, encouraging interaction, and creating lasting value, Blip has become a unique social network with a real community at its heart.

Another community that has grown exponentially in its 6 years (though I’m sure you thought it was longer) is YouTube. Google UK’s Industry Manager Danny Gray made his way up to Glasgow to present Press Play for Social. Now that, allegedly, the number of hours we spend watching online video have exceeded that of porn, YouTube is the UK’s 2nd largest search engine. A whopping 48 hours of footage is uploaded to YouTube every minute, while 3 billion videos are watched daily. Gray went on to demonstrate more ways in which online video exceeds its conversational counterparts on other major social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. In fact, the two social media gains are YouTube’s two biggest traffic referrers. Interestingly, Facebook’s biggest referrers are Twitter and YouTube, and Twitter’s are YouTube and Facebook. This trifecta of link-sharing has interesting effects on the ways in which we share and consume online video, and measuring KPIs (Key Performance Indicators – all 35 of them) is a big concern for YouTube. The company continues to innovate the ways in which advertising content is viewed online, allowing users to take control with features like TrueView, which gives users the option to skip pre-rolling ads. Promoted videos are also taking over in a similar model to AdWords, allowing paid content to sit at the top of the page as you watch your favourite videos. As Gray puts it, the better you run your paid and owned media, the more you will earn.

The ongoing commercialisation of a social network that began as a hub for user-driven content became very clear during this talk. Rather than promoting user-generated content on the homepage, large companies are now invited to buy advertising space amongst banners for film trailers, and TV content from Channels 4 and Five. If you don’t have money, or a following along with a desire to partner on advertising, it is very hard to get noticed on YouTube, let alone have YouTube notice you. While the company finds new and innovative ways to sell you top shelf advertising content, its social media-driven community has fallen into the background. For me, that’s what YouTube is all about – but in the commercial world of social media, KPI is King.

Have you attended any Social Media Week events, or is it taking place in your city?

I’ll be covering more events throughout the week, including Yomego’s Guide to Blogger Outreach, and KILTR Presents (Scottish writer) Alan Bisset. This post also appears as a guest blog on the Social Media Week website.