17 October 2011 - Lecture Week 12

Yay!! We have finally arrive in week 12, just 1 more to go. I really love this lecture because that was the first time I step into Schonell Theatre and also it was a very different lecture than before, we got a change of environment and it was watching a documentary which I totally love :) The documentary is title Page One: Inside New York Times. It was release in 2011.

Trailer on youtube:

Have you seen the trailer? It is awesome*skipping walk*. I'm damn tired of people asking why I study journalism and have I really considered my future before taking this major. They make such a light deal of journalism, saying journalism is dead, useless and pay little. Hello there people! Check out this trailer, journalism is alive and healthy, yeah it may got some bruises here and there but the center is alive and well!

This documentary is a very inspiring documentary about New York Times. There was this guy named David Carr who is a senior journalist in New York Times. He became the main narrator of the documentary. Many issues for journalism these days is presented. One of the issue is twitter and other social medias. Carr joked that a new guy who was a blogger before he came to NYTimes might be a robot created to replace him. The documentary also shows economic issue with ads profit decreases 30% and stuffs. They had to lay off 100 people. The economic downturn for NYTimes can also be attributed to the feeling of free news entitlement.


Another big challenge for New York Times was WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks put a video about Iraq War from anonymous source on youtube. What WikiLeaks done put journalism under pressure including NYTimes. People buzzed about WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks came under the spotlight in media. In the early minutes of the documentary, the new guy interviewed Julian Assange whether he is a journalist or an activist in which Assange replied that he prefers being an activist rather than a journalist because his goal is justice.


A good thing is that when someone in the documentary said that you can get all kind of soft news on online fast media but hard news such as war requires investigative journalism and nothing can replace it. One thing that remains a very encouraging message was the last quote, "Journalism is alive, well and feisty, especially, at the New York Times." Cheers people :)