Some are calling David Carr the “breakout star” of Page One, the documentary that takes you inside The New York Times‘ newsroom. But for us who have seen Carr participate in two panels before, his performance in the movie didn’t come as a surprise.

During both the screening of the film and the panel that followed, Carr was the main attraction. We’ve pointed out before how Carr’s tone and delivery come with a certain calmness that sets the audience at ease and, in turn, calls for a certain trust from his onlookers. Those skills probably help him in his reporting, and have thrust him into the spotlight when he and others discuss Page One. No wonder he’s such a frequent panelist at media events.

At the top of this panel, Keller admitted that on his first viewing several months ago, he believed that the movie was far too long at 90 minutes. Rossi said that he wanted to include more than just The Times‘ media department, he wanted to showcase the  “moment of great crisis across the board” for the entire journalism field. This is what Carr called a “Death Valley moment” where no one – even Times reporters – really knew what was in store for the nation’s top newspaper, and whether it could survive tough economic times and uncertainty.

For all the changes that journalism is enduring now, Gay Talese said he believes that to do it right you have to be out in the field. Technological advances have definitely changed things, Talese said, but he recalled being advised when he was a budding reporter to shy away from the telephone. The panelists all have a great sense of honor for the legacy of the newspaper, Talese even rebuffing a suggestion that he was a pioneer for The New Journalism. He said that even he learned it from his predecessors. Talese said that he still reads The Times every day, which takes him two hours.

So will The Times live on? Rossi isn’t sure if journalism will remain the same on a new platform. Carr, however, thinks The Times will survive, even if only as a status symbol. When you’re on your iPad, he said, it’s impossible to tell if you’re reading The New York Times or not. Echoing this sentiment were two people sitting in front of us at the event who made it difficult to tell if they were tweeting about the panel on their iPhones or just checking their email.

What They Said
“One thing we have in this family is the belief in freedom of the press even if it’s all about the press. And that’s a great tradition.”
- Gay Talese praises the Sulzbergers for their commitment to the paper

“I got sent down to Katrina but it was after the gossip columnists but before the architecture critics.”
- David Carr says that while he enjoys his media beat, it’s not exactly the most pressing one at the paper

“He would never have let The Daily Show in.”
– Bill Keller jokes about David Carr’s news judgment being better than his.

“I didn’t aspire to be a foreign correspondent because the story really was New York. The story was America.”
– Gay Talese kept his interests local

“[Brian Stelter] is really like an avatar for the new media, even establishing his own brand within the paper.”
– Andrew Rossi was impressed by the work ethic of the media reporters he shadowed

What We Thought

• Keller did a great job in a short amount of time asking the right questions. He focused on Carr and Talese for their reactions to the film and thoughts on the future of journalism, while turning to Rossi for the outsider perspective. It was a panel that could have gone the other way, being that Rossi was out of his element on a panel with three journalism veterans, but Keller managed to incorporate Rossi in when he could shed some light, too.
• In the Thank Yous at the closing of the film, we couldn’t help but notice that alphabetically, “The White House” came just before “WikiLeaks.org.” If that doesn’t speak to the current media landscape, we don’t know what does.
• Carr said that Jayson Blair was one of his close friends at The Times when he first arrived there. It seems to still shake him how someone could get away with that at The Times.

PANEL RULES!

This panel didn’t feature any audience questions, possibly an effort to get the audience out at a decent hour. After two hours of sitting, we were somewhat relieved to be sent on our way.

Sulzberger made these remarks at the WAN-IFRA’s 9th International Newsroom Summit, a conference being held yesterday and today in London. The publisher was there to deliver the keynote speech during a session about getting readers to pay for online content—the New York Times is slated to introduce a metered paywall on its website early next year.

Though Sulzberger’s statement may seem shocking, it shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been following the plight of print media over the past decade. Mashable reports that the situation is rapidly growing more and more dire:

As newspaper circulation continues to fall, so do newspaper revenues. All told, losses amount to 27.2% or ad revenue lost year-over-year between 2008 and 2009. More and more consumers are using the web to stay updated about current events; in fact, in a poll earlier this year, only 21.7% of Mashable readers said they got their news from a newspaper.

Clearly, something has to change if venerable news institutions like the Times are to stay afloat. Sulzberger seemed confident about the paper’s imminent paywall, calling its adoption “a step in the right direction for us.” And if this experiment turns out to be a bust, like the TimesSelect debacle of 2007?

Well, that’s the beauty of working in a relatively low-cost digital atmosphere: “If we discover that we’ve tried something that’s not working, we could change it,” Sulzberger said.

Frank Rich

It is often taken as fact that the New York Times has a bias in favor of gay rights and the gay and lesbian community in general. In a 2004 public editor column, Daniel Okrent said “it’s disappointing to see The Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading.”

But it hasn’t always been that way. It was not until 2002 that the New York Time first began to run wedding announcements from same-sex couples. And tucked away in Rich’s piece are two sentences that describe how the New York Times was very late in covering AIDS and the gay community generally.

The Times did not put the mysterious disease on Page 1 until after the casualty rate exceeded 500 and didn’t start covering it in earnest until Rock Hudson died of AIDS three years after that. In 1985, the term “gay” itself was an untouchable for writers in this newspaper.

Journalism historian Larry Gross recounts that during the 1970s and 1980s, gay stories were a contentious issues in the paper because of publisher Arthur Sulzberger and managing Abe Rosenthal’s attitude towards gay people and stories. On the question of AIDS coverage, he quotes Michelangelo Signorile as saying “Rosenthal, who attacks anti-Semitism in the media, never realized that the way he was treating the AIDS epidemic wasn’t much different from the way that news organizations treated the Holocaust early on.” It wasn’t until 1987, after Rosenthal left the paper to be replaced by Max Frankel, that the word “gay” replaced “homosexual.”

He also quotes former NYT reporter Charles Kaiser:

Everyone below Rosenthal spent all of their time trying to figure out what to do to cater to his prejudices. One of these widely perceived prejudices was Abe’s homophobia. So editors throughout the paper would keep stories concerning gays out of the paper.

While AIDS coverage improved under Frankel, another major turning point in how AIDS and the gay community was covered by the NYT was the 1990 collapse in the newsroom of deputy national editor Jeffrey Schmalz who was later diagnosed with AIDS. The closeted Schmalz said that he feared that his sexual orientation would harm his ascent in the newsroom and therefore his brain seizure at his desk also represented his coming-out as gay. In 1992 Schmalz wrote “Covering AIDS And Living It: A Reporter’s Testimony,” a groundbreaking moment for the paper because a gay man with AIDS wrote about being a journalist and covering both gay issues and AIDS.

Twenty years after Schmalz feared telling anyone he was gay because it would harm his career, a gay man–Richard Berke–is now the national editor and a so-called gay mafia–which includes Ben Brantley, Frank Bruni, Stuart Elliot, Adam Nagourney, and Eric Wilson–hold key positions at the paper. Alas, the paper has no openly gay or lesbian voices on it editorial pages.

Now, of course, gays are everywhere in the paper’s coverage and in the newsroom.  In a recent blog post, Kaiser commented on the changes at the paper after attending a New York Times-sponsored seminar with the lawyers working to overturn Proposition 8 in California.

[I]n the third row sat New York Times publisher and chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. , and six rows behind him was Andy Rosenthal, the editor of the Times editorial page.

Thirty years ago, their fathers, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger and Abe Rosenthal, were running this newspaper, and they shared such antipathy for homosexuals that gay employees of the newspaper believed that their careers depended on keeping their sexual orientations a secret.

But as the younger Sulzberger began his ascension through the paper’s corporate ranks, he did a  remarkable thing: he made it clear to every single person who worked for him that he would not tolerate an iota of prejudice based on sexual orientation.

Practically overnight, he transformed what had been a relentlessly homophobic place into one of the most gay-friendly institutions in the world.

Concluding “[w]hat a difference a new generation can make,” Kaiser said “Andy Rosenthal’s editorial page has published more brilliant editorials in defense of equal rights for gay people than any other editorial page in the world.”

So does the NYT have a bias now in how it covers same-sex marriage and gays generally?  That’s probably something for the next public editor to explore. There’s no doubt that few papers cover the LGBT community  as extensively as the New York Times, but it is far from perfect. Some critics argue that gay people are much more likely to show up on the culture and arts pages than the news pages, and locals complain that the paper does a poor job of handling news that involves the local LGBT community. In addition,  lesbians still remain largely invisible in coverage (and in the newsroom). And, of course, conservative critics of the paper will always contend there is a strong pro-gay bias, not matter the facts on the ground.

But as Rich points out, there’s been a remarkable change at the paper and how it approaches covering the gay community and gay issues. His column provides for a nice moment to reflect on those changes.

But hey, why focus on the nitty gritty when there’s a good war story to be had? Answer: it’s irresistible. When I asked NYU’s Jay Rosen about the difference between the reality and the hype he remarked that “the phrase “old fashioned newspaper war” is simply too attractive to be resisted; an entire mythology rides on it, reaching back to His Girl Friday and “you supply the pictures, I’ll supply the war.” (The Hearst of the legend.) Nothing can stop a narrative like that, and nothing will.”

Except maybe lack of readers. It’s far too early to tell whether the Journal’s foray into local news — or as the Village Voice refers to it, “The New York Post for People Too Rich To Be Caught With A Copy Of The New York Post” — will be a success, one week does not a successful media venture make. That said, it’s been one hell of a week for local news, and if there was ever a time for the Journal to shine and impress the past five days were a better opportunity than anyone could reasonably expect.

Alas, as far as I can tell, they’ve made nary a blip. In his column yesterday Michael Wolff described it as “a discordant and confounding presence” “inside what is still one of the best papers in the world.” So what to do? Here’s five things we think could help make the Journal’s Greater New York Section actually matter.

>>>>NEXT: Five things we think could help make the Journal’s Greater New York Section actually matter.

Leaving aside the fact we have been hearing variations on this rumor for close to a year now (the pay wall always imminent, the implementation always a few month away) it’s interesting to see how the news was greeted this time around. Not that long ago a NYT paywall elicited plenty of no way I won’t pay responses, as we progress faster and further into the 2.0 world there appears to be less of that and more resignation on how to best apply to practice so as not to impede on the NYT.com relevance and traffic.

Reuters Felix Salmon:

The NYT system should instead simply measure how much you used the site last month, and then bill you; my guess is that Apple, when it releases its new tablet later this month, will also unveil a system which makes it very easy to link your nytimes.com account to your iTunes account so that your NYT bill will simply get added on to your iTunes bill along with your apps and TV shows and music and ringtones. The NYT itself won’t even need to collect your credit-card information. Once you reach a certain maximum billing level for the year, the NYT and Apple will just stop billing you.

And what of people who can’t or won’t pay? The NYT is an invaluable source of information for many people around the world who don’t have credit cards or iTunes accounts. I think that in the first instance most countries outside the US (and maybe also Canada) should be exempt from having to pay anything.

I take it back. Jeff Jarvis is less than thrilled at the prospect of paying online for what he already pays for in print:

I think the risks are great and grave. The Times could have fought to become the preeminent news brand on earth, fighting it out with the BBC for that title. Instead, I fear, it will duck into its shell as the Washington Post has. I already pay for The Times at home. I hope they would not charge me again. If they do, I will cancel the paper. If they charge me for using the paper more, I will use it less.** I will find other very good substitutes for much of what I get from it — indeed, this will push me to discover and curate new sources.

Meanwhile Gizmodo picks up on Sherman’s note that the timing of this latest rumor interestingly coincides with Apple’s upcoming release of the Tablet.

The New York Times experimented with paid content before, without much success, but that’s not stopping them from giving it a go again. This time, however, the paid-to-free content changeover might coincide with a certain unconfirmed mystery tablet. The NYT announcement is expected to arrive in the “coming weeks,” which puts it smack dab in the middle of Apple’s mystery product press conference, slated for January 27. Convenient!

According to New York magazine, the paid content model could also arrive hand-in-hand with an Apple partnership or distribution deal.

So yeah, maybe what makes it different this time around is that there will soon be available technology which makes it possible to pay without pissing too many reader off. Or not. We’ve been talkin NYT paid content for close to a year now…let’s just say I’ll believe it when they start asking for my credit card number.

Pic via.

“Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane.”

This is the so-called Titanic Fallacy, which is aptly named. Tell it to the 1,517 people who died in the water that night, several hundred miles short of New York.

I really wish he had kept that analogy to himself. With all the digital cheers going up around the deathbed of print, the media world does not need a pinch of snuff-porn, any more than it needs a Sulzberger Happy Meal.

The truth lies where it so often does, somewhere between hope and despair. But the outlook for media today is a lot better than the future for luxury cruises was in 1912. It’s bracing, to be sure, but in the way a good long run or a complex, stimulating book can be.

Consider, for example, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial two-volume work, “The Printing Press As Agent of Change” (Cambridge University Press, 1980). I’m in the middle of reading it now, and it is a long, bracing run indeed—a minute and skillful examination of just how massive the disruption was, a story previously taken for granted by historians but never so exhaustively studied and eloquently told.

All that is commonly remembered now of that fundamental shift is that reading became more common and knowledge more widespread. We do not mourn the monks whose craft and art of illuminating manuscripts was torn from their hands by that revolution.

Neither should we mourn the printers or print publishers of today. Instead, we should applaud the digital shift, which is actually fulfilling the manifest destiny set out for information by Gutenberg’s bright idea in the 15th Century.

Thanks to the digital revolution, there are millions more people consuming news and information than ever before. As Moore’s law works 24/7 to double the capacity of new devices, the much-rumored Apple Tablet, said to be coming out in a few months, will be just the ancestor of a new generation of digital hardware that will bring text, movies, music, motion graphics—all the tools of multimedia—off your desk and into your hands.

As that happens, the world of media will be transformed. In addition to inviting users to “lean forward” to find the information they want and need through search engines and databases, information on the Web—and more generally in the world of digital broadband—will encourage users to “lean back” and experience the new ways data can combine into coherent, narrative forms. Otherwise known as stories.

Maybe Sulzberger was misunderstood. Let’s hope so. Let’s hope he realizes how lucky he is that some of the media inventors with the Wright stuff are in the Times’s own multimedia department, doing the hard work of inventing the crafts and arts of digital story-telling and so our information future.

Any day now, he should get them out of the factory and let them fly.

Jim Gaines is the editor-in-chief of FLYPmedia, the first true digital multimedia publication. Gaines was the former managing editor at People, Time and Life magazines, and also served as the corporate editor of Time Inc. An advocate of storytelling and the widespread adoption of technology and multimedia within publishing, Gaines blogs about the evolution of the media industry at True/Slant.

— New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. demonstrates the correct Titanic analogy to employ when discussing the future of print. The fact he is clear on the problem (and the future!), alas, does not mean he has a solution. Where are the media world’s Wright Bros.? Will the Zuckerbergs one day fill the void?

This morning the Globe followed-up on the news with an interview with NYT Co. chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. and chief executive Janet Robinson, who say they are in no rush to sell the group of papers, which also includes the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and the Globe‘s website, Boston.com.

“What’s important here is that the Globe be maintained as a viable business entity,” Sulzberger told the Globe in some of his first words on the topic of a sale, ”whether it’s sold or we continue to operate it, and to make sure it has the financial stability to ensure its continuity. We’re committed to that.’’

Still no word on why the Times Co. waited until now to announce the sale.

The Globe has also reported on three possible buyers for the New England Media Group. The Beverly Hills-based private equity firm Platinum Equity, which purchased the San Diego Union-Tribune in March and specializes in handling distressed companies, has bid $35 million, with the added cost of $59 million in pension liability assumption. Another bid came from Jack Connors, a businessman and philanthropist based in Boston, and Stephen Pagliuca, co-owner of the Boston Celtics and an executive at Bain Capital, who are seeking to finance Globe reporting through a non-profit foundation.

Steve Taylor, whose family sold the Globe to the Times Co. for $1.1 billion in 1993, is also involved in the bidding process.