Here's the concise bio that TDS has for Bruce Headlam:
Bruce Headlam is the media desk editor at The New York Times. Formerly, he was the media and marketing editor for the Business Day section of the paper, and oversaw the Monday business section, which was largely devoted to media and technology. Before focusing on business, Headlam worked on two weekly sections at The New York Times, Circuits and Escapes, and was an occasional contributor to The New York Times Magazine and Slate.com. Headlam is featured in director Andrew Rossi's 2011 documentary "Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times."
There's all sorts of stuff floating around about him, the documentary, and assorted other inside baseball gossip news-that's-fit-to-backlight (fit-for-pixels? Why isn't there already a thing for that? If there is, why don't I already know it?). Here's one of the couple pieces in the Village Voice:
As the Industry Panics, the Times Gets Its Own Reality Show in Page One
By J. Hoberman Wednesday, Jun 15 2011
Nobody cries, “Stop the presses!” in Andrew Rossi’s Page One: Inside the New York Times; no one would dare. There’s a palpable fear that it could actually happen.
Rossi’s documentary, which might have been called Inside Baseball: Inside the New York Times, opens with a montage of the press in full operational mode, spewing out newspapers all but automatically for a fleet of waiting delivery trucks. It’s a system at once efficient and cumbersome, ultra-modern yet quaint, that suggests nothing so much as a herd of dinosaurs, oblivious to the threat of impending extinction.
Part vérité, part infomercial, Page One celebrates a way of life shared by more than the ink-stained wretches of the Fourth Estate. “Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer,” G.W.F. Hegel, onetime editor of a Bavarian daily called the Bamberger Zeitung, noted in his diary nearly 200 years ago. For many New Yorkers of a certain age, the New York Times still fulfills that sacred function (even if they’ve already heard the news on Morning Edition or watched it on Morning Joe). The paper is doing God’s work; as more than once noted during the course of Page One, the Times re-creates the world each and every day by setting the news agenda and, in so doing, sanctifies our ongoing social existence...
Um. And here's another:
Doc Filmmaker Goes Inside the New York Times, Gets Story
By Eric Hynes Wednesday, Jun 8 2011
A media organization covering the media is reflexive enough, but how about adding documentary filmmakers to the mix? “It was journalists reporting on journalism, and we were working as journalists covering that,” says Kate Novack, producer and writer of Page One: Inside the New York Times, a sprawling vérité group portrait of the Gray Lady’s media desk that opens June 17. The paper’s reporters and editors get the War Room treatment, with ornery vet David Carr playing Carville to Brian Stelter’s fresh-faced Stephanopoulos, and inside-baseball industry chatter presented as front-page news. “It was treating the New York Times newsroom as if we were reporting in the field,” says director Andrew Rossi. “Our beat was them.”
...Though understandably eager to lift the skirts of the hallowed publication (“It’s like a cross between a law firm and Congress,” Rossi says of the 41st Street HQ), they also spotted a major breaking story and reported it out...
“We wanted to cover, almost as a primary document, the New York Times in what we viewed as a historic moment—not just for the Times, but for journalism and the way the culture processes information,” Novack says. “People were talking about the digital revolution leaving a lot of dead bodies on the side of the road,” says Rossi, and with the merits of old-school outlets suddenly questioned in the era of Gawker and HuffPo, it was time to take stock of what actually goes on at an institution like the Times and to consider what would be lost if the old lion became extinct...
“It’s interesting as a documentary filmmaker to make a movie about journalists,” says Novack. “So many of the issues that you’re grappling with they’re grappling with also,” from questions over how best to gather and present information, to simply—or not so simply—following a story. Yet such self-reflexivity always runs the risk of becoming an irrelevant echo chamber, something that Headlam ruefully confronts in the film when trying to discern between “a real story and a media story.” For Stelter and his colleagues, it’s crucial that they not cover media “as a navel-gazing exercise in what our friends in cocktail parties are doing. It has to be about citizens getting information.”..
And then there's this:
(That links here, btw.) And that's about as much reading about observation-of-navel-gazing as I could take. Might be something non-meta out there, but I've lost interest. If you haven't, you might start with @pageonemovie. |