On demand: "Page One: Inside the New York Times"

Things change. When I first started writing for the Sunday Telegraph seven years ago, we had a whole page on which to review the week's six or seven new film releases. After the crash of 2008, the newspaper found itself so short on available space, and so desperate for all the advertising it could get, that we were left with a half- or even quarter-page between the two of us to do justice to the ten or more releases routinely thrust each weekend into a marketplace that seemed more competitive than ever. Well, we sucked it up, dropped words and sentences and paragraphs, and got on with it the best we could, although a growing frustration at my inability to discuss films, or pursue a particular point, at any length led me to cross the great divide between the analogue and digital realms and start the blog you're reading now, where I could round up my published work alongside more discursive (and arguably unpublishable) pieces.

It was in 2008 that the New York Times recruited David Carr, the hero of Andrew Rossi's fine documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times, to serve as their media columnist. Initially, Carr's remit was unclear: nobody seems sure whether he was hired to describe the newspaper industry's transition from one realm to another, or simply to write the obituary for print journalism, using its own ink. Described by one of his colleagues as "the most human of humans" and by his editor as "the most fair-minded individual I know", Carr is a pugnacious figure, a former crack addict who - like The Wire creator and former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, another seasoned media observer - brings to the page a rare weight of life experience: in marked contrast to the scattered data and often juvenile invective one often finds on the Internet, he's become a master of context and perspective, possessed of a particular gift for putting events (and people) in their proper place. (He describes Twitter as "a cacophony of short-burst information", before - fair-minded as ever - giving it a go, and succumbing to its charms.)

Carr's line, pursued in his columns, is that the medium (i.e. newspapers like the Times) is no longer the message, the message itself is; that, in the interests of efficiency, and for better and worse, we've cut out the middle men, leading to the cutbacks most major newspapers have recently witnessed in both space and personnel. Essentially, we've left ourselves room and time for but 140 characters per person. This is not an entirely healthy and progressive step, it seems to me, and Rossi's film puts centre stage the final throes of a battle between old, apparently dying ways (the typesetting shown in an Alistair Cooke Omnibus report from the 60s, a Citizen Kane poster in the current Times editor's office, reporters pounding a particular beat, retracing their steps, checking facts) and the newer, more immediate and impactful delivery systems, like blogs, Twitter, and Julian Assange's Wikileaks website, that have come through in the last decade to challenge behemoths like the Times.

Rossi plays his access to the newsroom floor off against a more critical overview of the newspaper business. There's no hiding the fact the Times was badly wounded by reporter Judith Miller's White House-approved cheerleading for the second Gulf War, and some evidently believe the newspaper, like many of its rivals, has become a reactionary dinosaur that deserves to die out. Yet Carr remains a staunch defender of the Times's other 60-odd pages, and of its proud legacy of reporting and analysis. No matter how the news eventually comes to arrive on our doorsteps and desktops - via paperboys on bicycles or fibre-optic cables - it surely needs compelling and, more importantly, conscientious voices such as his.

Is he fighting a losing battle, in clutching to these old-media values? That remains to be seen: one solution Rossi's film proposes is a hybrid of the two realms, as tested (tentatively) in the recent collaboration between Wikileaks, the New York Times, the Guardian in the UK and Der Spiegel in Germany on the issue of diplomatic cables. Katharine Hepburn once said of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers "he gives her class, she gives him sex", and a similar principle would appear to be at work in these partnerships: the newspapers gave the website's revelations credibility, while the digital link bestowed upon the broadsheets a certain hipness, a new-found awareness of where the cutting edge might now lie. The documentary medium, for its part, continues to flourish: in walking the Times beat, and hitting upon his own form of assiduous, balanced, intelligent journalism, Rossi shows us there may just be something here worth saving, or - to put it another way - something we'd badly miss if it were to vanish completely, and be replaced by conjecture and snark.

Page One: Inside the New York Times is available to view on demand here for the next two weeks, and on DVD through Dogwoof.