Much ado about journalism.

State of Play is a wonderful political thriller made more dramatic by the superb work of Australian actor, Russell Crowe, who plays  a long-haired, overweight, whiskey loving  reporter investigating the murder of  a young boy.  

What's great about this movie is that it is set in the office of a big city newspaper and it rolls out the  tensions that  are currently  being played out in newspapers across the globe between the editor and reporter,  the journalist  and blogger.  As a newspaper junkie, these interesting dichotomies are  reasons enough to go see this incredible movie.

In the subplot the tense relationship between bloggers and traditional journalists  is depicted. 

Young bloggers work in the same building but the context is  entirely different.   The traditional newsroom is overcrowded, dirty and old.  The reporters use computers that look like they been through several wars.  Crowe's character has an  office for instance that looks exactly like the  one my father  occupied over  his  five decades in the media.   It is stacked with paper, pin-ups of important but ancient stories and dusty, thumb-marked books that are never to be thrown away.

Rachel McAdams, is Crowe's nemesis. She's from new media and as if to make the contrast more startling  between herself and Crowe, the director makes her character crisp,  fresh, young. Her work area is certainly more modern than Crowe’s.  At first, when Adams asks Crowe for help, he resists. They are wary of each other, but in the end work together on a story of Watergate proportions. 

Their work ends up in print - before it makes it online.  

"When people read this story, they should have newsprint on their hands," explains McAdams' character.

I won't give much more of the plot away but there are some important  lessons  about journalism  that can be gleaned from what is clearly the best newspaper- themed movie to hit the screens in a very long time.

Investigative reporting is the bane of good newspapers: The movie's depiction of journalists as skeptical, resolute, and not easily duped was amazing. Stories and facts are checked and rechecked and then checked again.  That's a good lesson for anyone trying to spread information in our evolving media world. Traditional journalists maintain that the reason why  bloggers can never replace them is because  blogs come with hidden agendas and  facts are rarely ever second sourced. Editors, they claim, raise the right questions, launder  issues through the legal washing machine and send stories back  to be cross referenced. In the State of Play when the Crowe’s sources reveal a connection deeper than the murder of a young thief, his editor wants to assign him another experienced journalist to work on the story. The blogger is not experienced enough. The tactic  is later discarded but it still points scrooge like fingers to this question:  are bloggers resourced enough to do the kind of stoic detective grunge work  that made Woodward and Bernstein so respected? This  is a  genuine and  important question. In State of Play we have reason to believe that the answer is yes. But this is  still  a movie and I don’t think this is quite true ( as yet) in the real world.  

Can the divide be bridged?: At the end of the movie when  Crowe and Adams  exit the final scene there are several cutaways of how newspapers get printed and then distributed. The production is fascinating but you can't help but think it is a process whose time has come. State of Play movie paints a clear print versus online scenario, which in the end works because the print wins. This is not what's happening in the real world though.  Newspapers are folding by the dozens and the only way to stop the hemorrhage  is to have  more integration between the online and print world. One way to do so is for  journalists -print and online-  to see themselves as one.  Every reporter should be an online journalist, equipped  with the knowledge of how to upload stories, write headlines for search engine optimisation and work in online ecosystems. Bloggers ought to take a page or two of experience from traditional reporters in the areas of cultivating sources,  and investigating stories. What I am really trying to get at is there shouldn't be print people and online folks in one news operation. Each one should have one name, journalist. Editors have to begin to cultivate the mutual cordiality.

What to do before the real convergence?  In the movie there is an excellent  background story of the paper’s new owners trying to stop its  financial collapse.  They want the controversy and the  editor (the wonderful and ageless  Helen Mirren)  is under pressure to deliver  sensational news that will sell. While this part of the story remains obscure and only a secondary sub plot, in the  real world of journalism this issue is  on the front burner. Editors are under pressure to deliver and if they don’t then the fear of  job loss and business closure is real. But perhaps the real fear is that  editors  are now forced to spend so  much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that they aren’t able to devote the time  needed to  invent a new prototype that works better for everyone. We see that is Mirren’s worry in the movie as she struggles to  discover the right balance.

Make State of Play a must see movie. If you work in journalism or the media, I am interested in your comments.