Lessons from old movie to a modern media

I was a member of this summer's Washington Post intern class, and as I left I reflected on my experience using the same cinematic lens as when I contemplated being there.

Once upon a time — actually just 3½ years ago — I was in high school. Beginning in ninth grade, every month or two, I would get my political fix by inserting a DVD of the 35-year-old All the President's Men in my laptop.

There was something timelessly intriguing about the film: the suspense, the intrepid reporters named Woodstein, the inscrutable "Deep Throat." It was our national thriller that I could forever relive three decades later.

But it wasn't until a journalism class senior year that a film truly catapulted me into journalism: The Paper, one of director Ron Howard's most underrated and least remembered pictures.

The 1994 film, which portrays a New York City metro editor's 24-hour sprint on a racially sensitive double homicide, cast A-listers Glenn Close, Michael Keaton and Robert Duvall as editorial brass. In his reporting, Keaton, the city editor, ultimately vindicates two wrongly accused African-American youths of the crime.

The plot of journalists uncovering injustice broadly appealed to me, of course. Keaton, a profile in journalistic nobility, holds a headline that would incriminate the two students ("Gotcha") when another suspect and motive emerge, and a police detective familiar with the case tells him "they (the boys) didn't do it."

"We decided to hang out in newsrooms and write down what people were saying," says the screenplay's co-author, Stephen Koepp, a longtime journalist at Time. "A lot of best lines were out of real journalists' mouths. We were really inspired by that."

Some examples in the film:

Metro editor's wife when he snaps open a can of Coke for breakfast: Why don't you just pour battery acid down your throat? Metro editor retorts: No caffeine.

Metro editor when one of his writers interrogates him as he walks into his office: Doesn't anybody say "good morning" any more?

Funny, lighthearted and gracious, the film contributed to my entry into the journosphere.

After a summer in the Washington Post's newsroom, there is one jarring difference from the dozens of hours I've immersed myself in The Paper. Many are glued to their computers and are having animated conversations electronically (via e-mail or inter-office instant-messenger) that they used to have in person.

Koepp takes similar notice.

"Newsrooms are much quieter now. In the older days, people would get up and have conversations with each other, even shout across the room and around the cubicle."

The consequence is that today's paper often feels like a whisper compared to the fictitious one from the early '90s. Back in the day, there were manual typewriters, so talking wasn't shattering silence in the newsroom because there was background noise.

Now there is a nonstop flow of information monitored in real time — transforming a story from one stage to the next rapidly. Moreover, this is accompanied by a requisite preoccupation with the outside world and — amid a new business model — fierce competition in the flow of information.

Koepp laments the fact that there is less conversation and more aggregation.

"The code of the newsroom should always be to help each other in person. Nothing beats walking around to people's desks and offices. It's the ultimate instant message, with facial expressions and hand gestures — multimedia signals that enhance conversation."

When I approached him about The Paper, Joe Saltzman, a professor of journalism and director of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture project at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, was somewhat deflating on its relevance in 2011.

For Saltzman, The Paper is an ancient artifact depicting an old-fashioned newspaper that is largely inapplicable today. He says State of Play and the The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, both starring Web teams and bloggers, are more in sync with today's new media culture and technology.

"You're still more than 17 years in the past. The Paper was a fairly realistic if melodramatic account of a day in the life of a newspaper." But many young journalists (including me) don't want The Paper to be over. It's just too good to leave behind.

Alexander Heffner, a senior at Harvard, has written for the Boston Globe, Newsday and RealClearPolitics. An intern at the Washington Post this summer, he has written several pieces for the St. Petersburg Times.