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Yet Rossi was an associate producer on the documentary "Control Room," about the Al Jazeera satellite television news service in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. And Novack was previously a reporter covering arts and media for Time magazine. Both were already invested, personally and professionally, in figuring out more about the modern media age. Yet as the two filmmakers explain below, they did not initially set their sights on The New York Times.

Andrew, in developing a documentary commissioned by HBO about the young guns of Web 2.0, had tagged along with Ben Lerer, the 20-something founder of a digital tip sheet for urban hipsters called Thrillist. Over fried chicken and ice cream sundaes in the wood-paneled dining room, the conversation started with the decimation of the advertising market and wound its way to the challenges to news reporting looming ahead. It was a feisty debate: Can marquee journalists leave their legacy media homes and make it on their own with tumblr and Twitter accounts? Should opinion and news gathering be disaggregated to save money? Does anyone still look to newspapers as the supreme authority? And, finally, on the heels of Carlos Slim Helú's loan to The New York Times Company and its $57.8 million losses in the past year, the question arose, "Will The New York Times survive?"

It was a question that Michael Hirschorn had dared to ask publicly just weeks earlier. "What if The New York Times goes out of business—like this May?" he wrote in a provocative Atlantic magazine piece ominously entitled "End Times." "It's certainly plausible," he posited. After all, financial industry stalwarts Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns recently had met a similar fate. Why not The New York Times?

It was during this seemingly vulnerable moment for the paper that Andrew met with David Carr, The Times's media columnist who would eventually become the breakout character of "Page One." But the goal that day was to interview Carr for the Web 2.0 project. The idea was that after all the excess and froth of the first Internet boom 10 years earlier, there was a new breed of start-up that was leveraging social media, emerging technologies and stringent budgets, and we wanted to follow them on the path to success as a sort of sequel to the 2001 documentary—and cautionary tale—"Startup.com."

In his trademark gravelly voice, Carr talked about the rise of geo-location services like Foursquare, and the perils of mapping tastes and preferences in a project like Chris Dixon's Hunch.com. But the conversation kept circling back to the appropriate role for the legacy media in this changing universe. Meanwhile, The Times's cavernous newsroom, with its three floors linked by a series of fire-engine red staircases, beckoned as an ideal cinematic backdrop. And as Andrew listened to Carr, he thought, I want to make a movie about The Times instead. We imagined chronicling the paper during a time of transition in the way that Gay Talese had in his best-selling book "The Kingdom and the Power" in 1969, a period of record profits for the company, when The Times stood as "necessary proof of the earth's existence."

"Go talk to my bosses," Carr told Andrew. (He has since admitted that it was the most polite way he could think of to make Andrew go away.)

The one question audiences always ask is, Why did The Times let you inside? It took about six months of conversations and meetings with editors and reporters inside the paper before the project was green-lit. In hindsight, though, The Times probably opened its doors because of something executive editor Bill Keller told Andrew during one of those meetings: "I'm proud of my journalists and I'd like the world to see them."

In the newsroom, Andrew worked as a one-man crew. Having a boom operator and a field producer hovering over a video screen would have compromised the intimacy we were trying to achieve. In the first weeks of filming, Andrew often would sit for hours on the low filing cabinets that the writers have next to their cubicles, mainly just watching. The goal was to become part of the furniture and to give the film a naturalistic vérité feel of a movie by, for example, D.A. Pennebaker, the filmmaker behind "Don't Look Back" and "The War Room," and one of our heroes.

We are both regular readers of The Times, but we didn't want this to be an exercise in Times worship. We knew that if Andrew was going to be "embedded" in the newsroom for more than a year, we'd need to step outside its walls throughout the process of filming. So Kate began wading through the countervailing perspectives on the future of news—from Marc Andreessen, the cofounder of Netscape who once called on The Times to stop publishing on paper or perish (and who gently turned us down), to Elizabeth Eisenstein, the academic behind the classic "Printing Press as an Agent of Change." With a cast of cooler talking heads, we would create, we hoped, a counterpoint to the intimate, direct cinema inside the newsroom.

One of our first interviews was with Kurt Andersen, who'd written for Time and The New Yorker and edited New York magazine. He was also a cofounder, in the '80s, of Spy, which had a column devoted entirely to critiquing The New York Times. We'd recently heard Kurt compare The Times to the Vatican, which intrigued us. Did the paper really still hold such sway?

"In the secular church of establishment opinion and press, The New York Times is where the encyclicals come and where life is organized and ruled. You know, it's the great position of authority," Kurt told Kate in an interview. "What The New York Times thinks, says, does, is," he continued, "doesn't quite have the power of infallibility of the pope." Then he stopped and caught himself: "Of course, the pope doesn't anymore, does he?"

The notion of The Times as an influential institution during a time of turmoil, somewhat like the Catholic Church itself, stayed with us. This was not a story of continuity of authority but of disruption and transformation.

Perhaps no one had been more outspoken on the disruption occurring in media than Clay Shirky, the New York University new-media professor. Shirky had been a mentor to Dennis Crowley, the student who went on to start Foursquare. He was a folk hero of sorts for the crowd-sourcing camp. He'd been comparing the advent of the Internet to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, before such talk was stock book party banter. We went to see him just before commencement, when the students in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program were exhibiting their thesis projects. As we wound our way through the show to get to Clay's small office in a downtown loft building, we wondered if one of these seemingly quaint projects might be the next Foursquare.

In Shirky's view, the erosion of the mainstream media's authority was less of an explosion than a slow burn. "When they buried Walter Cronkite, it was a funeral for a man, but it was also a funeral for a role, that Platonic ideal of the authority figure, the deliverer of truth," Clay told Kate. "Cable TV, then CNN and the spread of everything from Fox to C-SPAN—every one of those—was a ratcheting up of the amount of discourse available to the public and then suddenly the Web goes mainstream and The Times is now one of many, many, many voices in a marketplace."

Whether the loss of authoritative media figures was a good thing or a bad thing was another question. "I go back and forth," Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, would later tell us. "Sometimes I think the voice of Walter Cronkite, the three broadcasts bringing you the news every evening, was very important, and sometimes I think it's too nostalgic to think of that as a great thing."

After the interview with Clay, he walked us to the elevator. "So who are the key newcomers to watch?" Kate asked as we stood waiting for the doors to open.

"Julian Assange," he replied immediately.

The name Assange was already creeping onto the mainstream radar. Weeks earlier, Andrew had arrived at The New York Times building to find Brian Stelter, the former collegiate blogger who now covers media for the paper, hunched over his laptop.

"A former hacker with a whistle-blower Web site"—whom we now know as Julian Assange of WikiLeaks—had posted a chilling video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter shooting down two journalists and several Iraqi civilians. Reuters had been trying for two years to obtain the footage through traditional, legal channels, and somehow Assange had managed to get his hands on the video and post it on YouTube. The talk that day at the Media Desk was about how the leak was a modern-day Pentagon Papers. No one needed to drop off thousands of pages of secret documents to reporters for The New York Times, as Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, did decades ago. When we interviewed Bill Keller later that week, he explained. "The bottom line is Daniel Ellsberg needed us. WikiLeaks doesn't."

What struck us most that day wasn't Keller's candor. We'd been impressed with the newsroom's openness ever since the paper's editors agreed to let the camera in months earlier. What really surprised us was how clearly something fundamental was changing—not just in the news business, but also in how we as a culture access and interpret and internalize information. Suddenly, The Times and other institutions like it seemed—to borrow a line from David Carr—"like trains whose cabooses have square wheels." Months later, after The Times had published several stories based on information originally obtained by WikiLeaks, we sat down with Susan Chira, the paper's foreign editor, in her office. "I think we're all much more humble about what we think we can control," she told us.

In the last scene of "Page One," the journalists gather in The Times's newsroom like crew in the hub of a luxury cruise ship. But it's not the Titanic. The apocalyptic vision of Michael Hirschorn's "End Times" did not come to pass.

Keller has assembled his staff to announce the paper's Pulitzer Prize winners for the year. Reporters are unusually relaxed and the paper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who's rarely in the newsroom, surveys the scene with a smile.

But the questions that prompted the film more than a year earlier linger. Will The New York Times survive? Will newspapers? Some industry watchers give newspapers just 10 more years. Even inside The Times, the idea of the single all-powerful arbiter of authority, the Zeus figure throwing thunderbolts from the sky, seems a relic of a pre-digital era.