Admittedly, I haven’t watched many of Conan O’Brien’s shows but I still admire him as a talented comedian and a guy that’s very inventive in his craft. I think he got totally screwed by NBC, but then, it’s all about the ratings and I guess his fans didn’t step up to the plate to support him until it was too late. Having said that, I think the one thing that this movie documentary showed was the fact that throwing money at someone doesn’t take away the personal sting of being rejected. There were really tons of funny moments in this flick, but my takeaway was seeing him, despite all the love, the sold out arenas on his tour, the hoards of faithful demanding pix with him and autographs, the homemade cakes and crocheted Conan likenesses, and yes, despite the huge monetary settlement from NBC, he still showed plenty of sadness about his ordeal. Even though, I’m sure, the grief he’s suffering is no different than states (not stages) of grief that we all go through in a loss, this one seems to be lingering for him, quite frankly, longer than I would have suspected. I’m wondering if some day he will take a second look at this flick and wished that he would have waited a little longer to make it, but then, maybe his goal was to show us all that wallowing in our self-pity is a very human, very natural thing.

My take away from Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times was to go and subscribe to the New York Times (NYT). Was this just one big advert for it? No. But it sure did elevate my opinion of the paper, which, frankly, I didn’t think could go any higher. Oh sure, there’s the Judy Miller thing and the Jason Blair scandal, but it’s going to be a sad day for journalism when news bureaus don’t put their teams in war zones and DC PAC zones. Wikileaks’ Julian Assange recognized the still validity of pushing his stuff via the NYT and so, no, the paper isn’t dead yet. And one of the most interesting parts of the movie was when David Carr (who, by the way, was sometimes equal to Conan in generating laughs) showed a printout of a Gawker landing page, cutting out literally all of the references to NYT and other papers’ stories. The result was a lacy piece of paper, with only about 2 or 3 stories remaining. A lot of the documentary was about the downsizing that went on, which I could certainly identify with as I’ve seen my own employer go from a staff of over 450 to a meager group of about 275. Overall, though, it was an honest look at the newspaper business in 2011 and certainly gave me food for thought about what’s going to happen next. But if the NYT isn’t part of my future, I guess I’ll have to refer back to Conan’s movie and start going through the states of grief he experienced.