BB: Absolutely. I would say that at no point were our cameras steering our journalists into a broadcaster position, because they were never really talking to the cameras. But certainly it put them in a strange position, and we were conscious of that coming in. But I think if you ask most of them, certainly what Kerry Burke and Greg Gittrich would say, is that they spend their professional lives asking people, sometimes on the worst days of their lives, to come forward and speak on the record. So when it came time and somebody came knocking on their door, they felt like it was hypocritical to say no, and they could tell that we were excited about the opportunity to tell their stories.

In this week’s episode we tell the story of the first New York City cop who was killed in Iraq. And it’s incredibly important to the reporters on a personal level to tell that story well. And with all the cynicism that people project onto journalists, they saw that we were telling not just the salacious stories, but also of how hard they work on telling the emotional stories for the people of New York.

GB: I think when people first heard the concept of the show, I think they imagined that you were going to be inside both the Daily News and the New York Post. But it seems as if it’s going to be exclusively about the Daily News with the Post figuring into the series as this dark force lurking around and stealing stories. I wonder, why did you choose the Daily News?

BB: The Post was never approached. There have been rumors that the Post was approached and they turned it down, but that’s completely untrue. The Daily News was chosen because it is a great paper of New York City. I can understand why people thought it was going to be about both papers, but the fact is that we were only ever going to follow the reporters at one paper. The more overlap we get between the characters and subjects, the better it is for us. We didn’t want to present an informational overview of New York newspapers, we wanted to present a view of what it’s like to work at a great city paper. So as much as possible, even within the Daily News, we choose people whose lives and whose jobs overlap.

I wouldn’t describe the Post as a dark force, but the competition is very real, there are five daily papers in New York City. And yes, the competition with the Post is more targeted. But the journalists at the Daily News always want to be first, they always want to have the best story, whether it’s the Post or any other paper. So that competition is extremely real.

GB: You must have been thrilled to find the kind of personalities you found there among the reporters. Someone like Kerry Burke, it’s gold …

BB: Absolutely. He’s money. He wouldn’t say that about himself, but that’s how he would describe someone else. He’s phenomenal. He works unbelievably hard. He cares so deeply about what he does. He believes in what he’s doing. So as a filmmaker, finding someone like him is a dream come true. How often do you hear someone say, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” about their job? It doesn’t happen. And to really, truly mean it. He really cares more about the work that he does than most of us. And that’s an incredible story to tell. And I believe that his approach, when we really started to get to know him and see the level of commitment that he brings to the job, that’s when the show really started to come to life for us.

GB: I wonder what kind of insights about journalism, besides the commitment and passion, emerged for you in the process of working on this project.

BB: I’d have to go back to what we were talking about before. As someone who grew up in New York City and grew up reading the New York Times, I hadn’t really thought about the importance of papers like the Daily News that are much more about the city, that speak to a local audience. Spending the kind of time we did on those stories, I thought a lot about the importance of telling those local stories for a local audience, so that people know their history and they know what the stories are of their own neighborhood.

• 1
• 2