Over the weekend, I went to see State of Play with high hopes. The original BBC drama about a journalist uncovering a conspiracy between government and business was nuanced, involved and gripping.

The Hollywood remake, based in Washington DC rather than London, was going to find it hard to live up to the original.

But the main weakness was its depiction of journalism in 2009.  In the Hollywood version, our hero is Russell Crowe, playing a disheveled, investigative reporter who is dismissive of the cub reporter responsible for writing the paper’s politics blog, played by Rachel McAdams.

As Los Angeles Times film writer, Patrick Goldstein noted:

“State of Play” didn’t just get its facts about journalism wrong, but its tone was off, too. The days of top gun investigative reporters are pretty much over.

Today’s journalists are less swaggering and self-involved, more nuanced and self-critical, especially in an era where every move a journalist makes is immediately analyzed and chewed over in a hundred blogs.

Hollywood hasn’t quite caught up to — or felt the pulse of — that new style of journalism.

The film presented an out-dated version of journalism.  The web was dismissed as the purview of “bloodsuckers and bloggers”.

And in a wonderfully anachronistic moment towards the end of the movie, McAdams’ young ingenue blogger talks about how people will want to read the story in newsprint, rather than on the web.

In the words of Goldstein:

At the film’s end, the reporter presses the SEND button and the presses miraculously begin to roll — print the legend, indeed!

In the year when one of the newspaper institutions of the US, the New York Times, won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for a story broken online, State of Play just feels out of step with the realities of journalism today.