The scene is the New York Times newsroom. The paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, is watching the Trump inauguration on television. “Wow,” he murmurs. “What a story. What a fucking story. OK, let’s go.”

Covering the reporters covering Donald Trump, The Fourth Estate is a documentary filmed inside the New York Times over a 16-month period. Over four episodes we see how much the Trump presidency has accelerated the news cycle. The reporters sometimes look as though they have barely had time to brush their hair or do up their ties in order to keep up with the relentless pace that has characterised the Trump White House.

But watching The Fourth Estate from Australia, I found it difficult to do so without applying another lens: that of being a journalist in a time of deep cuts to media organisations.

When we see the five investigative reporters at the Times meet to discuss how they dig into Trump’s Russian connections, the thought that crossed my mind was: could Australian news organisations do the same with the resources they have?

In the five years up to 2013, an estimated 3,000 journalists lost their jobs in Australia. There have been further redundancies at Fairfax Media, News Corp and the ABC since then. This can’t be seen as anything other than crippling. Not only do reporters cover the news with fewer resources than they did 20 years ago, but those who are still in the business are expected to be multi-platformed performers – tweeting, appearing in podcasts, and on radio and television promoting their work as well as writing stories.

According to Margaret Simons: “Most of the new entrants to the business [in Australia] employ only a few local journalists. The reputable ones struggle to perform miracles each hour with hardly any reporters.”

No wonder the Save the ABC rally at the weekend in Melbourne packed out the Town Hall and had queues around the block.

This is huge. Melb Town Hall is packed to the rafters. People are still queued up all along Swanson, around the corner up Collins, all the way to Russell, waiting to get in. All here to #saveourABC pic.twitter.com/EngbRw76FC — Adam Bandt (@AdamBandt) July 15, 2018

An independent and well-resourced ABC has broken stories including revelations in 2013, with the Guardian, of Australian spy agencies tapping the phones of the Indonesian president; abuses in the Northern Territory juvenile justice system; police corruption in Queensland – the list goes on.

Any questions as to why it’s important that media organisations fight to maintain their dignity, independence and resources are answered in The Fourth Estate – where New York Times staff are run ragged around the clock, trying to keep up with all the twists and turns of the Trump administration as well as relentless attacks on their credibility by the president himself.

The Fourth Estate is a process documentary, focusing on a few key players in the Times including Baquet, the reporters Maggie Haberman, Michael Schmidt and Glenn Thrush, and the Washington bureau chief, Elisabeth Bumiller. Viewers see how news is gathered and created, and the judgment used in deciding what is or isn’t a story.

Newspaper dramas tend to look to the past for all the glory. From the 1976 Watergate thriller All the President’s Men to last year’s The Post, 2009’s State of Play and 2015’s Spotlight. These movies close triumphantly, with shots of the newspaper rolling off the presses, being loaded into vans and being distributed across the country.

There is none of that here. Instead, this could be the first accurate depiction of what it is like to work in a digital-first newsroom. Instead of presses, there shots of people typing, and a slight pause before they hit the blue icon on their content management system that says “Publish”.

The New York Times’ Washington investigations editor Mark Mazzetti in The Fourth Estate. Photograph: SBS

While publishing has become easier, the rest of the job is getting harder. As we watch the Washington reporters work around the clock (missing Valentine’s Day dinners, time with their children, sleep), we see all the other stuff they now have to do as part of their jobs. When the White House correspondent Haberman sits down to record an episode of the podcast The Daily at 9.15pm, she looks beyond exhausted. “I’m gonna fall asleep if we don’t start soon,” she says.

To see a big, well-resourced newsroom like the New York Times invokes a mix of nostalgia and jealousy. The paper’s Washington bureau is well-staffed. The paper’s main rival, The Washington Post, is owned by the billionaire Jeff Bezos, whose deep pockets support the sort of reporting needed in a time of a highly metabolised and complicated news cycle.

The New York Times’ “Trump bump” means that there are more readers of the paper than ever before – and more subscribers. But that doesn’t mean everything is rosy. During the documentary, Baquet looks to further increase the Times’ capacity for political reporting, although this comes at the expense of the copy desk, where 109 copy editors were cut down to about 50 positions. The New York Times isn’t growing so much as reorganising.

Amid attacks on the Australian public broadcaster by politicians and rightwing commentators, plus job losses in the newsrooms across the country, the public – as we’ve seen at the ABC rallies – is pushing back. As they should. If The Fourth Estate shows us anything, it’s that a healthy media – one that works relentlessly hard, often in the face of attacks by the government – means a healthy democracy.

• The Fourth Estate: The NY Times and Trump is streaming on SBS On Demand