In a business known for eating its own (just ask Brian Williams), David Carr enjoyed a singular status. Among journalists, a breed that doesn’t bestow it lightly and doesn’t agree on much else, he was accorded a near-universal respect.
The New York Times media columnist died at age 58 late Thursday after collapsing in his newsroom. Autopsy results released Saturday said he died of complications from metastatic lung cancer. Sardonic about himself, if less so about the people he chronicled and commented on, Carr might have appreciated the locale, if not the fact and premature timing, of his passing.
The admiration for Carr was professional; the affection was personal.
Raspy-voiced and often struggling with health challenges (he beat cancer at one point), Carr wrote splendid and widely followed prose. From his prominent perch at The Times, he mentored another generation of promising young journalists, including his former colleague Brian Stelter, now CNN’s media correspondent.
“He ran a great newsroom,” said David Plotz, Carr’s deputy at Washington’s City Paper and now the chief executive of the startup Atlas Obscura. “He was aggressive. He was loud. He pushed everyone to be out of the office. He had fun himself, and it was infectious. It made the rest of us want to have fun. He had a deep, deep, deep belief in diversity and fought to have City Paper speak to black Washington.”
He was beloved, said Mother Jones magazine co-editor Clara Jeffery, “because he punched up and not down, because he was enthusiastic in his praise of success or even a good effort that didn’t quite pan out. When he fixed his eyes on you and asked you how you were doing, he really wanted to know.”
A former crack addict who wrote a best-selling memoir in 2008 (“The Night of the Gun”), Carr had an empathetic side that abetted his journalism, his colleagues said.
“David would talk to anyone,” said Anthony De Rosa, editor in chief of Circa, a mobile news organization, and one of the young neophytes Carr befriended. “Even if you were a stranger, he’d find a way to have a conversation with you. He had been through so much in his life … that he was really able to empathize with folks who are struggling. He was open and honest about himself, and he laid himself bare.”
Carr was born and raised around Minneapolis, the son of a clothing salesman father and a schoolteacher mother.
He became the editor of the local alternative weekly, the Twin Cities Reader, after attending the University of Minnesota.
His addiction problems, with cocaine and alcohol, became acute in the late 1980s. He beat up a girlfriend and pulled a gun on a friend. For a time, he lived with a woman who was his drug dealer and the mother of his twin daughters. He recovered and began a new life with his wife, Jill, with whom he raised three daughters.
“For those of us who have the luck and honor to have worked for him, he was a one-man journalism school, drilling into your head the momentousness of any mistake, kvelling in your successes,” said Jake Tapper, now at CNN. “He had a clear ethical compass that was basically a beacon in whatever newsroom he stood. He saw journalism as both a caper and one of the noblest of professions.”
