02/13/2015
This guy wrote me an email once while in college.
This guy checked the pulse on our news. He chronicled the news makers and news shakers. He criticized and championed our favorite newspapers and media outlets, including his own occasionally, The New York Times, for the industry's bungling of the changing media delivery landscape.
His story of redemption was like so many. His rise to the top was a dream come true.
He was a pure character and talented writer. His Monday column, The Media Equation, regularly told me things I didn't want to know were true about the future of newspapers and news delivery, yet I read it with naked enjoyment.
If you have never seen "Page One," a documentary about The New York Times, and a peak into the news industry, you really have missed a fantastic look at what these people do every day.
One of the greatest thrills in my life was when he took the time to answer an email I'd sent him once, asking for comment when I was writing my final column for a college newspaper, The Cauldron. It was a twist on what my generation of news writers were to do during the shake down at the Plain Dealer a few years back. What the hell, I wondered, are all us recently trained dinosaurs supposed to do now?
He wrote: "Rick, I'd rather be graduating when you are than when I did (early 80s). Apart from coveting your youth, I think that journalism has always been a tough racket to get into, it's just a lot more interesting right now. Digital media won't fill the footprint that print has, it will make a new one. Diminished in some aspects, but immensely richer in others.
Thanks for the memories, David Carr. Mondays will never be the same.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/business/media/david-carr-media-equation-columnist-for-the-times-is-dead-at-58.html?_r=0
Mr. Carr, a shrewd and well-informed skeptic, wriggled away from the demon of drug addiction to become an unlikely name-brand media columnist at The New York Times.
