Since joining The New York Times in 2002, David Carr has become America’s most visible and influential writer on the media. His weekly “Media Equation” column is closely followed by people in the industry. Last year, he was featured in Interview magazine (interviewed by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, no less), and he was the star of the 2011 documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times, in which he comes across as a gruff and indefatigable truth-teller.
That documentary showed Carr in the act of reporting his stellar article on the disastrous decline of the Tribune Company under Sam Zell. For the piece, Carr interviewed more than 20 current and former employees of the company. He then described how, under the direction of Randy Michaels, a former radio executive and shock jock chosen by Zell to run the company, the Tribune Tower in Chicago came to resemble a frat house, full of sexual innuendo, profane invective, and poisonous workplace banter. Carr showed how Michaels and other executives received tens of millions of dollars in bonuses while laying off hundreds at the Chicago Tribune and other papers. It was a devastating account of the hubristic destruction of one of America’s top media companies.
This is the hard-hitting David Carr—a relentless interviewer, incisive analyst, and gifted writer all rolled into one—and the piece on Zell and company showed the powerful effect he can have when he applies those qualities to an important subject.
But there’s another David Carr, one who is breezy, knowing, star-struck, and insidery, and it’s this David Carr who, alas, more often than not shows up in his weekly column. Take, for example, “Digital’s Ever Swifter Incursion,” which ran on June 18. Carr opened with a description of a magazine launch party on the rooftop of the Gramercy Park Hotel, with an “open bar ringed by thirsty media reporters, groaning trays of shrimp, a D.J. playing music just soft enough that it didn’t drown out the chatter.” In the past, Carr noted, he had attended many such events for print magazines, but this one was for Huffington, a sleek new online weekly created by Arianna Huffington, to be available in tablet form. It was, he wrote, “a particularly acute reminder” of the transformation taking place in journalism, away from “legacy media” and toward digitally based ones. Last year, he observed,
The Huffington Post was sold to AOL for $315 million, less than a year after Newsweek was sold for a dollar, and in April the site won its first Pulitzer, for David Wood’s 10-part series about wounded veterans. More unique Web visitors now go to The Huffington Post each month than The New York Times, according to the research company comScore.
In the past, Carr went on to note, he had complained that The Huffington Post, though “one of the fastest build-outs of an editorial brand in history,” derived much of its value from “digitally kidnapping the work of others.” But, he continued, he now saw that
it doesn’t matter what I think is right and wrong, or what I think constitutes appropriate aggregation or great journalism. The market is as the market does.
It’s a valid point: The market rules, good journalism or no. But in this column, as in many others, Carr seems bewitched by the market, evaluating everything by its judgments. Rarely does he get around to the journalism itself. Of the 1,200 words in this column, for instance, he spends virtually none of them assessing content. But if, as Carr insists, the transition from traditional to new media is inevitable, doesn’t the quality of the journalism on the latter matter? I’d like to know how much of the content on The Huffington Post resembles that 10-part Pulitzer-winning series and how much resembles “Kris Humphries Makes Outrageous Claim About Kim’s Sex Tape” or “The Shocking Reason Why Adele’s Ex Supposedly Dumped Her” or the nonstop parade of titillating and gossipy links along the site’s right rail. Carr doesn’t bother to say.
This column clearly enunciated something I've sensed for a while, but couldn't put my finger on.
#1 Posted by Paige Gold, CJR on Wed 27 Jun 2012 at 11:44 PM
Carr's most likely writing more fluff because it's so damn hard to report what's behind the facade at these events. It takes time, and our 24-7 culture doesn't lend itself to in-depth writing. It's also hard to be a curmudgeon all the time, especially when everyone's telling you how great you are.
One little thing -- I don't think his kids are still in foster care, are they? I'm pretty sure I saw a pic on Twitter of Carr with his daughters. They all looked relatively happy to me -- a subjective observation, to be sure, but one that conveys as accurate a picture of his success as a father. (I do realize that saying he "lost" his kids to foster care doesn't imply that they are still in foster care, but if you're going to bring it up, maybe you should add some current information.)
#2 Posted by Steve Davies, CJR on Thu 28 Jun 2012 at 10:17 AM
Carr has always been enamored with celebrity. I remember sitting next to him at a party in Minneapolis years ago before he went to NY, listening to him tell me boring stories all about his best friendship with Tom Arnold.
#3 Posted by Susan Peterson, CJR on Thu 28 Jun 2012 at 12:02 PM
Carr has always been enamored with celebrity. I remember sitting next to him at a party in Minneapolis years ago, listening to boring stories about his best friendship with Tom Arnold.
#4 Posted by Susan Peterson, CJR on Thu 28 Jun 2012 at 12:04 PM
Fame--his own and that of others--has started to sand down Carr's flintiness. So has career and familial contentment. Age? Also a factor, perhaps. Still, he's a better read than 95 percent of the journalists out there.
#5 Posted by Dave West, CJR on Thu 28 Jun 2012 at 02:15 PM
Carr's a columnist - which comes with some arbitrary and discretion as to what stories he wants to cover and how he covers them - I salivate over his column every week - because of his ability to reach a happy-medium between journalism and commentary, producing copy that pinpoints his readers, like myself, as to where the conversation is in the industry or should be.
Sometimes his column's might be those big hitters, like the Tribune Company's downfall or the piece calling Gannett out for rewarding a retiring CEO who failed to produce results he was hired for.
And sometimes - it might be profiling - yet, is it such a bad thing for Carr to embellish the time he spends with high-profile media celebrities, like Brian Williams, Arron Sorkin or Anthony Bourdain? These people have brilliant minds, why wouldn't you be awe-struck?
To me, it shows that he's just as human as the rest of us - and I like that about him.
#6 Posted by William Dowd, CJR on Thu 28 Jun 2012 at 07:30 PM
Carr's specialty--like most Times People--is defending and extolling middle class/middlebrow values. The sycophancy before wealth and celebrity, the breathless touting of new technologies, and the savage bashing of Sam Zell & his minions (a more insipid and lowbrow crew impossible to find helming a major public company) are all of a piece.
#7 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Sun 1 Jul 2012 at 11:39 AM
In his recent CJR piece “The two David Carrs,” Michael Massing praises David Carr, the media columnist for The New York Times, as “a relentless interviewer, incisive analyst and gifted writer” responsible for, among other things, a “stellar” 2010 expose of the Tribune Company. He then laments the David Carr who is “breezy, knowing, star-struck, and insidery,” pointing in particular to David’s
accounts of parties and business meetings where he encounters his subjects.
As David’s business editor for six years, including for his Tribune article, I fail to see the distinction between the “relentless” Carr and the “insidery” one. David, like most reporters on his beat, goes to events and parties where media types congregate. He doesn’t go because he is “star-struck.” He does so to meet sources and to observe his subjects in person, without the protective cover of press releases and PR reps. (Put another way, David goes to Huffington Post parties so that we don’t have to.) David also works the phones and digs up
financial reports, court orders and bankruptcy filings, especially but not exclusively when first-hand interviews are not available, as was the case with the Tribune article.
I question of value of contrasting what seem to be complementary, even overlapping skills, declaring one good and one bad. Observing Rupert Murdoch as he sells his MySpace deal at a Silicon Valley event is different from reporting on the behavior of Tribune executives only insofar as one required an invitation, the other a telephone. What really matters is how all that information is put into context for the reader.
Here, I believe, is where David truly excels. We can quibble about this article or that, but I can’t think of a columnist, media or otherwise, who has done a better job over the past seven years of exposing readers to the seismic shifts underlying the business and explaining what those shifts mean for owners, consumers and employees.
Editors routinely tell their reporters to “get me inside the room.” Whenever I use that hackneyed phrase, I silently add one more: “but please Lord, don’t leave me in there.” David never does.
Best,
Bruce Headlam
Media Editor
The New York Times
#8 Posted by Bruce Headlam, CJR on Tue 3 Jul 2012 at 11:58 AM
Wow, Michael, bitter much? Carr's brilliance is in his observational skills, his ear for conversation and coming this.close to being an insider - without actually becoming one. Can you see that his ability to instantly make a reader feel like he or she is getting an inside look - from someone who is not an insider but among them - is exactly what makes him great?
#9 Posted by Kathleen Coleman, CJR on Tue 3 Jul 2012 at 05:05 PM
Obvious that Murdoch was mugged when he bought MySpace. Even if it was hip, as soon as someone like the Dirty Digger bought it, it would immediately become as unhip as it is possible to be.
#10 Posted by gouchout, CJR on Fri 13 Jul 2012 at 12:00 PM