David Carr

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“God Sees Everything, Including The Blind”

February 13, 2015 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

If you read this blog regularly, you know I adored David Carr, someone I never met except through his writing. His success was improbable, having previously survived a pitiless drug addiction–a surrender and an onslaught. Almost as unlikely was that he maintained his soulfulness inside a corporate behemoth like the New York Times, appearing unchanged, unreconstructed, unvanquished, perhaps inoculated from the plague of phoniness by the earlier taste of poison. It doesn’t surprise me that in his final column he hoped for a second chance for Brian Williams. Carr himself was one of the best second chances ever. He will be missed. From his book The Night of the Gun, in which he searched for a face that was strange yet his own:

Am I a lunatic? Yes. When am I going to cut this stuff out? Apparently never. Does God see me right now? Yes. God sees everything, including the blind.

Trapped in drug-induced paranoia, I began to think of the police as God’s emissaries, arriving not to seek vengeance but a cease-fire, a truce that would put me up against a wall of well-deserved consequences, and the noncombatants, the children, out of harm’s way.

On this night — it was near the end — every hit sent out an alarm along my vibrating synapses. If the cops were coming — Any. Minute. Now. — I should be sitting out in front of the house. That way I could tell them that yes, there were drugs and paraphernalia in the house, but no guns. And there were four blameless children. They could put the bracelets on me, and, head bowed, I would solemnly lead them to the drugs, to the needles, to the pipes, to what was left of the money. And then some sweet-faced matrons would magically appear and scoop up those babies and take them to that safe, happy place. I had it all planned out.

I took another hit, and Barley and I walked out and sat on the steps. My eyes, my heart, the veins in my forehead, pulsed against the stillness of the night. And then they came. Six unmarked cars riding in formation with lights off, no cherries, just like I pictured. It’s on.

A mix of uniforms and plainclothes got out, and in the weak light of the street, I could see long guns held at 45-degree angles. I was oddly proud that I was on the steps, that I now stood between my children and the dark fruits of the life I had chosen. I had made the right move after endless wrong ones. And then they turned and went to the house across the street.

Much yelling. “Facedown! Hug the carpet! No sudden movements!” A guy dropped out of the second-floor window in just gym shorts, but they were waiting. More yelling and then quiet. I went back inside the house and watched the rest of it play out through the corner of the blind. Their work done, the cops loaded several cuffed people into a van. I let go of the blind and got back down to business. It wasn’t my turn.

Twenty years later, now sober and back for a look at my past, I sat outside that house on Oliver Avenue on a hot summer day in a rental car, staring long and hard to make sense of what had and had not happened there. The neighborhood had turned over from white to black, but it was pretty much the same. Nice lawns, lots of kids, no evidence of the mayhem that had gone on inside. Sitting there in a suit with a nice job in a city far away and those twins on their way to college, I almost would have thought I’d made it up. But I don’t think I did. While I sat there giving my past the once over, someone lifted up the corner of the blind in the living-room window. It was time to go.•

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“It Struck Me That He Might Be The Ultimate Expression Of A Certain Kind Of Citizen Journalism”

December 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An excerpt from David Carr’s latest piece of wonderfulness, a nuanced excoriation–and appreciation, for lack of a better term–of loathsome pisshole Chuck Johnson, a venomous, irresponsible blogger who fancies himself a “citizen journalist” and is, sort of, in our age of destabilized media:

“The Internet has given us many glorious things: streaming movies, multiplayer games, real-time information and videos of cats playing the piano. It has also offered up some less edifying creations: web-borne viruses, cybercrime and Charles C. Johnson.

His name came out of nowhere and now seems to be everywhere. When the consumer Internet first unfolded, there was much talk about millions of new voices blooming. Mr. Johnson is one of those flowers. His tactics may have as much in common with ultimate fighting as journalism, but that doesn’t mean he is not part of the conversation.

Mr. Johnson, a 26-year-old blogger based in California, has worked his way to the white-hot center of the controversy over a Rolling Stone article about rape accusations made by a student at the University of Virginia. His instinct that the report was deeply flawed was correct, but he proceeded to threaten on Twitter to expose the student and then later named her. And he serially printed her photo while going after her in personal and public ways.

In the frenzy to discredit her, he published a Facebook photo of someone he said was the same woman at a rally protesting an earlier rape. Oops. Different person. He did correct himself, but the damage, now to two different women, was done. …

After watching him set off a series of small mushroom clouds, it struck me that he might be the ultimate expression of a certain kind of citizen journalism — one far more toxic than we’re accustomed to seeing. Once a promising young conservative voice who wrote for The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Daily Caller and The Blaze, Mr. Johnson has a loose-cannon approach that alienated many of his editors. There was a time when that would have been the end of it, but with Twitter as a promotional platform, he has been able to build his own site called GotNews.”

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“If This Is The Future…What Is Underway May Be A Kind Of Mercy Killing”

August 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Once valuable print properties at Time Inc. and Gannett and Tribune and elsewhere have been spun off from their parent companies, formerly favored children now grown awkward and cast aside. Weren’t they only recently beloved?

These and other print-based corporations hope to remake themselves as Buzzfeed or some other bullshit that works financially, but it’s unlikely. From David Carr at the New York Times:

“At Gannett newspapers, reader metrics will drive coverage and journalists will work with dashboards of data to guide reporting. After years of layoffs, many staff members were immediately told that they had to reapply for jobs when the split was announced. In an attempt to put some lipstick on an ugly pivot, Stefanie Murray, executive editor of The Tennessean, promised readers ‘an ambitious project to create the newsroom of the future, right here in Nashville. We are testing an exciting new structure that is geared toward building a dynamic, responsive newsroom.’ (Jim Romenesko, who blogs about the media industry, pointed out that Gannett also announced ‘the newsroom of the future’ in 2006.)

The Nashville Scene noted that readers had to wait only one day to find out what the news of the future looks like: a Page 1 article in The Tennessean about Kroger, a grocery store and a major advertiser, lowering its prices.

If this is the future — attention news shoppers, Hormel Chili is on sale in Aisle 5 — what is underway may be a kind of mercy killing.

So whose fault is it? No one’s. Nothing is wrong in a fundamental sense: A free-market economy is moving to reallocate capital to its more productive uses, which happens all the time. Ask Kodak. Or Blockbuster. Or the makers of personal computers. Just because the product being manufactured is news in print does not make it sacrosanct or immune to the natural order.“

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“Some Of The Spiders Are Large And Remarkably Deadly”

August 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Boy, that David Carr is a flawless writer. You never see the editor’s hand in his work, something that is rarer than you might think for reporters unless you’re reading closely. Emily Nussbaum, the TV critic at the New Yorker, is the same way. Pretty much perfect every time out. Journalists who write on that level can pull you into reading something you might not be initially interested in, give you something you didn’t expect.

From Carr’s latest New York Times piece in which he visits Glenn Greenwald, a bothersome man who’s useful even if you’re not sure you always trust his judgement, at his Rio de Janeiro home base, a surprisingly lo-fi lair for perhaps the most wired journalist on Earth:

“For all its challenges — the monkeys and dogs have daily throw-downs and some of the spiders are large and remarkably deadly — the location suits him, the eternal guerrilla fighting from the mountains. When cable television calls, he races down the hill to a satellite facility, suit coat and tie on top, sandals and shorts on the bottom.

On Tuesday morning last week, Mr. Greenwald was pleased. He woke up early and wrote an uncharacteristically brief post about the huge number of civilian casualties in the Gaza conflict. He was proud of the pie charts he had managed to conjure to go with his post.

‘I went to Google and typed in ‘create a pie chart’ and I ended up with an online pie-chart maker probably intended for first graders,’ he said. I mentioned that he now works for a digital news site that has a $250 million endowment from Mr. Omidyar and some very talented data journalists and graphic artists.

‘Yeah, I know, but I would have had to wait and I didn’t want to wait,’ he said. ‘There are others things, like the 7,000-word story we just did on the surveillance of Muslim Americans that 15 people probably worked on — the video, graphic and editing resources make a huge difference. But I wanted this to be simple and I wanted it to be mine.’

True to his intent, Mr. Greenwald’s first-grade pie charts entered the bloodstream of the web, coursing around Twitter and various blogs. Nothing — other than yet another dog rescue — pleases Mr. Greenwald more than lobbing in something from a great distance and watching it detonate.”

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“That Was A Big Tactical Mistake”

May 19, 2014 in Excerpts | Permalink

David Carr might be the best and most lucid writer working for any of the companies that remain in what used to be known as the “newspaper business.” I could read him endlessly. In his latest column, Carr scrutinizes the fiasco of Jill Abramson’s firing. The whole episode has been astoundingly tone-deaf on the part of management. When you live in a country where none of the 44 Presidents have been women, and one gender has always enjoyed clear advantage in salary, you have to realize that the abrupt dismissal of the first female executive editor because of “management issues” is going to be incendiary. Especially when you consider the notoriously difficult personalities of some of the men who’ve previously held that post.

Based on his intra-office reportage, Carr doesn’t believe Abramson’s firing was caused by a scuffle over pay inequality or other gender issues. And while Carr self-identifies as a “company man,” he’s also brutally honest about himself and everyone else. He clearly wrote what his research truly found. 

Questions Carr doesn’t address: Was Abramson paid less than her male counterparts of similar stature and tenure during her years at the Times? Are other women there compensated on par with men? While the Times certainly doesn’t want their salary structure wholly transparent, the company should form a panel of ten female and minority journalists and managers who are privy to the salary of every Times employee. This committee should meet with the publisher and HR at regular intervals to question what they see as inequities. Perhaps that would dispel the deep concerns some women working at the Times must now have.

From Carr:

“Jill rose as a woman in a patriarchal business and a male-dominated organization by being tough, by displaying superlative journalistic instincts and by never backing up for anyone.

Some might suggest that these traits are all in the historical job description of a man editing The New York Times, but Arthur concluded ‘she had lost the support of her masthead colleagues and could not win it back.’ I like Jill and the version of The Times she made. But my reporting, including interviews with senior people in the newsroom, some of them women, backs up his conclusion.

When he announced Jill and Dean Baquet’s appointment in 2011, Mr. Sulzberger was rightfully proud of his dream team, two talented journalists to lead the paper who were not white men. But while there may have been a dream, there was never a real team.

Jill did a six-month tour of The Times’s digital endeavors before assuming the editorship, and was publicly supportive of a recent groundbreaking report on innovation at The New York Times. But the report plainly stated that the paper was lagging in that area, and according to several executives in the newsroom she took some of its findings personally.

Perhaps that is part of the reason she tried to bring in Janine Gibson, a senior editor at The Guardian, as a co-managing editor for digital. That was a big tactical mistake, at least in terms of office management. Dean was not aware that Jill had made an offer to Ms. Gibson, and he was furious and worried about how it would affect not only him but the rest of the news operation as well. (All the talk about pay inequity and her lawyering up to get her due was a sideshow in my estimation.)”

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“I Believe That There’s No End To How Much We Can Track Each Other”

February 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Kevin Kelly, one of the tech thinkers I admire most, was recently profiled by the New York Times’ wonderfully dyspeptic David Carr, and now he’s participated in an excellent Q&A at John Brockman’s Edge.org. 

I think if you read this blog with any regularity, you know I believe that legislation won’t control or alter surveillance and snooping, won’t stem the flow of information any more than Prohibition stopped the flow of alcohol. Everybody is drinking; everybody’s drunk. That topic is addressed in the first question of the interview:

“Edge:

How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy?

Kevin Kelly:

The question that I’m asking myself is, how far will we share, when are we going to stop sharing, and how far are we going to allow ourselves to monitor and surveil each other in kind of a coveillance? I believe that there’s no end to how much we can track each other—how far we’re going to self-track, how much we’re going to allow companies to track us—so I find it really difficult to believe that there’s going to be a limit to this, and to try to imagine this world in which we are being self-tracked and co-tracked and tracked by governments, and yet accepting of that, is really hard to imagine.

How does this work? How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy? I don’t see any counter force to the forces of surveillance and self-tracking, so I’m trying to listen to what the technology wants, and the technology is suggesting that it wants to be watched. What the Internet does is track, just like what the Internet does is to copy, and you can’t stop copying. You have to go with the copies flowing, and I think the same thing about this technology. It’s suggesting that it wants to monitor, it wants to track, and that you really can’t stop the tracking. So maybe what we have to do is work with this tracking—try to bring symmetry or have areas where there’s no tracking in a temporary basis. I don’t know, but this is the question I’m asking myself: how are we going to live in a world of ubiquitous tracking?”•

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“How Do We Explain To A Broad Audience What Government Is Doing?”

October 21, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The first two questions from David Carr’s interview with ebay founder Pierre Omidyar, the latest Internet gazillionaire to try to understand the economics of Digital Age journalism, funding Glenn Greenwald’s new venture:

“David Carr:

You could be putting your time and money into a lot of things. Why news?

Pierre Omidyar: 

I’m a technologist by origin and by training, but I’m focused on philanthropy. One of the key areas was taking the lessons from technology and applying them to making the world better. And part of that interest really led me to government transparency and accountability: how do we explain to a broad audience what government is doing?

We’ve lived in Hawaii for about seven years and I saw a gap in coverage as newsrooms were merging — there was a real reduction in reporting capacity and so I felt it was critical to just build a newsroom that is exclusively focused on public affairs. I wanted to get my hands dirty learning what it’s like to work with journalists and editors day in and day out, to see how the sausage is made. Through that experience, I saw firsthand the impact that really good investigative stories have at every level and so this is the next step in a very long journey.

David Carr:

This next step seems focused on secrecy and transparency. What pulled you in that direction?

Pierre Omidyar: 

A number of things happened: Even before the Snowden leaks, we saw a number of what I would characterize as missteps by the Justice Department. We saw the Justice Department wiretap the A.P. newsroom. We saw [Fox News reporter James] Rosen being labeled as co-conspirator label in affidavits; we see the many leak prosecutions including the use of the Espionage Act. It alerted me to the fact that even in this great country of ours with this fantastic Constitution, there’s a real pressure against press freedoms that’s going on. Perhaps unintentionally in the hot pursuit of leakers and trying to protect secrets, we are really putting pressure on press freedom here. When you have mass surveillance, it’s impossible to meet the intent of the First Amendment because reporters can’t talk to sources because sources are afraid to talk.”

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“Mr. Ebert Was, In Retrospect, A Very Modern Figure”

April 11, 2013 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Roger Ebert was one of the best newspaper writers ever–lucid, interesting, prolific, intelligent, inviting–in the same league as Breslin, Hamill or Royko. My interaction with him was minimal: I interviewed the critic once by phone and spoke to him another time at the Toronto festival about the Jessica Yu film, In the Realms of the Unreal, which we both loved. He was naturally argumentative and cantankerous but remarkably generous and open-minded and egalitarian and warm. And he was steadfastly progressive in regards to women and minorities, to people who didn’t have the kind of platform he had carved for himself. Ebert was truly the King of All Media, and I’m constantly amazed at how such an ink-stained wretch found his way not only through the world of television but through all areas of the new communication platforms. 

The odd thing is that outside of his early years, Ebert had pretty lousy, hit-or-miss taste in film. He wasn’t a blurb whore like, say, Jeffrey Lyons (who used to loudly mock Ebert’s appearance in vicious, personal terms at New York screenings). He just lost his critical compass by the late 1970s. Sometimes Ebert’s aforementioned progressive politics seemed to get in the way of his critical eye: He disliked Blue Velvet in part because of how Isabella Rossellini’s character was treated, and he named Eve’s Bayou, a good film, the best film of 1997, the same year that saw the release of Boogie Nights, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, L.A. Confidential, etc. But often he just seemed to make odd choices (e.g., hating Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man) that someone with his intelligence shouldn’t. 

But if Ebert’s taste faltered, his writing and soul never, ever did. He was an amazing guy who left the world a better, smarter place because of his presence. He was loved and will be missed.

In the New York Times, David Carr, who is Ebert’s equal as a writer, examines the Chicagoan’s empire-building skills. The opening:

“At journalism conferences and online, media strivers talk over and over about becoming their own brand, hoping that some magical combination of tweets, video spots, appearances and, yes, even actual written articles, will help their name come to mean something.

As if that were a new thing.

Since Roger Ebert’s death on Thursday, many wonderful things have been said about his writing gifts at The Chicago Sun-Times, critical skills that led to a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, the first given for movie criticism. We can stipulate all of that, but let’s also remember that a big part of what he left behind was a remarkable template for how a lone journalist can become something much more.

Mr. Ebert was, in retrospect, a very modern figure. Long before the media world became cluttered with search optimization consultants, social media experts and brand-management gurus, Mr. Ebert used all available technologies and platforms to advance both his love of film and his own professional interests.

He clearly loved newspapers, but he wasn’t a weepy nostalgist either. He was an early adopter on the Web, with a CompuServe account he was very proud of, and unlike so many of his ink-splattered brethren, he grabbed new gadgets with both hands.

But it wasn’t just a grasp of technology that made him a figure worthy of consideration and emulation.

Though he was viewed as a movie critic with the soul of a poet, he also had killer business instincts. A journalist since the 1960s, he not only survived endless tumult in the craft, he thrived by embracing new opportunity and expanding his franchise at every turn.”

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“Some Of The Bigger Cracks Can’t Be Papered Over By Financial Engineering”

July 9, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The New York Times’ David Carr, one of the nation’s very best newspaper writers, has a devastating article about the hopeless condition of newsprint in the Digital Age. It sounds more like a death knell than a clarion call. Of course, I read it online and even though I’m a complete news junkie I haven’t bought a paper in years. An excerpt:

“‘Most newspapers are in a place right now that they are going to have to make big cuts somewhere, and big seams are bound to show up at some point,’ said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute.

Some of the bigger cracks can’t be papered over by financial engineering. Hedge funds, which thought they had bought in at the bottom, are scrambling for exits that don’t exist. Many newspaper companies are hugely overburdened with debt from ill-timed purchases. And though it is far less discussed, newspapers are being clobbered by paltry returns on underfunded pension plans.

Two highly placed newspaper executives told me last week that while the industry had already experienced a number of strategic bankruptcies, more will most likely take place to deal with pension obligations.

As Mike Simonton of Fitch Ratings pointed out to me, very few bond investors are even willing to lend to papers. He said the pension obligations ‘represent a call on capital at a time when newspapers desperately need to deploy capital toward evolving their business models and adapting to the digital world.'”

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