Clara Jeffery is the coeditor of Mother Jones magazine.
Flashback, mid ’90s, perhaps a week after I first met David Carr. The occasion was David giving reporters and editors at Washington City Paper, the alt weekly where I worked and where he’d just become the boss, a little speech. My memory of it is vague: part introduction, part pep talk, part acknowledgement that he had a steep learning curve to grok a city where most of us had grown up and all of us had put in some serious time (serious to a bunch of twentysomethings, anyway) learning the unwritten rules of the city—to say nothing of the quixotic ways of the Marion Barry administration. David was an odd mix of humble and feisty; there was something about us needing to hold staff meetings in Anacostia. What I do remember is as we shuffled out of his office, one of my coworkers turned to me and muttered, "Jesus, can you translate? You lived in Minnesota for a while, right?”
Almost 20 years later, David’s Fargo-worthy accent has not been tamed. But then, that was never what made his commentary so captivating. It was the high-low mix, the gift for remixing colloquialisms he grew up with and absorbed along the way with at least a dash or two of self-deprecation and a little combativeness stirred in as well. But maybe, most importantly, what made him so good was the willingness to throw himself into a new arena with reckless abandon. After five years at City Paper, he departed for the brave new world of online journalism at Inside.com, a news site focusing on the business of entertainment and publishing, and parlayed that into a gig at the New York Times.
Today, there is perhaps no more engaging expert on the ways that technology is transforming—for good and for ill—journalism than Carr. His Monday Times columns challenge both the Web 2.0 and old media elite while making sense of their foibles for the average reader. But Carr is perhaps best known as the unlikely hero of Andrew Rossi’s acclaimed new documentary, Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times.
The film tracks Carr and other media reporters during an era where their paper is roiled by layoffs, Wikileaks, paywalls, and social media. Today, newspapers’ revenue streams have been wiped out. Reporters find their hard-won stories repackaged by bloggers and aggregators like the Huffington Post—entities that the Times’ editor, Bill Keller, has famously called “oxpeckers who ride the backs of [old media] pachyderms, feeding on ticks.”
But while Carr frets aplenty about how news organizations are going to pay for original reporting, he also believes that the digital tools of the 2.0 era have ushered in a journalistic Golden Age, allowing reporters to contextualize stories with video, analysis, and original documents at a speed unheard of a decade ago. Carr used these tools when he built the website for his best-selling memoir, The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own. In the book and on the site, rich with video interviews and interactive timelines, Carr essentially subjected his own ur narrative—how the love of his twin daughters prompted him to quit abusing and dealing coke, get off welfare, and eventually become a successful journalist—to his own fact-checking.
But to this Chicagoland audience, Carr may be best known for his blowout investigative piece into the frat boy corporate culture of the Tribune Company.
I feel a bit of sympathy for those Tribune executives and staffers. One journalist has likened Carr to Mark Twain, and while David would swat that comparison away immediately, like Twain he tends to lull fools by his down-homery, only to eviscerate them. In our conversation at the Chicago Humanities Festival, we can be sure to see his charm on display—and, if we’re in luck, a touch of the devil-may-care bomb thrower as well.
Francis W. Parker School - Diane and David B Heller Auditorium: Nov. 9, 6:00 PM
Tags: journalism, newspapers, media, Web 2.0, Mother Jones, David Carr, New York Times
