Times writer will be missed

Carr was a leader in digital journalism. He was known for his sharp wit and beating his own demons.

David Carr, a New York Times reporter and columnist known for his irreverent, penetrating takes on the news business and the disruptions wrought by the Internet, died Thursday. He was 58.

Carr collapsed at the newspaper’s offices in Manhattan and died at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York, the Times said.

The New York City medical examiner’s office said Friday that it will be examining his death. It’s unclear how long it will take for the findings.

Just hours before he died, Carr had moderated a “Times Talks” conversation with Edward Snowden, director Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald about the documentary “Citizenfour,” which chronicles Snowden’s leak of National Security Agency documents.

Carr, engaged as always, drew them out with pointed questions and wry observations to speak candidly about the film.

The Times’ publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., said Carr had “formidable talent” and was “one of the most gifted journalists who has ever worked at The New York Times.” He called him “an indispensable guide to modern media.”

Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet said in a memo to the staff that Carr “was the finest media reporter of his generation, a remarkable and funny man who was one of the leaders of our newsroom. He was our biggest champion, and his unending passion for journalism and for truth will be missed by his family at The Times, by his readers around the world, and by people who love journalism.”

Carr had written about the media for 25 years. Before joining the Times in 2002, he had been a contributing writer for The Atlantic Monthly and New York magazine, a media writer for the entertainment website Inside.com and

Carr

David Carr

the editor of alternative weeklies in Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis.

At The New York Times, he was a business reporter and wrote a weekly column called the Media Equation, a lively chronicle of developments in print and digital media, film, radio, and television.

“David was always honest, always smart, always tough, whether he was writing about CNN or — even better — The New York Times, his own employer,” recalled former New York Times business editor Lawrence Ingrassia, now associate editor of the Los Angeles Times. “He loved a good tussle with a subject, but he also was always fair, always generous.”

In his 2008 memoir, “The Night of the Gun,” Carr bared the ugly details of his addiction to drugs and alcohol, and described his eventual recovery.

Carr interviewed friends to reconstruct his descent, and detailed how he had been arrested for beating up a cabdriver and how he smoked crack cocaine while his pregnant girlfriend went into labor before giving birth to twin daughters.

In the book, Carr didn’t flinch from describing his arrests, his trips to rehab (five times) and his bout with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. Carr’s rise in journalism paralleled his recovery from drug addiction.

“I think the person who was the least ready was me,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2008 just after his book was published. Even though he knew the story intimately, he recalled, “I had no idea what I’d done. ... I had no idea how dark this book was. I think of myself as a daddy who sobered up and got custody of his kids. ... So I wasn’t really ready for the fact that I had cast myself as a thug.” Carl Sessions Stepp, reviewing the book for the American Journalism Review, described it as “messy but unforgettable,” adding that “Carr writes with ingratiating candor.”

Carr’s enthusiasm for his work was infectious, and he tackled the demands of digital journalism with relish and unflagging energy.

“I think working in journalism beats having a real job,” he once said. “You make it as good as you can as fast as you can. You file on many platforms — you make video, you do the website, you write the story, you Twitter out what you’ve done, you do a blog post about what you’ve done, then you collapse, sleep for a while, and then you get up and do it the next day.”

Last year, Carr began teaching a Boston University class that explored the creative business models to support digital journalism. It was among the first professorships dedicated to evaluating how media organizations can sustain themselves financially as readers and advertisers migrate to digital platforms, a crisis that has doomed some news organizations and threatens the viability of others.

Carr had written about the issue extensively.

“I think a lot of journalism education that is going on is broadly not preparing kids for the world that they are stepping into,” Carr told the Boston Globe.

The dean of the College of Community at Boston University, Thomas Fiedler, called Carr’s death “a terrible blow.”

“What an extraordinary talent and a remarkable human being,” Fiedler told the Globe.

A resident of Montclair, N. J., he is survived by his wife, Jill Rooney Carr; and three daughters.