David Carr: The Man the Media Wanted to Impress

by Warren St. John

When I lost my father eight years ago, a good friend told me that the hardest part of losing his own dad had been the years since of “trying to figure out who I’m supposed to impress.” Losing David Carr, who died Thursday at 58, feels much the same way. If you were a reporter in Carr’s orbit, or just imagined yourself to be, it was impossible to publish a piece without wondering in the back of your mind what he’d think about it.

David and I started at The New York Times the same year -- 2002 -- and connected, I used to think, because I’d written a media column before and he was covering media. (After the outpouring of grief over David’s death, I now realize that we’d connected because that’s what David did -- with nearly everyone he met.) We stayed in touch after I left the Times in 2008. I was part of an elite group, that I now suspect was much larger than David let on at the time, of friends who were asked to give notes on the manuscript for his amazing book “The Night of the Gun.” I occasionally sent him column ideas, which he acted on a couple of times, but which he usually passed on, though always with a cheerful email that never quite felt like a rejection.

When I told David a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to fill him in on what was happening at Patch, he responded by email, “Have unbridled admiration for you and well-deserved skepticism for Patch, so we can work from there.” Classic Carr: doubting, careful but relentlessly humane. A few days later, we met in the cafeteria at the Times. He sat me down at a table in the middle of everything. “I’m going to get some soup,” he said. “You sit here and look for people you know.”

A few minutes later, he came back, sat down, and between slurps, gave me a half-hour update on the state of the Times, the state of the media desk, his one-day-a-week teaching gig in Boston, which he loved. Then, shifting gears, he said, “So you can’t be the editor of Patch -- I killed that company a year and a half ago.” (David had written a withering obit for AOL’s version of Patch in October ‘13, a few months before AOL actually spun off Patch. That’s how prescient he was.)

“Community journalism is all heart,” he said. “It does feel good.”

I knew it was my turn to talk. We got into the details. I walked him through our progress and challenges -- as he interrupted frequently with questions, commentary and the occasional raised eyebrow. Every question he asked was smart, two steps ahead of most reporters’ understanding of the business and management challenges of a sprawling hyperlocal network. We talked about the editorial model, the sales model, the morale of the editors, the broader challenges of hyperlocal and the even broader challenge to digital media caused by falling advertising prices across all platforms. With Carr, who was constantly challenging himself for the big take while at the same time seeking to master the details, there was often a kind of conversational whiplash caused by the rapid changes in perspective from the microscopic to the 35,000-foot view.

But Carr was most interested in people. And it wasn’t long before he was grilling me on me.

“So why are you doing it?” he wanted to know.

Two reasons, I said. Number one, because it sounded really, really hard -- smart people had lost hundreds of millions trying it after all. For reasons I don’t understand, I tend to perform better in circumstances where I perceive long odds; I get more engaged and obsessed with figuring it out. Carr didn’t say much, but he gave me an understanding look. He knew we all had our demons and psychological quirks.

The other reason, I said, was that it was fun -- working with amazing people who are telling daily stories about real life in towns around America, not life in Manhattan. That one landed with David. He started nodding as I spoke.

“Yeah,” he said, with what seemed like genuine wistfulness. “Community journalism is all heart. It does feel good.”

What I didn’t tell Carr was that I had another secret, simmering motivation in diving into Patch, which was the promise of someday compelling David himself to, at least figuratively, retract his October ‘13 obit. He wouldn’t really have had to, of course; he was right about all the reasons Patch failed for AOL. But I knew that he would be impressed if some other model emerged from the wreckage of that expensive experiment, and he would have felt genuine admiration for anyone who had played even a bit role in pulling it off.

Without the promise of that Carr column someday in the future, I’ll have to figure out once again who I’m trying to impress. The healthier way to do things is to tackle projects for yourself, for their intrinsic value to your own life and those closest to you. But it’s easier to get out of bed everyday, and to power through the murky, unframed hours of a workday if, even at a subconscious level, you’re steering to a beacon. When the beacon flickers out, you can still feel your way forward, but the arrival, if you get there, won’t be nearly as sweet.

––––––––––

Warren St. John is the editor-in-chief of Patch.