by Greg Mayer

David Carr’s funeral was held earlier today in New York. He died last week of complications from lung cancer, collapsing and dying in the newsroom of the New York Times, where he had been a media reporter and columnist since 2002. A media columnist for the New York Times might seem a bit far afield for WEIT, but our interests here are varied, and, in many ways, much of Carr’s journalism addressed questions at the heart of WEIT as an online enterprise: in a digital age moving away from physical print media, how are the means of gathering and disseminating information to change, and how can authority and reliability be earned and represented in digital media? The questions might sound a bit grand, but since starting his website 5 years ago, Jerry has been very much actively involved in defining what a website for discussion and presentation of science to the general public can be.

Carr, while embracing virtually all forms of digital media, clearly saw the virtues of “legacy” media, and insisted on the importance of news-gathering versus news-aggregating. In a memorable moment captured in the film Page One, he was once on stage with a vacuous dot com executive who hailed a brave new future where newspapers would be gone and people would produce their own news, to which Carr replied:

The New York Times has dozens of bureaus all over the world, and we’re gonna toss that out and kick back, see what Facebook turns up? I don’t think so.

I first found Carr through his Carpetbagger column at the Times, and began to regularly read all of his Times contributions. His back story, which I learned only after reading him for awhile, was amazing. A Minnesotan by birth and upbringing who had worked at a number of “alternative” weeklies, he had been a crack addict who, as he liked to put it, was a single parent on welfare. But in a remarkable second (or third or fourth) act to his life, he became one of the nation’s leading journalists– a paean to the second chance. He told this story in his memoir Night of the Gun and in a NY Times Magazine article (which is where I first read the story).

I saw him give a live TV interview last week, just a day or so before he died, on the Brian Williams affair. I was shocked to see how ill-fitting his suit was—he had lost a tremendous amount of weight, probably one of the complications of the cancer that was to soon end his life. I thought his remarks about Brian Williams a tad ungenerous: he referred to Williams’ “bad decisions”, but having taught for 20 years about the unreliability of sincere eyewitness testimony and the constructive nature of memory, I could not see Williams’ errors as “decisions”, but as an all too frequent result of how human memory works (an aspect of the Williams story well covered by the Times).

Despite my different take on Brian Williams, I always appreciated and frequently agreed with Carr’s analyses. Margaret Sullivan has gathered together links to much of the coverage of Carr in the Times and throughout the media in her Public Editor column, so I won’t place any here; go take a look at her column and follow the links to sample some of Carr’s work and the tributes that have poured in.