Cover photo by New York Times
By Sam Schaust/Murphy News Service
The late New York Times reporter David Carr possessed a long list of friends and acquaintances who stretched across the United States (and beyond), many concentrated in his home state of Minnesota. For those who knew Carr, he wasn’t a face easily erased.
“His relationships were very intense and long lasting,” Deborah Hopp said of Carr, who died Thursday. Hopp is vice president of publishing for MSP Communications Inc. and had been a close friend of Carr’s since the late 1970s.
“He was brilliant and cared deeply about everyone around him – he was just a wonderful person,” Hopp said. “Particularly after he exorcised his demons; he became more of those things: more brilliant, more caring and more interested in other people’s lives. I think that’s what made him such a good reporter.”
Vivid memories reside in the minds of past Carr cohorts across the Twin Cities. Aside from the struggles he detailed in “The Night of the Gun,” his open-hearted, tell-all memoir, Carr is known in these parts as a Hopkins-raised, University of Minnesota graduate, where he majored in psychology and journalism.
From there, he performed freelance work until taking a full-time position at the alternative weekly newspaper, the Twin Cities Reader. Come spring of 1993, Carr had transitioned from freelancer to staff writer to editor of the Reader.
Journalist Burl Gilyard was first hired by Carr at the Reader and grew to be a friend.
“Because he had been a reporter, he had a reporter’s instinct and a reporter’s mindset. He knew how to get stories, what other sources to try and other approaches to take. He knew the nuts and bolts of reporting,” Gilyard, now a senior writer for Twin Cities Business magazine, said.
The two remained openly communicative, Gilyard said, making a point to see one another when Carr came home and Gilyard ventured to New York. “I traded emails with him only last weekend,” Gilyard said.
Long-time colleagues such as Hopp marveled at Carr’s unique way with language – colorful, biting and never shying from the facts. Gilyard recalled the symmetry between Carr’s writing and what came from his raspy, chemotherapy-scarred voice in how he defines it as “Carr-isms.”
“Anyone that knows Carr probably has a long list of Carr-isms,” Gilyard said. “He had unique phrases – his own Carr lingo.”
Example: Carr in 2012 remarked how “you hit the ‘upilater’” when sunk in a moment of gloom, only to hear an uplifting song suddenly perk into your ear.
And “cracking wise” was a coin he dropped on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” this week when addressing the controversy surrounding suspended NBC News anchor Brian Williams and the propensity of some reporters to overly animate how stories are told for a heightened reaction.
Carr also compared the killing of Michael Cera in the movie “This Is the End” to “murdering a basket of puppies.” He regularly referred to his own life as “one grand, grand caper.”
His ability to converse without limitation – whether he was gathering quotes from an athlete, actor, corporate leader or drug abuser – further added to his trademark. Similarly with his interest in fields of reporting, Carr often had few bounds.
“There was a stream of things he wanted to write about,” Hopp said. “It was sports and business and politics and people and music – he just ran the gamut.”
With his final article reflecting on the big news about the professional exits of two major media icons, NBC’s Williams and Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show,” Carr unexpectedly and unfortunately made headlines of his own before the week was out.
At 7:36 p.m. Thursday, The New York Times gave official word of Carr’s collapse and death in the newsroom. The Times quickly posted the collection of his column, The Media Equation, published Carr’s obituary and linked to a compendium of noteworthy quotes.
Finding a replacement for Carr will be a tall order, Hopp said. “He touched the media business in a way that whomever comes after will not have the kind of insights that he’s had and the ability to not really care about whose ox gets gored.”
Reporter Sam Schaust is studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.