David Carr

Wednesday evening, Gawker Media hosted a party at Soho House in honor of the soon-to-be-released film version of How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, Toby Young’s memoir of his misadventures as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair in the late '90s. Half of the crowd kept referring to the celebration as a book party, despite the fact that the book in question had been released over six years ago. Indeed, the film did seem to take a backseat, as the room was full of media types eager to speak with Mr. Young, who did not arrive until late.

However, our first conversation was with a different type.  read more »

What happened to NBC, wonders Felix Gillette. "In recent days, MSNBC’s president, Mr. Griffin, has told a number of reporters that the change was not made as a result of outside pressure. Still, some TV insiders continue to play the MSNBC parlor game, speculating about how and why the McCain camp appeared to have succeeded in budging MSNBC where Hillary and her democratic supporters had failed."

Cheers! John Koblin reports that The New York Times will celebrate its own coverage of the Beijing Olympics with "Champagne and egg rolls to reward the 'stunning' coverage The Times produced on the Web, and in the newspaper..."

Publishers are clambering to put together books on Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, reports Leon Neyfakh. Plus: After David Carr, Bill Clegg.

PLUS: Femocracy '08... What Has Happened to the Toronto Film Festival?... Ira Silverberg

Just ran into local hero David Carr on his way to the New York Times’ filing center. He said he has spent his day so far not in the Xcel Center but outdoors, reporting on the protests. The big question there, he said, was whether the local anarchists who organized the march were going to overcome their natural inclination towards mild-mannered politesse, a.k.a Minnesota Nice.

“I got pulled over this morning for doing 60 in a 30 zone,” he said, by way of illustration of the phenomenon. “He apologized and let me go. He said, ‘I’m sorry I had to pull you over, I know you're busy, but you were really hauling the mail, and I had to tell you to slow down.'”

 

The bus line that is shipping reporters from the media tents outside the Pepsi Center to Invesco Field is getting awfully long, but it's moving fast. David Carr, who was right behind Lynn Sweet, and directly ahead of Newsweek's Andrew Romano, was on line for only about five minutes before he got onto the bus. Mr. Carr was smoking a Camel and thrilled that his new book, The Night of the Gun, would land at #11 on The New York Times' nonfiction best-seller list this Sunday. But, he added, it was only a matter of time before he was going to get kicked from the list once Labor Day hit and an avalanche of campaign books flood the market.  read more »

David Carr must be one busy man this month. In an interview with Salon's Andrew O'Herir, Mr. Carr, The New York Times media columnist and author of the recently released book, The Night of Gun, says that he "got 1,200 e-mails when an excerpt of the book ran in The New York Times Magazine, and a lot of them were from people seeking recovery."

We know from Jennifer Senior's profile of Mr. Carr in this week's New York magazine that he probably felt compelled to answer them all since:

When he recently wrote a media column slamming Fox News, he got 450 e-mails, and he answered each and every one.  read more »

Jennifer Senior profiles her former colleague David Carr in this week's New York. In a welcome curveball, she focuses not on his recovery from drug addiction but on his transformation from misogynistic creep to loving husband and father, which she argues was "the real redemptive story in David's life, even if it's a less dramatic one than kicking a coke habit."

The main revelation in the piece is that for all his honesty, there was a lot of stuff Mr. Carr couldn't bring himself to cover in the book, or removed from the final version at the urging of friends. A lot of this material apparently concerned the "busy" and reckless sex life that he led as an addict: "People said, 'There's enough sort of misogyny and objectification without this kind of fratty stuff.  read more »

The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life—His Own
By David Carr
Simon and Schuster, 400 pages, $26

For most of us, David Carr is the goofy-looking Midwesterner most often seen unrolling a red carpet with his foot on NYTimes.com during Oscar season. He calls himself the Carpet Bagger. He has a blog and a column, too. In his gravelly twang he explains the ins and outs of Hollywood like some sort of benevolent avuncular muppety Richard Attenborough. With his slightly lost-looking pale blue eyes, his open vowels and his dorkiness, David Carr—like David Pogue, the Times technology writer fond of starring in his own iPhone musicals—brought hope to us slightly off writers.  read more »

Leon Neyfakh reads David Carr's The Night of the Gun and concludes that the book "turns the traditional memoir on its head, assuming as it does that its author knows nothing about his own life and must research it as though it were someone else’s. The book practically interrogates itself, questioning its own right to exist even as Mr. Carr vigilantly gathers string on the dark and druggy life he led into his 30s."

Josh Benson and Felix Gillette examine, "The McCain campaign’s response to the quantifiable imbalance in volume-of-coverage—a function, depending on whom you ask, of the fact that the press loves the Barack Obama story or that John McCain is the Republican nominee for president—has been a petulant cry of foul for the kind of infraction gentlemen are supposed to ignore.  read more »

It’s not immediately clear when you get to the end of NYT columnist David Carr’s new book, The Night of the Gun, whether you’ve just seen the memoir redeemed or irrevocably dismantled. A work of traditional reportage motivated by the fashionable and unnerving notion that it’s impossible to really know anything for sure, Mr. Carr’s book—which arrives in bookstores next week—turns the traditional memoir on its head, assuming as it does that its author knows nothing about his own life and must research it as though it were someone else’s. The book practically interrogates itself, questioning its own right to exist even as Mr.  read more »

New York Times columnist David Carr’s forthcoming addiction memoir The Night of the Gun, the carefully reported—that is, not vaguely remembered and pieced together—tour de force that was excerpted on the cover of The New York Times Magazine this past weekend, features lots and lots of minor characters. Dealers, cops, girlfriends, pals, fellow junkies—they all pass in and out, some staying in Mr. Carr’s bumpy orbit for years and others sticking around only as long as they needed to.

One of these minor characters is a guy named “DonJack,” who comes up a couple of times over the course of the book but never really comes to life.  read more »

The New York Times website has just posted a preview of this week's Times Magazine featuring an excerpt from media columnist David Carr's forthcoming book, The Night of the Gun.

The story, like the book, tells of Mr. Carr's years of drug and alcohol abuse and his various scrapes with the law as he somehow managed to rise in journalism and raise his twin daughters. There's also a video in which Mr. Carr explains the book's title and how his attempt to remember "the night of the gun" set the tone for his investigative approach to his own experiences.

Not included in the extract? Tom Arnold, who plays a special role in Mr. Carr's book and in his life.

In his media column today, David Carr revisits the hubbub surrounding Barack Obama's decision to allow Access Hollywood to interview his daughters. Obama eventually told Matt Lauer that the family "won't be doing it again," but Carr suggests that the whole incident ultimately worked to the Obama campaign's advantage.

To be sure, the Obamas haven't shied away from softer media outlets, and at least one expert thinks that is a good thing for them.

In an e-mail exchange last week, I asked Jin Chon, Hillary Clinton's press secretary for specialty media, who had a fair amount of success putting Clinton in the generally friendly confines of entertainment shows, about the merits of politicians using entertainment-focused media.  read more »

There was almost a full-on press melee in Philadelphia this weekend at the Alternative Newsweeklies Convention. According to Gustavo Arellano, The OC Weekly's "Ask a Mexican" columnist, he and Village Voice editor-in-chief Tony Ortega, New York Times culture editor Sam Sifton and Times media critic David Carr were called "nerds" by a "big mook" on their walk back to the Downtown Marriot after an evening of boozing at a local press hangout.

"All of us were in various stages of inebriation (from nothing to Jim Beam-ing), all of us were living life," Mr. Arellano later wrote. "If the guy said it to my face, I'da kick[ed] his ass! ... Carr, Sifton, and Ortega made similar threats. We headed to the Marriot's bar for a nightcapper and laughed with the knowledge our nerdish ways have rewarded us with lives of leisure, while that assaulting asshole could only look forward to trimming his precious goatee."  read more »

Felix Gillette braves the crowds outside NBC's Today Show to find Katie Couric's most loyal fans. "'Katie’s hot,' said Craig Bellew, who was visiting from Clarkesville, Ga. 'She should come right back here. I grew up watching her on Today. And it’s easier to say her name then—what’s the other girl’s name? Anyway. She’s hot.'

Speaking of Ms. Couric, John Koblin looks at how a whiff of a story (Katie Out at CBS?) becomes conventional wisdom in our Print 2.0 world. The New York Times. 'It used to be you came in the next day and your editor would say, "Well, we won today," or she’d say, "Looks like we got beat like a drum," and that would be the end of it. Now it’s this ongoing game of catching up and staying ahead.'"  read more »

In his Media Equation column this week, The New York Times' David Carr looks at a strange footnote in the ongoing Anthony Pellicano wiretap trial in Los Angeles: The overlapping employment of Wayne Reynolds, who worked for both Pellicano and Condé Nast Publications.

As Carr writes, "Mr. Reynolds was first questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the Los Angeles offices of Condé Nast early in 2003. Mr. Pellicano, who is serving as his own lawyer, asserted in his cross-examination that Mr. Reynolds had bragged about bugging his own supervisor — no name was mentioned — at Condé Nast and that Mr. Reynolds had provided him with a prepublication copy of a Vanity Fair article (widely assumed to be about the Hollywood 'superagent' Michael S. Ovitz)."  read more »

On a hot August night in the Astrodome 16 years ago, Pat Buchanan stood before the Republican National Convention and declared that America was in the throes of a religious and cultural war, with the opposition party pushing an “amoral” agenda of unregulated abortion, rampant homosexuality and unrestricted pornography.

In particular, he singled out the “lawyer-spouse” of the Democratic presidential nominee, gravely warning that Hillary Clinton “believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and she has compared marriage as an institution to slavery and life on an Indian reservation.”

“Friends,” Buchanan continued, “this is radical feminism. The agenda Clinton and Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat—is change…but it’s not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.”  read more »

David Carr tackles the changing Wall Street Journal this morning and writes about the paper's sudden infactuation with politics. Journal managing editor Marcus Brauchli concedes to Mr. Carr that there have been more political stories this year, but that's because it's such an extraordinary year (simple enough). But Mr. Brauchli also offered this interesting quote:  read more »

On Jan. 3, the night of the Iowa caucuses, ABC political reporter Jake Tapper appeared on “Nightline” from Des Moines, where he reported live on Mike Huckabee’s surprise victory.

Afterward, he caught an overnight flight on the Hucka-plane to New Hampshire, where, around dawn, he filed a story for “Good Morning America.”

That evening, he was back in front of the cameras yet again, this time from Henniker, N.H., reporting on Mr. Huckabee for “ABC World News with Charles Gibson.”

“It was pretty nuts,” said Mr. Tapper.  read more »

"There is a chance that historians will examine this period in American history and wonder if journalism left the field."

That's David Carr in today's New York Times, who considers the future of investigative reporting in the wake of last week's layoffs at the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper.

But, in looking for a silver lining, Mr. Carr offers this sort-of-unconvincing argument...  read more »

Al Gore's Oscar ceremony star-turn has prompted a fresh round of speculation about whether he'll get into the 2008 presidential race.

Here's what Gore told reporters yesterday after winning, according to David Carr:

"I do no have a plan to become a candidate for office again," he said in response to a question. "I am involved in a campaign of another kind."

Another questioner suggested that the former wonk had crossed over.

"William Hung was a rock star," Mr. Gore replied, referring to the engineer turned "American Idol" star. "I just have a slide show."

-- Azi Paybarah

Two years ago, somewhat suddenly, Tom Sykes was not drunk and was very much out of work.  read more »

Deadly Intent: Ann Coulter, Word Warrior, by David Carr, June 12, 2006. Eve Ensler, the Original 'Vagina Warrior,' Organizes Arts Festival, by Felicia R. Lee, June 12, 2006.  read more »

Just asking: What new entry in the crowded and antagonistic celebrity-glossy field is making rivals  read more »

It starts with the ragtag pioneers, moving in with their funky friends and their bohemian pursuits, seeking life on the cheap in some desolate space. Then comes the progression: artists give way to creative professionals, lofts give way to loft-style co-ops, expensive cheese stores give way to more expensive cheese stores. The neighborhood has arrived; there it goes.

So it was when the armchair pundits, teenage diarists, freelance writers, and other non-professionalized writers found a new place to live, a sketchy industrial zone previously occupied by hardcore geeks and tech workers. Some of them came there to get away from the ink-and-paper mainstream media neighborhoods; some came because they couldn't get into the ink-and-paper world; some came because they weren't thinking about ink or paper at all.

But after a period of trepidation--is it safe around there? Can those people be trusted?--the ink-and-paper folks themselves started to notice the vibrancy of the street life, the raw immediacy of the neighborhood culture. They saw the appeal. The New Republic sent some of its younger kids to live there. The Washington Post annexed Kausfiles. Vanity Fair set James Wolcott up in a groovy bachelor pad.

The boom is on. Time Warner has launched Entertainment Weekly's Popwatch. Conde Nast is offering Beyond the Beyond, by Wired's Bruce Sterling. The New York Times' David Carr is backing up his media observations about podcasts with a podcast

Oh, and the Observer is launching the Daily Observer, with its Media Mob column.  read more »

The results aren't necessarily real Web logs, any more than a dive-y bar is a dive bar. But they are constantly updated, commentary-laced outlets for papers that can't always wait for paper anymore. Even if the paper is a lovely shade of salmon.

--Matt Haber

Recently, The Transom received this letter from a young fashion reporter who is frequently, as they say, "on the scene":

...[N]ot sure how to convey this to your staff, but every time I'm at a party with an Observer reporter, I KNOW they're an Observer reporter. Your staff is brilliant, but SO nerdy, and they dress/ act like it! They walk around with glasses and little notepads. Nobody is going to open up to people like that!

Case in point: Last month at the REDACTED DESIGNER fashion show. REPORTER NAME REDACTED showed up in a mousy black pant suit and glasses. They wouldn't let her in. I'm convinced if she'd dressed and acted like she belonged, she would have breezed through the door. Similarly at the REDACTED event, REPORTER NAME REDACTED looked terrified and clearly out of place.

Jesse Oxfeld recently told me that reporters should be as inconspicuous as possible and that meant dressing down. I disagree; to see and hear what the insiders see and hear, you must dress and act like them. THAT'S inconspicuous, at least in the fashion world (see: REDACTED NAME OF CUTE YOUNG FASHION REPORTER).

I don't know why I'm so passionate about this; maybe because I think the Observer is one of the few print papers that can really reflect an accurate and complex picture of the fashion scene in New York. And I hope I don't sound like a total snob, being like, "your reporters have yucky clothes." But I do think a makeover is in order, or at least a new staffer to show them how it's done.

Or, you know, you could bring back Candace B. :)

The Transom has thought often, if not much, of this email. (Particularly about bringing back Ms. Bushnell! Now there's a New York Observer reporter with a body—and a budget!—for fashion.)

But as The Transom gazes across the office, all that can be seen are reporters with fashion interests not much different from those of New York Times media reporter David Carr. (Those who have seen the brilliant Mr. Carr with a cigarette clenched between his teeth, scratching at his ragged notepad, shirt tails all aflap, will know what we mean.)  read more »

It is 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday, July 6th. The Transom has just realized that the Observer's foxy redheaded senior editor Suzy Hansen wears the same ratty t-shirt to work every single Tuesday. It is a grubby bit of Napoleon Dynamite swag which arrived via U.S.P.S. some months ago. "I've never even seen the movie," said Ms. Hansen. --Choire Sicha

Since Sept.  read more »