David Carr's Masterwork Investigated the Trickiest, Most Slippery Subject of All

By Kerry Lauerman    |   Monday, April 06, 2015 - Off the Shelf When David Carr collapsed and died in February back at work at The New York Times after an evening public speaking event, calls and texts spread quickly among his multitude of friends hoping to break the news before it began bubbling up, alarming and poorly sourced, on Twitter. I first heard from a friend at the Times, and then I immediately called a close friend of David’s who was not so lucky; he’d just been scanning his feed. There was a bit of rough poetry in that. Carr, through his Media Equation column and his oversized Twitter footprint (his account still has nearly 500,000 followers), helped popularize and legitimize Twitter. “The real value of the service,” he wrote back in 2010, in Twitter’s infancy, “is listening to a wired collective voice.” He loved how the social media hive sifted through hype to offer up the fascinating and the important—precisely what many of us valued so much in his own work. Now, that hive buzzed about his death at the age of just fifty-eight. A familiar, colorful portrait emerged of Carr in the coverage that followed: outsized personality with a distinct voice and a Gump-like ability to be where the action is, who overcame an early, crippling ad... READ FULL POST