David Carr

David Carr’s Last Word on Journalism, Aimed at Students

With DAVID CARR FEB. 15, 2015

David Carr was known at The New York Times as a supreme talent scout, a mentor to young reporters and a blunt critic of those who didn’t measure up. He was a natural teacher, and right up until the day he died last week, he was bent on minting the next generation of journalists. Last fall, David joined the faculty at Boston University’s communications school. While David did not write his curriculum as a column, it has all the essential ingredients of one. So here it serves as the final Media Equation under David’s byline.

“I love the current future of journalism we are living through and care desperately about getting my students ready to prosper in this new place,” read the quotation below David’s portrait in a photo gallery at B.U., where David served as the first Andrew R. Lack professor.

The class he taught offered a window into the future he was trying to shape. His course, called Press Play, focused on the cutting edge of media and was about “making and distributing content in the present future we are living through.” David cared deeply about nurturing reporters-to-be — college students who felt the calling and were looking for a spiritual guide to help them navigate the rapidly shifting media landscape.

A collection of memories and reactions to the death of Mr. Carr, who The Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, called “the finest media reporter of his generation.”

The syllabus for Press Play, published on the blogging platform Medium, is perhaps David’s most succinct prescription for how to thrive in the digital age. It is also David in his purest form — at once blunt, funny, haughty, humble, demanding, endearing and unique.

David was interested in people, not their résumés. He didn’t care where someone went to college or who their parents were. So instead of giving his students a standard biographical blurb (graduate of the University of Minnesota, editor of The Washington City Paper, media columnist at The Times since 2005), David told them this, under the heading “Not need to know, but nice to know”:

“Your professor is a terrible singer and a decent dancer. He is a movie crier but stone-faced in real life. He never laughs even when he is actually amused. He hates suck-ups, people who treat waitresses and cab drivers poorly and anybody who thinks diversity is just an academic conceit. He is a big sucker for the hard worker and is rarely dazzled by brilliance. He has little patience for people who pretend to ask questions when all they really want to do is make a speech.

“He has a lot of ideas about a lot of things, some of which are good. We will figure out which is which together. He likes being challenged. He is an idiosyncratic speaker, often beginning in the middle of a story, and is used to being told that people have no idea what he is talking about. It’s fine to be one of those people. In Press Play, he will strive to be a lucid, linear communicator.

“Your professor is fair, fundamentally friendly, a little odd, but not very mysterious. If you want to know where you stand, just ask.”

He encouraged teamwork. “While writing, shooting, and editing are often solitary activities, great work emerges in the spaces between people,” David wrote, adding, “Evaluations will be based not just on your efforts, but on your ability to bring excellence out of the people around you.”

David warned there would be a heavy reading list. “I’m not sliming you with a bunch of textbooks, so please know I am dead serious about these readings,” he wrote. “Skip or skim at your peril.”