I debated whether to write a tribute here to David Carr. There are many more who had the privilege of knowing him much better than I did. Though it is quite appropriate that, as Andrea Peterson beautifully phrased it, the "wired collective voice of Twitter howled 'David Carr'" on news of his death last night, a tweet, ten thousand tweets seem too few and by all means too fleeting for the likes of him. I asked myself what I would want my friends to do when I go and I'll put those few of you on notice now: I want more than a tweet. So here in this, my somewhat less fleeting home, is a moment for David Carr.
Here I want to remember just one aspect of David's remarkable career, character, and life: his appreciation for the value of youth.
I loved the times when he would brag about his daughters' accomplishments and his moments with them online. Of course, that's every father's joy. But David was proud of the accomplishments of young people around him in much the same way. Last night in Twitter's howl, I saw many rising talents thank David for the moments of intense attention and encouragement he had given them. My heart goes out to his own children and wife, of course, and also to his extended brood, like his students at BU who were so privileged to sit in the class of the all too briefly tenured Prof. Carr. In his brilliant syllabus, he told them:
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.
I was lucky to snag David once to judge my students' entrepreneurial ventures. As the other assembled experts debated this and that, David waited for his moment and then -- and you must hear this in that voice of his, that of a badly tuned diesel engine struggling up a mountain against the wind -- he said: "The journalist must go to the ocean." The room was silent, heads cocked like confused German shepherds as if to say, "What the fuck does that mean, David?" He was used to that: the price of speaking in brilliant, unexpected flourishes. So he explained: He saw that now the journalist had to do it all, had to make all media, had to distribute, had to support her work as a business. David voted for a few of those businesses and then, indeed, quietly helped those students find their ways to the ocean.
I was most impressed with David's much observed bromance with Brian Stelter. When Brian arrived at The New York Times fresh from graduation day, David joked about seeing this young man as a threat -- in David's brilliant, unexpected flourish, Brian was a robot built in the basement of The Times to destroy him. Of course, David took Brian under his wing. But he did something more remarkable: He simultaneously treated Brian as a respected colleague, an equal, often someone to look up to. He was proud of Brian's many page one stories. There's a reason they costarred in Page One.
David's love of youth and inventiveness permeated his criticism and media worldview. He played the curmudgeon brilliantly. The voice and imposing glare helped. He held journalism to standards. He asked the hardest questions he could and kept asking past the easy answers. But at the same time he allowed himself the joy of discovery of the new. I'll bet that's why he liked young people so much. They brought the fresh perspective that challenged his own perspective. He was open and intellectually honest enough to change his mind.
Evidence of that was his changing relationship with those Vice whippersnappers. Here was David scolding them in Page One:
And here was David changing his mind about Vice. Last year, he wrote: "Being the crusty old-media scold felt good at the time, but recent events suggest that Vice is deadly serious about doing real news that people, yes, even young people, will actually watch."
Now see Vice cofounder Shane Smith talk about those moments and his relationship with David:
"People like David Carr who speak their minds and tell the truth are few and far between," Shane said, "and there should be more David Carrs." True.