David Carr, the brilliant New York Times media critic, died on Thursday in New York. He was 58.
The Times said that he collapsed in the paper’s newsroom around 9 p.m. He was then rushed to St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Carr wrote about a range of cultural subjects at the Times, but he became best known for his columns on the media. He most recently wrote a piece on the opposite career trajectories of Jon Stewart and Brian Williams. Just hours before his death, he was moderating a panel discussion between Citizenfour filmmaker Laura Poitras, Edward Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald.
In addition to his pieces on the media, he also wrote about film. Just last month, he wrote about why Selma’s lack of Oscar nominations was important.
“David Carr was one of the most gifted journalists who has ever worked at The New York Times,” Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the Times publisher, said Thursday. “He combined formidable talent as a reporter with acute judgment to become an indispensable guide to modern media. But his friends at The Times and beyond will remember him as a unique human being — full of life and energy, funny, loyal and lovable. An irreplaceable talent, he will be missed by everyone who works for The Times and everyone who reads it.”
“David was [a] media columnist and hugely admired in the profession,” fellow Times writer Nicholas Kristof wrote on Facebook. “I think that's partly because the news industry sometimes seems to be struggling for its soul, and David always exemplified both soul and integrity.”
Carr was an unlikely national media figure, surviving drug addiction during the late 1980s, a story he told in his 2008 memoir, The Night of the Gun. He joined the Times in 2002 as a business reporter and later was the star of Page One, a 2011 documentary on the Times.
He was born in Minneapolis and graduated from the University of Minnesota. He was also a cancer survivor.
Carr is survived by his wife, Jill Rooney Carr, who is the international operations manager for Shake Shack; and his three daughters.
Carr’s death comes just a day after the death of another respected journalist, 60 Minutes’ Bob Simon.
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