The late David Carr was one of the great hires at the New York Times when they were still doing fantastic, deep-dive media journalism. Recovered addict and veteran writer, Carr was a great one for delivering hard-bitten yet inspiring advice.
Keep typing until it turns into writing.
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The late David Carr (Night of the Gun) was the kind of writer who reminded writers why they loved their jobs. He suffered for the job, but also thought it was a blast, and tore poseurs to pieces.
Here’s Carr being interviewed by a magazine at Boston University, where he taught a class:
The dirty secret: journalism has always been horrible to get in; you always have to eat so much crap to find a place to stand. I waited tables for seven years, did writing on the side. If you’re gonna get a job that’s a little bit of a caper, that isn’t really a job, that under ideal circumstances you get to at least leave the building and leave your desktop, go out, find people more interesting than you, learn about something, come back and tell other people about it—that should be hard to get into. That should be hard to do. No wonder everybody’s lined up, trying to get into it. It beats working.
Darius Clarke Monroe was a straight-A student from a tight-knit family in Houston; the last kid anybody would have picked to become a criminal. But nevertheless, he and two friends left high school one day to rob a bank. Evolution of a Criminal is Monroe’s confident, morally astute documentary about what led up to and followed that life-changing decision.
Evolution of a Criminal is opening this week in very limited release and will be broadcast on PBS in the near future.
My review is at Film Journal International:
As in Night of the Gun, where journalist David Carr reported his past history as a violent drug addict as though he were covering any other story, Monroe approaches the bank robbery that changed his life with a similar degree of distance. The background he paints through closed-framed, emotional interviews shows a vibrantly family-filled childhood in a quiet Houston neighborhood. His mother and father and other relatives describe a bifurcated existence, where his lively confidence was shadowed by worry about the family’s severe financial problems. After a robbery leaves the family devastated—the thieves actually broke through his bedroom ceiling—Monroe’s jokes to his mother Sigrid about robbing a bank to help her out take on a more insistent edge. Like just about everybody else Monroe talks to, she can’t believe that her friendly, outgoing, well-behaved boy would ever do anything of the sort….
You can see the trailer here:
In one of the less surprising media announcements of late, Newsweek said last week that they were ceasing publication of their print magazine at the end of 2012. The magazine, which has already been merged of sorts with Tina Brown’s web site The Daily Beast, will go to an online-subscription model next year. According to Paid Content:
…the magazine is slated to lose $40 million this year and has seen its subscribers fall from 3 million to 1.5 million in the last decade. More broadly, the company faced a more existential problem in that a “weekly news” magazine has become an anachronism in the digital world.
It makes sense ultimately, as Newsweek hasn’t really been able to keep up with the relevance of publications like The Economist, Time or The Atlantic, which have shown the ability to keep a very vibrant web presence while not damaging the print product. Brown has tried to tart up the magazine of late, with dubious results:
Readers and media analysts have been puzzled by some of the covers Ms. Brown had chosen in an effort to distinguish Newsweek from other magazines and make it a talked-about publication again. Last November, she featured a cover story about sex addiction, and in May President Obama was shown wearing a rainbow-colored halo with a headline that read ”The First Gay President.”
And while Daily Beast is an interesting creature, mostly for its mix of rehashed news and original opinion plus the handy daily Cheat Sheet aggregator, the design is somewhat atrocious, navigation a pain, and the writing, well….
Founded in 1933 or not, this is a magazine whose time may have passed. See the cover shown at right for proof.
Chris Barsanti 
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