I posted this internally to Medium employees on February 13, 2015. See Hatching Inside Medium for more context.
Medium Lost a Great Friend
Nobody who ever met David Carr will forget him. He was, in every sense, distinctive — an odd-looking fellow (one account nailed it — stork-like), with a gravelly voice, Keane-esque eyes behind thick spectacles, and just a little bit of hipster swagger. (Probably the only Times-person who could call you “brother,” and pull it off.) Just about everyone he met knew who he was, and he used that power for good — ignoring the fame part and exploiting the familiarity to get his foot in the door of comity. After a five-minute conversation with him, someone would count him as a friend. And they’d be right.
That’s why, besides the many people who knew him very well — as a colleague, competitor, source, close friend or family man — dozens, maybe hundreds of others are posting their memories of him. I guess I’m no different.
As a journalist, of course, Carr was unparalleled, a supremely talented journalist who became the best media reporter we will ever see. That’s why millions of readers who never met him are greiving today.
But in our own little corner of the world, our mourning is intensified because David loved Medium.
He never uttered such a sentiment directly, but it was clear that he not only paid attention to what we did, but was fascinated by our experiment. His article last May was probably as close as Carr ever came to a puff piece: while the headline read, “Medium Charms Writers,” the real headline was “Medium Charms Carr.”
A month later, I honored when he took up our pitch to write a story about my leaving Wired to come to Medium, and also got a chance to see how he worked. We set up a time that he’d call (from some mountain retreat in NY’s North Country) and he machine-gunned a list of thoughtful but inescapably direct questions to me. It was like a great doctor asking you about tough but personal issues — somehow, underneath the frankness you could sense a layer of empathy. You wouldn’t dare prevaricate in a setting like that.
A Carr interview wasn’t a duel with a reporter playing gotcha, or serving an agenda. It was two people doing the work of digging out a chunk of truth — going into the kiln to fire up one more tile in the vast mosaic of contemporary media that he painted in the aggreate. Which is a sentence he might call bullshit on. Just a way to fill a few column inches, right? Wrong. He knew how important his work was.
Medium was the central tool in a journalism class Carr taught at class at Boston University. Everything, from the syllabus to class papers, was on Medium. The syllabus itself was a phenomenon, with 194 recommends, and heavily shared on social nets.
The last time I had a substantial conversation with him — no, I wasn’t a close friend but one of the many whose occasional interactions with him provided me that illusion — was at the F.ounders weekend in Ireland. We had a long talk about his coverage of upheaval at the Times, the direction of journalism and a bit about my experience at Medium. And a bit of primo gossip. I can’t believe there will be no more conversations. (Though to be sure, Carr, never the picture of health, seemed particularly fragile that night.) And that David Carr won’t be around to cheer — or, if proper, to excoriate — our evolution at Medium.
RIP, brother.
