February 13, 2015 — The Shorenstein Center remembers New York Times media columnist David Carr, who passed away on February 12, 2015.
The Shorenstein Center had the privilege of hosting three visits with David Carr, one almost one year ago to the day, and others in 2011 and 2009, where he shared his outlooks on the media industry with students and the larger community.
In a February 2014 talk titled “That Media Model Is So Yesterday: Catching Up With the Present Future We Are Living Through,” Carr said that new “excellent and growing” sites such as Gawker, BuzzFeed and Business Insider are taking from the “great, vast sea of information and editing, selecting it, surfacing it” in ways that are visually appealing to consumers. They are putting “new skin on a constantly changing world of news,” he said. While “some call it aggregation [and] others call it stealing,” these sites are hiring more reporters and producing serious content.
On October 14, 2011, Carr spoke with Harvard/NYU’s danah boyd, also senior researcher at Microsoft Research, at the Shorenstein Center’s 25th anniversary celebration at Harvard Kennedy School. The video is below, and a complete transcript of their discussion can be downloaded here.
David Carr discussed the future of the news industry, and newspapers in particular, on March 3, 2009, where he said he was equal parts pessimistic and optimistic about their outlook. Read a summary of his talk.
