NY Times media columnist David Carr dies at age 58

New York Times media columnist David Carr collapsed at his office on Thursday night and died. He was 58.

Just hours earlier Thursday he had appeared with the filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald, who were joined by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden via live video for a conversation about the Oscar-nominated film " Citizenfour" at the New School in Manhattan.

Carr wrote the Media Equation column for the Times, focusing on issues of media in relation to business and culture.

He joined the Times in 2002 as a business reporter, covering magazine publishing. He originated a column on the entertainment industry’s red carpet awards season, The Carpetbagger, which has continued with other columnists.

His Media Equation column which appeared in the Monday business section “analyzed news and developments in publishing, television, social media — for which he was an early evangelist — and other mass communications platforms,” according to the Times.

Carr figured prominently in “Page One,” a documentary about the newspaper.

New York Times staff broke the news on Twitter that Carr had collapsed. The paper said Carr “was found shortly before 9 p.m. He was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.”

In an email to staffers quoted in the paper’s obituary of Carr, Times executive editor Dean Baquet described Carr as "the finest media reporter of his generation, a remarkable and funny man who was one of the leaders of our newsroom."

The Times said that “Carr’s rise to a prominent position at The Times is all the more remarkable for the depths from which he rose.”

Carr wrote frankly about his experiences with cocaine addiction and recovery in a 2008 memoir, “The Night of the Gun,” which he wrote after reporting on his own life.

Before joining the Times, Carr was a contributing writer for The Atlantic Monthly and New York magazine. He also was a media writer for news website Inside.com, the editor of Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly in Washington, D.C., and editor of The Twin Cities Reader, an alternative weekly in Minneapolis. The Washington City Paper linked to Carr’s work in its obituary, saying “They're a bit of a disorganized digital mess, which wouldn't have surprised Carr, who declared alt-weeklies all but overwhelmed by the Web a few years ago in the Times.”

Al Jazeera with wire services