An Interview With Times Columnist David Carr

To obtain an approximation of the truth when writing his memoir, Night Of The Gun, David Carr spent years interviewing and recording the people from his past. He did this with $800 worth of video and audio equipment he picked up from Best Buy.

When he finished writing his book, he considered throwing all the material he gathered on the internet. However, after closely looking through some of the assembled information he thought better of it.

He sifted through and created an impressive, if not overwhelming, website that provides people with access to the source materials he used for his memoir. On the site are narrated videos, as well as unedited footage from interviews in addition to photographs and police and medical records.

Producing a site of this scope would scare many newsmen, but David is no stranger to the web or multimedia. In his day job as a columnist for the New York Times, Carr has blogged and filmed video segments in addition to mashing a keyboard for his weekly column on media. His extensive work can be accessed here.

I spoke with him over the phone about the process of filming and recording his subjects, as well as the website for his book.

When you set out to report your book, why did you decide to bring a camera and audio equipment?

I did it because the stuff was cheap. It created layers of redundancy built into the reporting with video, audio, typing created efficacious reporting. It would give me the most sort of flexibility. What I wanted to do was create a website. I would have the data from my reporting. I didn’t have a good idea of what it would be.

What was the process in deciding what would be text or video when creating the project?

The book was there from the start. I sold a proposal, so it was always going to be a book. I found I had put everything on this hard drive, I asked myself and others what that should be. There were a lot of iterations. I could throw the whole database on the website, but going through the tapes I discovered libel and slander and other shit I didn’t put in book. An unedited database would be a disaster.

I interviewed a bunch of people, I worked with Nick Bilton at the Times who has experience with story telling, we organized the site around a few questions. We used text, audio, video to answer those questions. It became apparent that video would take some narration. I did a day long shoot in my garage and worked with Jigar Mehat from the Times.

I’m proud of the site, though it didn’t work out how I thought it would. I think having twelve videos produced,that stretches people’s interest, it’s not the smartest thing. I thought it would be a bigger deal than it turned out to be. I didn’t get a lot of coverage about the website. There has not been a lot of feedback, one thing the website did or is doing is providing a point of entry for young people, people in [their early to mid twenties], who sampled main stream media, and used the web as secondary source. They were converted, they liked the website and they would come.

Now that the book is out there, we’re seeing traffic go up, but I thought it would be a significant point of entry for people buying the book.

When I looked at the site, I found it to be overwhelming, and it was unlike a Chris Anderson site, where it’s a blog that’s pretty simple.

I blog a bit at work and I didn’t want to get locked into blog about the book, which is just blogging about me. I’m a pretty healthy narcissist, but I couldn’t sustain that. But I understand what your saying about it being overwhelming in this age of simple user interface. At the site, you open up all these tiles, you go what is this?

It may or may not have been a good judgment, like the navigation will re-array depending on what button you push, the timeline–which I didn’t understand why Nick wanted to do that, it didn’t make sense to me–sustains interest. It has its own gloriousness. I don’t know if community works, it hooks to a forum on Simon and Schuster but it is pretty moribund. There’s a lot more activity on the blog for Amazon. I built a separate Facebook page, too.

Is that a failure of Simon and Schuster? Are people uninterested in going to a publisher’s site as opposed to Amazon or Facebook?

No, it’s not their fault, it’s ours. We made the community element a small button on a dense site. The gesture of participation was authentic. The website has as much DNA from documentary film as from web stuff and as such–as glorious as it is–and really well done, I don’t know if it comports with web, which is hilarious because Nick Bilton is so good at designing in the bit, snack, meal interface, but we probably served up too much of a meal.

People aren’t compelled by the narrative, but by the raw data. We put up six more of the just interviews from my raw footage. People love that shit, they love it.

For what we’re working on, and I believe it is becoming the standard for web video journalism, it involves filming five shots of the person as they work and then interviewing them afterward and weaving it all together. Do you think this will continue into the future or will it be more of the one-on-one dead-on talking head style?

I was more concerned with what the truth is, so having a single person being filmed indifferent to aesthetic, no special sound, gives it some kind of vibe of authenticity, you get a peek at the real shit.

I know what you mean, with overlaying audio. It’s how people really learn stories. Audio based overlay on more interesting visuals has extreme value, but one is portrait, which you’re doing. Mine is raw reporting. They’re different sort of activities. I’m not telling you about this person, they’re telling me about me.

The thing is, I told Simon and Schuster this website was going to be a big deal so they funded it. It’s not a huge, significant amount of money for a website. I dont think it was or is that big of a deal. I posted a question in the on the book’s forum: Does the website matter? It’s only 25 responses, the site hasn’t gone really viral.

My book was very well covered, I got every break in the world, but one of the coolest best pieces was a hurry up piece that Abcnews.com did, it jammed so much info into that, its like 90 seconds and really good. It’s me talking and then some found images in there.

Do you find people act differently when you put a camera in their face as opposed to just reporting with a notepad and a recorder?

People are fully assimilated to cameras, people leap toward and embrace being on camera. Everybody is always ready, they don’t care what you are doing. When I’m filming the carpetbagger, I could tell them I’m shooting for Danish TV and they wouldn’t care. If you shoot at night and have a light on the camera, people will come like moths to a lamp. They just want to say, “I was on the thing,” a lot don’t even really ask what its for, the transaction is complete, they don’t even need to see it.

Of course for the book, did people act differently? I think it went away after awhile, people seem pretty natural. What I don’t like about filiming as journalist, is I’m about observed reporting, and you get none of that with a camera. You have an 800 pound pencil, you become the center of attention.

With the Oscars, dealing with famous people, the camera is not a help with them because they have a character when there’s a camera light on them, the more used to a camera a person is the more different they’ll act on it.

A lot of what I’m hearing and being told is that reporters should be able to do video, do podcasts, do typing, but in my experience it seems like there is a video crew and there are reporters. They may work together, but it’s almost siloed with each doing its thing. Do you think this will continue, or will there be a convergence with reporters doing both?

At the Times I feel videographers rolling towards me, but if there is breaking news we let videographers go and do their own stories. I do a seasonal blog about the Oscars and we’ll do a weekly video with producer and editor. In that case, I’m talent. I’m just acting goofy, jumping in front of camera. For the daily videos I’m waving around and it’s usually just me working the video.

When I make a video of the family, a home movie, I’m constantly annotating and commenting from behind the camera and I see that being valuable going forward, but thats all I would be doing, that would be a story, you can weild the camera and write the asides.

Thirty years ago I worked at a paper and I got assigned to take both the photo and story, but they’d never both turn out. Either one would turn out or the other, you get story or the picture or you don’t get both. That part of convergence will be difficult to negotiate. You’ll be coming out of school with different skill set, but its fucking hard. When I go to Sundance, I do a lot of video, but there is no reporting when the camera is around, I’m talent not a reporter.

Jay Yarow