Carr-isms

Our job is to restore consequence

Be a worker among workers. It’s more important that you fit in before you stick out.

Someone who is underestimated will be the one who changes the world. It’s not the person everyone expects. It might be you.

Journalism is like housekeeping. It’s a series of small, discrete acts performed over and over. It’s really the little things that make it better. So don’t think about the broad sweep of your journalism. Just do a good job on what’s in front of you. Working on your grand plan is like shoveling snow that hasn’t fallen yet. Just do the next right thing.

I SEE LOTS OF GOOD WRITING FROM YOU, BUT I ALSO SEE A TENDENCY TO SETTLE FOR A CLICHÉ RATHER THAN WRITING YOUR WAY THROUGH SOMETHING. STOP DOING THAT

Sometimes you're writing, and sometimes you're typing. Now go type.

I know what it's like to come out the other side when the odds are stacked against you.

As a writer, I prefer to get bossed around by my notebook and the facts contained therein. They may not lead to a perfect, seamless arc, but they yield a story that coheres in another way, because it is mostly true.

I never want to see you. Go out and report. There are no good stories in this building.

Don’t tell us HOW you got the story. Readers don’t like to see the scaffolding.

I’m a churchgoing Catholic, and I do that as a matter of, it’s good to stand with my family. It’s good that I didn’t have to come up with my own creation myth for my children. It’s a wonderful … community. It’s not really where I find God. The accommodation I’ve reached is a very jerry-rigged one, which is: All along the way, in recovery, I’ve been helped without getting into specifics of names, by all of these strangers who get in a room and do a form of group-talk therapy and live by certain rules in their life — and one of the rules is that you help everyone who needs help. And I think to myself: Well, that seems remarkable.

You are always told to recover for yourself, but the only way I got my head out of my own ass was to remember that there were other asses to consider.

I worked at a weekly with a lot of young reporters, and I would hear them pouring on the honey on the phone and being real sweet and nice with the people that they talked to. And then they would turn in these stories that were scabrous and really mean. And I said, well, you're just - you're setting this up so the phone call's going to come to me, not you. And you haven't done these people the privilege of giving them an opportunity to defend themselves.

I was taught when I was a young reporter that it's news when we say it is. I think that's still true -- it's news when 'we' say it is. It's just who 'we' is has changed. Members of the public, people with modems, people with cell phones are now producers, editors. They can push and push and push on a story until it ends up being acknowledged by everyone.