Hitting the Reset Button

New York Times columnist and reporter David Carr presented "Hitting the Reset Button" – the 2012 Mary Alice Davis Distinguished Lecture in Journalism – on Oct. 24 at the Belo Center for New Media.

Carr is featured in the documentary "Page One: Inside The New York Times," which screened on Oct. 23 at the Belo Center. Sponsored by the School of Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin College of Communication, both events were free and open to the public.

David Carr of The New York Times gives advice to students at The University of Texas at Austin from Moody College of Communication on Vimeo.

Carr discussed how mainstream legacy organizations, such as The New York Times, are working to survive in the Digital Age – a topic covered in "Page One: Inside the New York Times." Released in 2011, the documentary follows Carr and his New York Times colleagues for one year.

Carr also visited journalism and media entrepreneurship courses.

Carr writes the Media Equation column for The New York Times' Monday Business section, which focuses on issues in print, digital, film, radio and television. He also works as a general assignment reporter for the Times' Culture section and blogs at Media Decoder.

He began working at the Times in 2002 covering the magazine publishing industry for the Business section. Before joining the Times, he was a contributing writer for The Atlantic Monthly and New York Magazine. In 2000 he was the media writer for Inside.com, a news site focusing on the entertainment and publishing industries.

Before moving to New York, Carr served as editor of the Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly in Washington, D.C. He also served as editor and columnist at The Twin Cities Reader, a Minneapolis-based alternative weekly.

Formerly a cocaine addict and a single parent on welfare, Carr chronicled his journey to recovery in the 2008 New York Times best seller "The Night of the Gun." True to his profession, Carr used reporting to fact-check his past.

To view the full lecture, visit https://vimeo.com/52339674. 

About the Mary Alice Davis Lectureship Series

The family of the late Mary Alice Davis, a 1965 journalism alumna and columnist for the Austin American-Statesman, established the lectureship in 2005.

Honoring Davis' legacy as a champion of journalism's role in democracy, the lectureship brings notable journalists to campus to discuss the role of journalism in society.

Before working for the Austin American-Statesman, Davis spent more than 20 years writing for the House Research Organization (a research organization for the Texas House of Representatives). Before that, she worked as a reporter for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, where she worked alongside – and later married – Jim Davis. The two met as journalism students working for The Daily Texan in the 1960s.