New York Times Media Columnist David Carr Dies at Age 58

Media columnist David Carr, who wrote the Media Equation column for The New York Times and penned a memoir about his fight with drug addiction, collapsed in the newspaper's Manhattan newsroom and died Thursday night. He was 58.

Carr's column focused on issues of media in relation to business, culture, and government, said the Times, which confirmed his death.

He was one of the big names featured in "Page One," a 2011 documentary about the venerable newspaper.

Carr joined the Times in 2002 as a business reporter covering magazine publishing. His Media Equation column appeared in the Monday business section.

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.

Carr served as editor of the Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly in Washington, D.C. He also was editor of a Minneapolis-based alternative weekly called Twin Cities Reader.

Carr, who lived in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife and their daughter and had two other children, wrote "The Night of the Gun," a 2008 memoir about addiction and recovery.

The book, published by Simon and Schuster, traces Carr's rise from cocaine addict to single dad raising twin girls to sobered-up media columnist for the Times.

Carr said he wrote up a book proposal "on a dare to myself" in two days. After an agent sold the idea, Carr ended up interviewing about 60 people and working on the book for three years.

He took the transcribed interviews, numerous documents, and pictures to his family's cabin in the Adirondacks, where he wrote the memoir, subtitled "A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life — His Own."