O Luís António Santos  recomenda que se descubra um pouco mais sobre um jornalista recentemente desaparecido, o responsável pela coluna ‘Media Equation’ no NYTimes, David Carr.

O espaço que criou na plataforma Medium, de apoio a uma disciplina de jornalismo na Boston University (Press Play), é um repositório muito claro de pistas sobre a sua personalidade, de indicadores sobre a sua postura face à profissão mas, sobretudo, de propostas para estudantes de jornalismo.

O David Carr era um brilhante homem cheio de falhas.
Escrevia texto cru e dizia que o jornalismo não podia viver só do estilo (há um excerto brilhante num documentário de 2011 que também se recomenda – Page One – em que Carr confronta, de forma bem enérgica, ‘jornalistas hipsters’).

Este excerto é bem testemunho de tudo isto:
“Your professor is a terrible singer and a decent dancer. He is a movie crier but stone-faced in real life. He never laughs even when he is actually amused. He hates suck-ups, people who treat waitresses and cab drivers poorly and anybody who thinks diversity is just an academic conceit. He is a big sucker for the hard worker and is rarely dazzled by brilliance. He has little patience for people who pretend to ask questions when all they really want to do is make a speech.
He has a lot of ideas about a lot of things, some of which are good. We will figure out which is which together. He likes being challenged. He is an idiosyncratic speaker, often beginning in the middle of a story, and is used to being told that people have no idea what he is talking about. It’s fine to be one of those people. In Press Play, he will strive to be a lucid, linear communicator.
Your professor is fair, fundamentally friendly, a little odd, but not very mysterious. If you want to know where you stand, just ask.”

 Luís António Santos | UMinho