Thursday evening, David Carr, the renowned reporter, collapsed in the newsroom of The New York Times and died a short time later at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital. He was 58 years old. As word of his death spread, his legions of readers, admirers, and the scores of journalists Carr mentored, cajoled, scolded, and adored remembered him as the most authoritative voice on media during one of its most precarious eras. He also knew addiction and pain. He clambered up from those depths, first to become the editor of the Twin Cities Reader and the Washington City Paper, and then a media reporter and critic in New York. He embraced the fullness of his life.

By every account—aside from his own, his 2008 memoir The Night of the Gun—Carr was an uncommonly decent fellow, whose interest in others was rooted in empathy and an abiding curiosity. He was a gossip and a schmooze who rarely came off as one, in part because his physical presence—gaunt, cancer-worn, with a voice made jagged by cigarettes—wasn't imposing, even as he was a commanding figure. Carr's analytical skills, his approachably clever prose, his dogged professionalism, and his reporting chops were all enviable. He made sense of an industry racked by layoffs, furloughs, bankruptcies and technical upheavals. Of course he was the perfect man for the job, in hindsight. But then, not every Minnesota-born recovered crack addict rises so high in the East Coast media ranks.

During Carr’s dark times in the 1980s, he spent many nights tearing up the Twin Cities with Tom Arnold, the actor who would later become Roseanne Barr’s husband and business partner. Arnold was an aspiring stand-up comedian; Carr was a journalist in the audience. The two men drank and used together, and were routinely the last to leave a party. That didn't stop them from physically scuffling once over an unsettled gram of coke. "He started arguing with me in front of a woman I liked," Arnold said Friday. "He said I owed him. I said, 'Dude, I'm going to punch you in the face, I'm just warning you.' And then that happened."

The men stayed close. Arnold went to California to build a career as an actor, and Carr would visit whenever he was in Los Angeles. Arnold, who has married four times, remembers going to the Nate ‘n Al deli with Carr and pouring out how miserable he was in one of his marriages, but told his friend he was determined to persevere. Carr wouldn't have it. He told Arnold he wasn't leaving Los Angeles until Arnold filed for divorce. Then he dug in at the deli and sat. "That day," Arnold said, "after I waited him out for about eight hours, I called the lawyer."

The first time Ashley Groussman, Arnold's current wife, met Carr in 2008, she told her husband that she was worried about him—he didn't look good. "You live the life he's lived, that's how you look!" Arnold replied. "Brian Williams looks a certain way and has to make up stories about his life, because he didn't live the life that David Carr lived. You could see the stories on his face."