Carr: I think one thing that people do not understand is, as recently as four or five years ago, to be a member of Manhattan media, you weren’t rich, but you lived as a rich person might. You went to the parties that a rich person would go to, you ate the food that a rich person would eat, you drank the vodka that a rich person would drink, and you’d end up in black cars, and you’d end up sometimes on boats and in helicopters. We lived as kings, and it convinced us, I think, that there was a significant underlying value to what we did.

It’s also worth thinking about how this changed the perspective of Manhattan media people, giving them the perspective of the rich. Someone — I think it was Eric Alterman or David Corn or Jonathan Alter, back in 2003 or so — wrote that the left/right divide among the media was an illusion and a red herring, that what really mattered was their lower-upper-class status, with all the biases & blind spots that entailed. One of the weirder things about the big network/cable television news shows is the divide between who works there and who watches them.

Carr: […] I just went through a cycle of Oscars with, I did the Monday media column, I did a Friday thing on the Oscars, I did some Arts and Leisure stuff, I made daily videos, weekly videos, and then I did occasional news coverage. I got done with Oscar season, I’m 52 years old, and I don’t think I really did anything good or important for like three weeks or a month afterwards. I was exhausted.

Dumenco: When you talk about your down period of recovering, post-Oscars, well, [Gawker Media chief] Nick Denton would have fired you by then, if you were working for Denton instead of the Times. I mean, if your page views were down that much for three or four weeks, if you weren’t keeping up.

Carr: […] and it would have been nothing personal, but he would have said, “Look, that’s not built into our model to have you go and do a little walkabout to get straightened out.” So that’s what great about The New York Times, but that’s what makes Nick very difficult to compete with.

And that’s why Gawker will never produce meaningful journalism.

Original Q/A here.