Heading to the Republican convention? You could do worse than follow the advice proffered in today's Times "36 Hours in" column on the Twin Cities, penned by Minneapolitan David Carr. It's full of good advice for restaurants, culture, and entertainment. And bars. There are really just a couple of our favorite places that he missed: you can get a good (for the midwest) pizza and a cheap pitcher of Summit at Pizza Luce on Lyndale Ave. If the lot's full, there's usually street parking readily available a block away on 32nd and Garfield. Just make sure to lock up! [NYT]

• Yet another miserable day for people whose livelihoods depend on ink and paper: Gannett is cutting 1,000 jobs, McClatchy is freezing wages, Cox has put 29 of its papers up for sale, and Tribune is a mess as usual. [Gawker]

In a roundup of every current media-wonk topic — the Olympics, YouTube, TiVo, and the Philadelphia Inquirer's boneheaded move to keep its hottest stories offline — David Carr of the New York Times has deftly buried a hint to his employer's Web strategy: "The horizon line for when a newspaper on the street is serving as a kind of brochure of a rich online product does not seem far off." Carr's not just speculating. He's alluding to a move already being made at the Times:

Everyone loves New York Times reporter David Carr, who's just published Night of the Gun, an excellent reported memoir about his years of crack addiction and bad behavior. That's why the self-promoting spam e-mail that he sent to everybody he knows this morning is so easy to swallow. Most authors self-promote while falling all over themselves, trying to apologize. Not David! "As you can see from the non-customized hello, I am spamming you out of self-interest."He goes on to say, "I'd apologize for that, except there is an easy way to solve — don't hit 'send.'" So he spams us, shamelessly. Used to being spun, we're dazzled by the lack of pretense. Apologies are insincere—as everyone already knows, addicts are experts at talking their way out of their sins. So, damn it: we'll bookmark Night of the Gun.

Hawk-faced elderly man James Brady, the name-dropping veteran of 600 media outlets who has now eased into his retirement job as Forbes' "media columnist" (ha), is primarily skilled at being befuddled about the point of things (though he hasn't lost his name-dropping talent). So faced with an early copy of former crackhead-turned Times columnist David Carr's (well-reviewed) new book-which is not, as Brady hoped, a volume of media name-dropping-Brady panics in print like the senile Uncle Junior in The Sopranos: shoot the bad man and run hide in the closet! See, Brady really wanted this book to be a recitation by Carr of media inside-baseball stuff. "What a glorious read that would be, and what a column or two I could get out of it," he writes. But no-it's full of drug shit!

Jennifer Senior's affectionate profile of former coworker David Carr examines what the Times media reporter left out of his tell-all memoir of crack addiction, drug dealing and physical abuse: Being a big jerk to many of the women he drew into his orbit. Carr's many female friends, Senior said, were shocked to read about him choking his girlfriend, and probably also would have had trouble imagining with some of what got cut:

Leon Neyfakh at the Observer reports on David Carr's fastidiously investigated druggie memoir The Night of the Gun and thinks it's just the rehab an ailing genre needs: "After years of abuse, the memoir has found its white knight, galloping in to show how a personal story can be engrossing, shocking and true. Mr. Carr's book...practically issues a challenge to those current reigning kings-David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, Ishmael Beah-of the memoir genre: You get a video camera and tape recorder, and retrace the steps of your life. Will your story sound the same?" Carr even hired a reporter to help him reconstruct the evidence of his forgotten crackhead years, which raises an interesting question: Will he be credited for bringing journalistic rigor to the memoir, or will a superabundance of facts and sources — "No, this really happened, I have affidavits to prove it!" — baptize the next big thing in literary narcissism?

Even serious, proven journalists like David Carr are reduced to defending themselves in the blog comments. [City Pages]

Minneapolis Star and Tribune "gossip" columnist (there is no gossip in Minneapolis) C.J. has a kind of hilarious "item" about how Times media columnist and addiction memoirist David Carr is now feuding with Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz. How does she manage this? She quotes a Kurtz column in which Kurtz sums up Carr's assesment of himself as a lousy junkie, then calls Carr to ask if he'll be on Kurtz's show. Carr, probably befuddled at receiving a call from C.J., says something kind of confusing about how they are not that close. Then, FishbowlNY picks it up? Best entirely nonsensical made-up feud ever! Team Junkie! [Strib]

Crackhead-turned Times reporter success story David Carr is loved by media types for being a cool guy, and is basking in the generally positive public attitude towards his upcoming memoir. But everything is not well in Carr's world. Oh no. Just as Carr has found the strength to open up to the world about his past drug use, an even bigger scandal threatens to overwhelm him: his incurable fondness for potatoes.

A memoir worth reading? Imagine that! New York Times media reporter David Carr's Night of the Gun comes out next month, and it's been treated to a nice nine-page excerpt in today's NYT Magazine. After detailing how he became a crack addict and how his dealer/girlfriend prematurely gave birth to his twin daughters (which you should totally read) he tackles the question of memoirs, which have been so sorely tarnished in the last few years.

Here's New York Times culture reporter David Carr, pictured with his rehab group in 1988. (We told you about him earlier this morning.) His forthcoming book, The Night of the Gun, re-creates his crack-shooting past through interviewing people—he's admitted that memories, especially his, cannot always be relied on. Thus, we are treated to a history of mugshots, medical records, and awesome rejection letters from the New Yorker. "There I was, less than a year sober, pitching my tale of woe," Carr writes in the book about this 1989 pitch for his cocaine-addiction story. (We scanned it; click to see.)

How does David Carr pull this off? The Times media critic writes in his forthcoming memoir of drug addiction that he kidnapped his children, smacked around his girlfriends and left two babies in a near-freezing car on the street for hours while he got high. This in addition to dealing drugs and fathering crack babies, which we already knew about. It's all in his book excerpt from next Sunday's Times Magazine. And yet, after reading the account, it's remarkably hard to detest the guy.

Did Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington recycle a blurb for David Carr's new book? [Portfolio.com]

Is the Fox News PR machine trying to get back in the good graces of the New York Times-and slyly drive a wedge between reporters there at the same time? The network's famously vicious media relations operation was ravaged in a David Carr column in the Times on Monday. But now that they've let Bill O'Reilly take his obligatory on-air shot at the paper, the network seems to have decided to play nice with Times reporters-at least, with some of them.

The New York Times' David Carr sounds off today about the Fox News PR machine and its longstanding practice of bashing critics with rumor and innuendo: "Roger Ailes, Fox News and its public relations apparatus have waged a permanent campaign on behalf of the channel that borrows its methodology from his days as a senior political adviser to Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush." [NYT]

Last week, Fox News aired nasty Photoshopped pictures of two Times journalists responsible for a story about Fox losing ground among younger viewers. But it sounds like the cable network may have done much worse to another Times reporter, Tim Arango, who wrote a similar article in March. In his column for tomorrow's paper, Times media columnist David Carr recounts tales of Fox's dirty-politics-style PR tactics against journalists from his paper, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press and others. One story, in particular, stands out:

For unclear reasons, the Times felt compelled to hand a huge chunk of its Sunday Business section over to a profile of Bonnie Fuller—the woman most responsible for creating our nation's soul-destroying cast of powerful celebrity magazines—who was recently axed from her multimillion-dollar gig as editorial chief of American Media. A sympathetic profile! The news peg, purportedly: Bonnie Fuller is doing some vague new project on the internet. For women! With specifics to be determined! Color us skeptical. The Fuller that the Times describes does not sound like the woman who was so despised by her assistants that they put snot in her food. What's the major malfunction here?

New York Times media reporter David Carr-a former crack enthusiast-takes a look at Gonzo, the new documentary about legendary drugs-and-freedom-loving journalist Hunter S. Thompson. "Few writers have commodified narcissism so completely - his participatory style of journalism became its own genre and gives the film its title - but still we are invited to sit in the dark of the theater and have a flashback about his flashbacks. When the film opens on July 4, why will people, as Thompson would say, buy the ticket, take the ride?"