Dear Mr. Carr,

First, I want to tell you how much I enjoyed your book, The Night of the Gun. Your tale of surviving a serious cocaine problem to emerge on the other side a successful writer for the New York Times and devoted father of twin girls is at once inspiring and cautionary.

I have just finished reading your article, "The Fall and Rise of Media," and I felt an almost spooky resonance: I also moved to New York in the dot-com heyday, and my first position here was as an editor and researcher at the Silicon Alley Reporter. As you write in your piece, the media industry in New York was thriving, and there were plenty of jobs out there for anyone who was, as you paraphrase E.B. White, "willing to be lucky."

Those were heady times, but also times of great hubris. It's hard to not roll your eyes when thinking back on all the talk of revolution and changing the world that dominated Internet industry parties, even though a lot of that talk has proven to be more than accurate. However, the ways in which the media landscape has evolved since 2000 do not, to me, appear to be as promising and positive as you suggest at the end of your article.

While my career has changed apace with journalism itself -- I was laid off from SAR in late 2000; freelanced as a factchecker and writer for numerous magazines, from small indie art and film mags to Rupert Murdoch's ill-fated Maximum Golf; and even ghostwrote a couple of books until the opportunities in print journalism dried up to the point where I was back to waiting tables -- I am not as confident that things are changing for the better, or even for the good enough.

Most of the magazines I worked for no longer exist, and I now am part of the so-called "digerati," one of the lucky few who are paid to write for the Web. But even so, I am always on the edge of my seat waiting for the other shoe to drop. Print is dying, and "professional blogger" is often thought to be an oxymoron.

You end your article with a triumphant vote of confidence in the next generation of media workers. I hesitate to call them "professionals" because there is no indication that anyone will be making a living from generating or distributing content for much longer. The skills may not be there.

I teach journalism at a CUNY college, and each semester my students look more and more like the digitally savvy folks you describe in your piece: they're armed with smart phones and are on every social networking site there is, and they're always tapped in. But many of them struggle to write clearly, contextualize, or think deeply about an issue. They live in a world of headlines and tweets, scatterbrained by the mess of information that flows through them as if they were mere ghosts in a rushing current of data. This is not their fault, but rather an effect of the "revolution" we were a part of 10 years ago.

I admire your insights and writing enormously, but I wish you had given some indication of how, exactly, all those "cabals of bright young things" will lead us to a future that may be different than the one you and I came into when we started as journalists, but that is nevertheless a future.

In other words, as the age of the $4 word gives way to a world in which self-appointed unpaid bloggers define reality, however untrue it might be (I'm sure you read Mark Bowden's fascinating piece for the Atlantic's media issue, "The Story Behind the Story"), how will the future sustain itself?

With my best regards,
David Alm