'It's a grand time to be a reporter,' says New York Times' David Carr

It's a refrain you won't often hear from a news reporter.

"It's a grand time to be a reporter," said the New York Times' David Carr in an interview with Stephen Quinn on CBC Radio One's "On the Coast".

The Media Equation columnist says the tools at the disposal of those who cover the news makes it a phenomenal time to be in the business.

But that doesn't mean there aren't challenges.

"We were a business that was built on scarcity and was built on a monopoly," said Carr, "Now there's an endless supply (of advertising)...with print it was finite."

Carr says the abundance of advertising means audience and content can be replicated all over the web.

Despite the issues facing the news industry, Carr says the New York Times' pay wall model, which requires reader to pay to have unlimited access to the newspaper's website, has been a great success.

"I can remember with a great deal of acuity, all the people that said that a pay wall would never work," said Carr, "We now have almost 600,000 people who pay for the digital version."

Those digital subscriptions represent hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue for the paper.

David Carr is in Vancouver for the Push International Performing Arts Festival. He'll be at at the North Shore Credit Union Centre for the Performing Arts at Capilano University, Sunday, February 3rd at 7:30 p.m.