Carr's first newspaper job was in 1897 when he was hired by the Los Angeles Herald on the recommendation of business manager Fred Alles to do "unusual little stories, funny or with heart interest.".
As a young reporter on the hunt for a story, Carr was ejected from a Los Angeles theater when, uninvited, he tried to watch the rehearsal of a play. The resourceful Carr, however, spied on the troupe through an alley window, wrote a story about it and it was printed. Subsequent stories brought Carr's talent to the attention of Harry Andrews, then managing editor of the Times, so he sent for Carr and gave him a job.
Carr's reputation soared with his eyewitness coverage of the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. He was the first outside reporter to make his way to the shattered city and his efforts resulted in "four or five full newspaper pages of print, the longest story I ever saw in a paper," said John Von Blon, an assistant city editor at the time. "I locked Harry in a room in the morning, brought him his luncheon and dinner and kept him right at it." His coverage, reporting and writing was "one of the greatest stories of modern times, one that is still regarded by newspapermen all over the world as a model for the chronicling of some tremendous and awful event," a colleague, Julian Johnson, recalled thirty years later.

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