Jay Rosen

Jay Rosen (born May 5, 1956) is a media critic, a writer, and a professor of journalism at New York University.

Rosen has been on the journalism faculty at New York University since 1986; from 1999 to 2005 he served as chair of the Department.

He has been one of the earliest advocates and supporters of citizen journalism, encouraging the press to take a more active interest in citizenship, improving public debate, and enhancing life. His book about the subject, What Are Journalists For? was published in 1999. Rosen is often described in the media as an intellectual leader of the movement of public journalism.

Rosen writes frequently about issues in journalism and developments in the media. Media criticism and other articles by Rosen have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times Salon.com, Harper's Magazine, and The Nation.

He runs his own weblog called PressThink, which concentrates on what's happening to journalism in the age of the Net. His writing for the weblog won the Reporters Without Borders Freedom Blog award in 2005. He is also a semi-regular contributor to The Huffington Post.

Rosen currently resides in New York City.

In July 2006, he announced NewAssignment.Net, a project linking professional journalists and internet users. The project has received contributions of $10,000 by the Sunlight Foundation, $10,000 by Craig Newmark, $75,000 from Cambrian House and $100,000 by Reuters.

Since 2009 Rosen has collaborated with technologist and writer Dave Winer on "Rebooting the News," a weekly podcast on technology and innovation in journalism.

Notable PressThink columns and posts by Jay Rosen
March 10, 2011, "They Brought a Tote Bag to a Knife Fight: The Resignation of NPR’s CEO, Vivian Schiller".

January 20, 2008, "The Campaign Press is a Herd of Independent Minds"

April 14, 2007, "Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press",

''"Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain."


 * ''Conservatives think the ideology of the Washington press corps is liberal. Liberals think the press is conservative in the sense of protecting its place in the political establishment. Karl Rove once said that the press is “less liberal than it is oppositional.” (A fascinating remark coming from Rove, since it appears to put him at odds with the conservative base.)


 * Whereas I believe that the real—and undeclared—ideology of American journalism is savviness, and this is what made the press so vulnerable to the likes of Karl Rove.


 * Savviness! Deep down, that’s what reporters want to believe in and actually do believe in— their own savviness and the savviness of certain others (including operators like Karl Rove.) In politics, they believe, it’s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere or humane.


 * ''Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness—that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political—is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain.

June 27, 2006, "The People Formerly Known as the Audience,"

''The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.


 * Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors.


 * Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did.

''
 * ''Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web.
 * You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages.

''
 * A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not “across” to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical.

April 9, 2006, "Murray Waas is Our Woodward Now"

March 1, 2005, "The Abyss of Observation Alone"

September 22, 2004,"Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat"