Some personal news

As we say on the internet, “some personal news.” After 39 years on the job I am retiring as an NYU professor.

In this post I will take a few moments to reflect on my academic career. Spoiler alert: I am not leaving the field, or the fight for a public service press.

NYU has been my home for most of my academic life, starting in 1980, when I enrolled as a graduate student in NYU’s Media Ecology program in order to study with the great media critic, Neil Postman. Just being around him was an education.

Postman was then writing his best book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” which argues that everything is becoming entertainment— schooling, parenting, childhood, politics, journalism. “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us, he wrote. “Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”

My dissertation was the history of an idea — the idea of a public informed by the press. Where does that notion originate? How viable is it, really? What will it take to make it come true? A key character in my thesis was Walter Lippmann and his brilliant book, “Public Opinion.” (1922)

In May of 1986, I received my doctorate, turned 30, and got my job as a junior professor in NYU’s journalism program, which was part of the school of arts and sciences, not a separate thing with its own dean.

“Part of the arts and sciences…” That may seem like a small detail. It was not. It meant that historians, scientists, mathematicians and literature professors might be on the commitee that passed judgment on your tenure case— not just journalists and media types

The faculty position I was hired into was designed for a researcher in the field of “mass communication,” a social scientist who might publish their findings about media effects in a scholarly journal.

That wasn’t what I had in mind

I was greatly moved by a single sentence from the British sociologist, Raymond Williams. “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” (1958) I agreed with that, and I wanted to refine and extend what Williams was saying there. There is no public until we start seeing people as a public. And if we fail to do that, support for public service journalism is likely to fade over time.

Treating people as a public — and how do you do that? — became the foundation for all of my press criticism, and my classroom teaching.

I feel extremely fortunate to have received tenure from NYU in 1993. I submitted to the jury a mix of 40 or so articles and book reviews that went in different directions, from op-ed to scholarly quarterly. In the more demanding environment that young academics face today, I am not sure I would have made it.

In 1989 I gave my first talk to a conference of journalists: the Associated Press Managing Editors. It had one idea. If people don’t participate in civic life, that’s bad for democracy— and bad for journalism.

Ten years later I published my book on this idea: What Are Journalists For? (1999, Yale University Press) It argued for a less distant, less detached press, and told the story of the civic journalism movement, a pre-internet attempt to warn journalists that they were becoming dangerously disconnected.

You can imagine the responses it got from conservatives in the profession (conservative about journalism, I mean) I put all their criticisms into the book, in the belief that you can learn a lot about journalists from the way they explain and defend their work— or decline to do so.

Which is an idea I put into practice four years later when I started my blog, PressThink. (As in group think, but for journalists.)  Here I took advantage of the way the internet had eroded the gatekeepers’ hold on public debate. 

Journalists of a certain age will remember Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews. It was a daily blog by a journalist about the industry, read by people in the newsroom at every level: summer intern to executive producer. I was able to reach them with my rethink just by convincing Romenesko to link to me. Which he did. Consistently.

That was the great thing about blogging: it leveled the playing field, not entirely, but a lot. Which was super important to me because I was criticising the practices of the press without any deep experience in journalism. (I had a bit oif experience. You can read about that here: Why I am Not a Journalist.)

At Jim Romenesko’s news-about-the-news site, PressThink was found on the same plane as newspapers and networks. This became the foundation of my online audience. That audience grew much larger with the arrival of Twitter, which I joined in 2008 after much badgering from my colleague Jeff Jarvis.

I used @jayrosen_nyu for my Twitter account because I wanted to emphasize that it was part of my work as a professor.

In 2008 I took that a step further, teaming up with Arianna Huffington as co-publisher to launch “Off the Bus,” an adventure in what we called “pro-am journalism.”

Off the Bus had a simple design. Any reader of the Huffington Post — then at its height — should be able participate in the site’s election coverage. Got it? Go.

As Amanda Michel, the project’s director put it, “we instructed our citizen journalists to steer clear of the horse race and the top-down coverage that dominates the mainstream press.”

Blogging began to decline because Twitter was faster and more convenient, so I had to learn the art of the thread, and of another practice: repeating my key ideas and invented terms of art until they clicked with readers and became part of the discourse.

“The view from nowhere” and the “savvy style” in political journalism both spread in this fashion, as did this mantra during the 2024 campaign: “Not the odds, but the stakes.”

In 2009 I started a graduate program at NYU called Studio 20, a reference to our offices at 20 Cooper Square in Manhattan. Its focus was on “digital first” journalism and other forms of innovation in the newsroom. The idea was to leverage my online audience and persuade editors and producers to give Studio 20 temporary custody of right-sized, real world problems in digital adaptation, which we would then tackle as a team.

In this approach, students learn by puzzling out a problem that’s 100% real. Editors win by tasking sharp grad students, and getting creative solutions back. Teachers in the program had to figure out what to teach that would be of use to problem-solving students. Here is an early — and fun — product from Studio 20 when we worked with ProPublica.

So I leave NYU after 39 years as a member of the Journalism faculty, including five as chair. But I won’t be exiting from journalism. I am shifting to consulting work (I have a couple of clients) and I am open to other opportunities as they may come along: from board membership to speaker at your company’s retreat. 

You can reach me here: rosen.jay at gmail dot com