What do you mean by an “internet archive?”
I am a media critic and journalism academic who has been publishing things on the internet since 1996. They are scattered about, but centered on my personal site: PressThink.org, which I own. What I mean by an “internet archive” is this: Everything of mine you can find online by clicking. That’s the goal anyway.
Here’s where we are so far. The archive in its current form.
When you say “everything you can find,” you don’t mean that literally, right?
Right. It’s notional, just a concept. In practice there are countless obstacles. You could never collect everything, and you wouldn’t want to try.
And who are you working with?
Joe Amditis is a college teacher, programmer, and all-around web person, the kind of guy who always has a side project going on. Joe had some free time in the summer of 2025, and I had some money leftover from previous projects. He is the developer and curator of the project.
What stage are you at?
Friends and family have played around with it. Now it’s your turn.
Currently the Archive holds 26,615 “records” that reach back to 1986, which is when I finished my PhD dissertation.
What counts as a “record” in this context?
It’s an umbrella term for any individual work in the Archive: typically that would mean an essay or blog post of mine, but it could also be a published interview, an appearance on TV, a thread I composed at Twitter or BlueSky, or a participant in a panel discussion that’s on YouTube, and so on. Again: Everything of mine you can find online.
To count as an item in the Archive it must have a web address of its own because the archive does not acquire anything. It deals in links only, and sends you to them.
If your internet archive deals in links only, then it’s going to be in constant commotion as “link rot” and the coming and going of web publishers takes over. How do you solve for that?
You don’t. This is why we have the indispensable Internet Archive and its “Wayback Machine.” My little project — Jay Rosen’s Internet Archive — is a study in preserving the web, on the scale of one media critic, who is slowing down and ready to think about preservation.
This sounds like something your university library might help with. Did you try that?
I did. But my ideas at the time were too hazy. NYU librarians told me to come back when I have a better model.
Why are you doing this?
I retired from NYU a year ago, and turned 70 a month ago. That’s part of it. A bigger factor is this. I wanted to point to as much as I could in hopes that some of it will still be there when the next crisis hits.
During the 2024 campaign that returned Donald Trump to the White House, you developed what CNN called a “mantra.” It went like this: “Not the odds, but the stakes.” What were you saying?
For more than 20 years I spoke against horse race journalism, an opponent more formidable than I first thought, in part because it fits so well with newsroom neutrality and what I have called “The View from Nowhere.
I then switched focus to what I’m in favor of, and ready to support. The “citizens agenda” is a phrase lifted from the 1990s and the civic journalism movement. Briefly, it says “start by asking the voters what they want the campaign to be about, then take that agenda to the candidates and get good answers.”
I’m still all-in with the citizens’ agenda, but campaign coverage is now conducted under massive threats to democracy and the whole system of free and fair elections. “Not the odds, but the stakes” says (in six words) that we need far more than a horse race and what I have called the savvy style in political journalism.
And why do you think it spread so easily?
“Not the odds, but the stakes” is territory that journalists, voters, experts, candidates and even cable news people can all share. Along with its brevity that’s probably why.
Is there some element of fatigue that drove your interest in creating your own archive? Feels like there is.
The horse race, the savvy style in political coverage, who’s up, who’s down, false equivalence— that’s one level of frustration. More menacing is the attack on the very idea of a common set of facts, and the institutions that depend on that idea, including journalism and the university.
More menacing still is the strategic use of denial and disinformation to generate power and run a political movement. “Verification in Reverse” I call it. Meaning: The bigger the denial of provable facts, the greater the gain for the reckless denier. I tried to write about this as it was underway. I don’t think I succeeded. But here’s how I explained it on Rachel Maddow’s show.
We already have a technology for a lot of this. It’s called the book. Have you heard?
Yes, I wrote one. What are Journalists For? (Yale University Press, 1999)
After that book, I went in a different direction: Speak in real time to journalists as they tumbled onto the web and discovered new practices. Collaborate on projects with journalists who are open-minded. Meanwhile, seek a broader internet audience that included journalists, but also everyone else who cared about their work.
For me, this meant moving from print to blogging and from blogging to social media. I wouldn’t push this too far, but in a sense PressThink was my second book, and Twitter my third. For better or worse.
What do you hope people will do with Jay Rosen’s Internet Archive?
Well, this is previously published material, so I’m not expecting big audiences. An archive is a home, not a highway.
Here’s part of a letter I recently got from a Korean journalist (Ran Ryu, Investigative Reporter at SBS.)
“I have tried to think through the tensions surrounding journalistic objectivity, authority, and polarization in the context of gender reporting. Your scholarship has not only shaped my academic thinking, but has also deeply influenced the way I reflect on my own experiences inside the newsroom.”
That’s one answer to “What will people do with the Archive?” It will inform this person’s ongoing work. I am confident there will be others.