Press Publish 3: Jay Rosen on the public, how the press thinks, and the production of innocence

The NYU professor and scholar talks about his intellectual influences, how he thinks the press did in 2012, and how much of an audience there’ll be for civic-minded journalism.

By Joshua Benton @jbenton Jan. 23, 2013, 9 a.m.

It’s Episode 3 of Press Publish, the Nieman Lab podcast! My guest this week is Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor and thinker about the ways of journalism.

Given that journalism is a profession centered around the idea of an audience, it’s a little bit disappointing how few journalism academics ever feel much need to engage with the general public. And the names that might come to mind as exceptions to that — Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman — were more fundamentally interested in media than in journalism proper. That’s why Jay has been so valuable to the field and, I’d argue, the profession — he’s an inside-outside voice pricking journalism when it needs to be pricked. His ideas, once shouted down in newsrooms, have become something closer to received wisdom for many. He’s changed the way people think about political reporting in particular, and he’s built an audience of his own for his thinking, both in and out of journalism.

My conversation with Jay touched on a lot of subjects: his entry into first journalism and then the journalism academy; the influence of James Carey, Postman, and McLuhan on his work; the Lippmann-Dewey debate and the changing conception of “the public” in journalism; the rise and quasi-fall of civic journalism; why we need a better horse-race journalism; how the press’ conception of itself evolves; how he’s trying to model a different kind of journalism education; whether I’m too much of a pessimist; and what he’d like to be remembered for. It’s an idea-packed hour; I think you’ll like it.

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Joshua Benton is the senior writer and former director of Nieman Lab. You can reach him via email (joshua_benton@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@jbenton).

POSTED Jan. 23, 2013, 9 a.m.

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