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In the summer of 1980, I moved to New York City to become a press critic. I was 24. I had no connections.
In their place were these advantages:
- I thought I was a good enough writer, but I also knew that I was poorly read. I knew little about the world beyond the newspapers and magazines that I was then scouring. (Remember: no internet.) I call this an advantage because the thrills of discovery made it easy for me to read and take notes all day and all night.
- NYU had a master’s and PhD program called “Media Ecology.” Perfect! I could solve my “poorly read” problem with NYU professors as a guide. “Media ecology” felt exactly right for what I wanted to do as a writer.
- I had a strategy that turned out to be the right one. Instead of becoming an academic or a journalist, I would try to find my voice between these identities, friendly to both, but with some distance as well.
- I had a good way to get started. “Take as many courses as you can from Neil Postman.”
Postman! Founder of the Media Ecology program at NYU and one of our best cultural critics, then working on Amusing Ourselves to Death, his best and most famous book, translated into 16 languages. He became a model for me as a teacher, speaker, writer, and public figure. (You can read about Neil and me, teacher and student, here.)
Of course, they won’t give you a PhD just for taking courses, reading a lot of books to catch up, and drinking wine with your teachers after class. You have to make an original contribution. You have to research and write a work of your own, and it has to meet your professors’ standards. Ideally, these are high, but not unreachable.
Here, I gave myself a further goal, again inspired by Postman. It was to write for what used to be called the “common reader,” a phrase rarely heard these days. Roughly, it means, “No need to learn a new language to understand the book.” Basic literacy will suffice.
Normal dissertations are not like that. They exist within a scholarly discourse divided into sub-disciplines that are built to handle small but (we hope…) meaningful advances in our knowledge.
I wanted to try something else. My first serious work of press criticism would be spread across a big landscape, from why we needed journalists in the first place (the answer lies in the scale at which modern life is lived) to prospects for an informed public in the crowded media environment of today.
The dissertation I submitted to NYU began to emerge for me when I came across a now-famous exchange between Walter Lippmann in his classic book, Public Opinion (1922), and John Dewey in his classic reply, The Public and Its Problems (1927).
Lippmann doubted there could be a news-reading public in the way we normally thought: consuming quality journalism to inform itself and make sound decisions. We have to abandon those expectations, he said. Among the factors they failed to reckon with was the attention market and all the distractions it comes with.
John Dewey took the point about attention, but drew a different conclusion. Discard any hope for an informed and engaged public and you run the risk of ditching democracy altogether. Are you sure you want to do that? We have to keep trying with the tools we have, Dewey thought. If the press can’t help us, then we need a better press!
By careful study of this debate, I got the idea for my dissertation. It would be the history of an idea: The press informs the public and that makes democracy work. Where did that idea come from? Does it still apply today? What work does it do? And who was right: Lippmann or Dewey?
I chose the title, The Impossible Press, to underline key observations like this: (p. 130)
“With every improvement in the delivery of information comes a new level of difficulty for citizens seeking to understand their world. No doubt this is one reason why we so often seem to have more information and yet be less informed.” p. 390
Today I am putting my dissertation online, with the help of web producer Joe Amditis, who built the site with all of its features, and Samuel Eearle, PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School, who is currently writing his own dissertation about our renewed interest in crowds. You can find his essay, comparing his work to mine, here.
Putting “The Impossible Press” online is part of a much larger project, the Jay Rosen Digital Archive, which Joe Amditis and I plan to release in February 2026. It will put under one web address almost all of my writing as a press critic and media observer, plus a lot more. (For example: podcasts I was part of, panel discussions I joined in, threads on social media that mattered. These are the kinds of things I imagined doing when I retired from NYU earlier this year.
I have been putting my work online since 1996. So I know that a dissertation from some 40 years ago is likely to have a miniature audience. But that does not bother me.
People who might have an interest in what we did here include:
- Fans of my writing over the years. There are some.
- Graduate students who are working on dissertations themselves, or who have finished one recently.
- Professors who want (or already have) a digital archive of their own.
- Other web developers who are working with academics.
- Scholars from another era who search and discover. Who knows what tools they will have for that?
It should be obvious here that I am trying to extend my life span, even as I know that the odds favor eclipse.
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