Jay Rosen

For more than a decade Jay Rosen has been a frustrated advocate of people-first, bottom-up "public journalism." The premise of his project (and his book, What Are Journalists For?) was that, as an act of civic conscience, major media might abandon the celebrity circus approach to covering, for example, presidential campaigns. The idea was laughed at, left for dead after the 1996 season. Yet now, strangely, he believes we're in sight of real public journalism -- not as a matter of corporate or professional conscience but because: the tools of journalism are being democratized.