Jay Rosen

This is a special edition.

We've decided to bring back our friends, media gurus Jeff Jarvis and Dan Froomkin, to discuss a week that's been kind of a big week in freedom of the press, or lack thereof, in the United States of America.

Um, uh, there is a story which has been unfolding the past few days in which the White House prohibited access to the White House to CNN, MS Now, and Politico.

The court ordered them late last night, two forty-three in the morning, I'm sorry I was awake at the time that they did it, um, to, uh, allow them back in.

Spiffy.

Um, but, uh, you know, Jensen Huang, who is also, you know, big advocate for let's, you know, let trade with China as much as we can, um, said in an interview with Ezra, uh, Klein, uh, just in the past 24 hours, "Well, yeah, it may be that people will lose skills from relying on AI, and they won't know how to do research, or they won't know anything about history.

But look, I don't remember all my friends' phone numbers anymore, and, you know, you lose some of these fine motor skill." And I was like, "What the fuck?" You know, I mean, d- d- d-

Well, Plato, Plato didn't like writing for that reason.

It doesn't tell you anything about policy and what they're going to do in your lives.

It's the journalists, as Jay Rosen from NYU would say, trying to show how savvy they are.

First.

Second, as I've quoted this often with you, Pete, the late James Carey said that polling preempts the public discourse it is intended to measure.

And we also have a lot of people that say that, "Well, what if it doesn't need to be profitable? What if we would have foundations that would support the media?" I would say that media historically and today is a kind of thing that first and foremost in the open market should be paid by its readers.

And now that the digital revenues, ad revenues are not that good, I think it's also what we can see all around Europe, that the most of the, I would say, interesting, uh, media startups are actually built in a membership-based model where you're actually trying to build an audience that kind of join your mission and come along to the ride, and they get something out of it, and they're part of something bigger than themselves, or it's a little bit different kind of a relationship to the old, very hierarchical and, and also distant relationship with the audience, which also we know, like Jay Rosen used to say, like people formerly known as audience.

[laughs] So what value do members get?

You sh- you should ask our members.

[laughs]

And Jay, Jay Rosen back in 2017 wrote that, uh, "Gee, now that the Times' primary support comes not from advertisers but from readers, what does that do," he asked, "to the relationship of the newsroom to that public?" And he didn't answer it 'cause he's a good academic and he asks questions, and I, of course, being a fake academic like David claims to be a fake journalist, uh, or a former journalist, um, uh-

No, no

...

Because an audience just is passively watching you.

That notion led Jay Rosen to author a 2006 post titled People Formerly Known as the Audience, describing the shift.

away from a one-way mass media model to a networked model in which people who used to passively consume can now publish, respond, organize, remix, and distribute information all by themselves.

That's not always necessarily a good thing, but, you know, is what it is.

Let me share one example.

This past January, New York University professor of journalism Jay Rosen came to the campus as a guest lecturer.

Let me share with you what he posted shortly after his visit.

Quote, this was the scene a few days ago when I gave a guest lecture at Brigham Young University, which of course is a Mormon school.