At last week’s AEJMC convention in Washington DC, New York University professor Jay Rosen talked about the philosophy behind his influential blog PressThink.

Rosen explained how blogging was ideal for the diffusion of ideas as you can, in his words, “etch yourself into the memory of the web”. What he means is that, for example, when you run a Google search for the words Eason Jordan, the second listing is Rosen’s posting on Jordan’s resignation.

PressThink is an example of how scholars can use blogging to reach a much wider audience than through publication in journals.

For Rosen, PressThink is the “best thing I have done as a scholar”, as it “makes journalists deal with my ideas”. In my case, I started up this blog when I took up a faculty position. As a digital media scholar, it seems natural to use the medium for comment and debate.

Back to Rosen. He attributes the success of his blog to the fact that “I do everything that bloggers do, but ten times better”. For example, his typical post is between 1,500 and 3,000 words in length, challenging the accepted wisdom that blog posts should be short and pithy. And he tends to post once a week, rather than every day.

In the case of PressThink, this works, but it doesn’t necessary mean that it is the only way to run a blog. This is a new platform that lend itself to experimentation.

Despite being such an advocate of blogging, Rosen is scathing about bloggers, saying most are lazy. He argued that the number of blogs is meaningless, as many are abandoned, or are for private communication, even if they are on a public space.

One little tidbit, Rosen almost called his blog “Master Narrative”. But then he realised how easy it would be to parody and settled on PressThink instead. Good decision.

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