Jay Rosen is associate professor of journalism at New York University. From 1993 to 1997, he was the Director of the Project on Public Life and the Press, funded by the Knight Foundation. Since 1990 he has been a leading figure in the reform movement known as "public journalism," which calls on the press to take an active role in strengthening citizenship, improving political debate and reviving public life.

Rosen is currently researching the interaction between communities and the press on a one-year grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. He is a member of the Penn National Commission of Society, Culture and Community, headed by President Judith Rodin of the University of Pennsylvania. The Commission's three-year charge is to study in depth the deteriorating climate of public debate and what might be done to improve it.

Rosen is also an associate of the Kettering Foundation of Dayton, Ohio. As a press critic and essayist, he writes frequently on media and political issues. His work has appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Harpers, the Nation, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and other journals. In 1999, Yale University Press will publish his book on public journalism, titled, What Are Journalists For?

In 1994 he was a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and in 1990-91 he held a fellowship at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, now the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center.

A native of Buffalo, NY, Rosen had a brief career in journalism at the Buffalo Courier Express before beginning graduate study. He has a Ph.D. from NYU in communication studies.