Ray Josen's Twitter pic.

Jay Rosen is a professor of journalism at NYU (director of the Studio 20 program), founder of PressThink.org, and prolific tweeter. We recently became aware of the professor’s alter ego, one Ray Josen, whose Twitter account is a hilarious sendup of Rosen’s “mindcasting” (in Josen’s parlance, it’s “mindthinking”).

I managed to get the elusive Ray Josen to agree to an interview, although he wouldn’t do it over the phone because he “had a cold, and so my voice is a little high pitched and nasally at the moment.” What follows is our email conversation. Enjoy, and if you have any leads on Josen’s true identity, get in touch with us. We also contacted the real Jay Rosen, who doesn’t know who’s behind the Ray Josen Twitter, but “wishes it was funnier.”

Note: the links are Josen’s.

Rosie Gray: Thanks for getting back to me – I actually have to have dinner with my aunt tonight, so how about I just send along some questions? Respond whenever you get a chance.

Ray Josen: I’m a little disappointed you didn’t offer to do the interview with your aunt during dinner over Twitter. Maybe you’re not from a socioeconomic class that enables you to own a smartphone? Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this interview. Maybe you shouldn’t be in J-School.

RG: What do you do for a living, besides mindthinking and tweetblogging?

RJ: Glad you brought up my background. It’s important to disclose obscure facts about your past before writing about topics wholly unrelated to them. For example, I think it’s very important for your readers to see paragraph six of a post you wrote in June, in which you disclose that you do not wash your legs in the shower.

I, however, am a PhD-holding journalism professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. I used to tell the whole department what to do there, but they wouldn’t let me teach an investigative tweeting course, so I stepped down.

RG: Do you write? Where can we read you?

RJ: I’m currently in talks with several geeks to develop an iPad app featuring a “best of” @rayjosen_nyu tweets. It’s the entire collection. We’ll be using semantic extraction to dynamically enrich them with taxonomical content. It’s from a mindthink I did where I realized that two tweets about the same topic have something in common.

RG: How did you develop such expertise in new media?

RJ: I started out at as a journalist, but I realized early on that the type of thinking going on in the industry wasn’t correct. It was incorrect. Journalists focused on concrete concepts and obsessive pre-publish fact checking and accuracy. If you’re not going to get it perfect right out the door, then good god, don’t even try. So I decided I’d let them have their fun with their “serial commas” and pretend “objectivity” and years of “experience,” and enter academia, where I actually had a chance at being successful. Anyone intelligent enough to follow me was welcome. Notice you’re interviewing me. Not them.

RG: Which blogs/media outlets do you most recommend?

RJ: Literally anything that Arianna Huffington or Craig Newmark shits out. They’re intelligent mindthinkers that also have very mindthinky pocketbooks.

RG: What’s your favorite blogging platform?

RJ: WordPress. I see traditional organizations everywhere from The Spokesman-Review to The New York Times using platforms that aren’t WordPress, expending comparatively minor amounts on what they consider “innovation.” Then I ask, if the work they’re doing doesn’t involve creating WordPress plugins that I can use, why are they even doing it? Pontificating that question invariably leads to the conclusion that their work is unstable, unsustainable, and unneeded. I’m thankful that the majority of newspapers agree with me on that point.

WordPress is stable and secure. A SXSW panel I was on, “The Future of Context,” uses WordPress for it’s website, futureofcontext.com. Just look at the great SEO it has.

I see no reason why a site like The New York Times could not be run on WordPress. Yet Aron Pilhofer does not mindthink as much as I do. *sigh*.

RG: What should young journalists be focusing on in school? What kind of skills should we be learning?

RJ: The first thing you should be required to learn in journalism school is tweet. You don’t tweet? You don’t graduate. I mean that.

Other than that, there are literally no concrete skills you must learn. I’ve laid out a plan of study that should be forwarded to the head of your department with a large nudge and a preface that I really don’t give a shit. Student won’t declare majors, they’ll declare mindthoughts. Then they can flirt by asking each other, “What’s your mindthink?”

Freshman Year
Students are screened for acceptance into the journalism program. Copy editors are sent to a rehab program where they learn web producing. Print reporters are expelled.

Sophomore Year
Students learn Tweeting and Blogging. Those that cannot condense an idea to 140 characters, or use enough hashtags to disguise incoherent words as a coherent idea, are shown the door.

Junior Year
Students study examples of investigative tweeting. They start intermediate mindthinking courses, and continue forming their tweeting style. If you’re tweets don’t have personality you shouldn’t be tweeting.

Senior Year
A year-long final project. Grades are calculated based on the number of twitter followers students gain by May. 10,000 = A. 9,999 = F.

RG: Do you read NYU Local?

RJ: I do read it from time to time. The work you’re doing there is a perfect example of some good mindthinking. Take your use of WordPress. Do I care that everything after page two has been broken all weekend? Or that the city, national and on-campus pages refuse to load? (Ed. note this has been fixed.) Yes. It’s perfect. It’s mindthinking like none other. Your readers have obviously become too complacent in expecting WordPress to work all the time. You showed them.

I also enjoyed your post about watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ms. Stevens’ lede was goddamn perfect: “I am about to fulfill that annoying cliche about queer feminist bloggers, and just come right out (heh) and say it: I love Buffy.” In one sentence, she exposes herself as:
Gay (or at least open to the idea)
Female
Radically female
A blogger
Someone that didn’t have too many friends when Buffy came out

It’s important you tell your audience “Here’s where I’m coming from.” Take The New York Times’ review of the Buffy movie: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: She’s Hunting Vampires, And on a School Night,” by Janet Maslin. A quote: “‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It includes very mild violence and profanity.” Damnit, Janet, what does that even mean? How can we ever know without knowing who is Janet Maslin? Is she a woman? How many friends did she/he have as a kid? No one goddamn knows, so her review is worse than worthless.

RG: Explain the concept of “mindthinking.” How does it differ from regular old thinking?

RJ: How do I put this… When an average person thinks, they think with an intention of doing. But even after thinking for a time, how can that individual really “know” what they’re “thinking” about? They then act before they’re positive it’s the right course of action.

Mindthinking is different. It’s thinking without any intention of acting. It’s recognizing that you can never know what’s best, so why even try?

RG: How long do you think the newspaper industry has before it’s entirely replaced by online content?

RJ: Well if you mindthink for a while, you realize that’s already happened. People that mindthink are already reading online only. People that don’t mindthink read The Chicago Tribune. But people that don’t mindthink don’t matter, and thus “Everyone” is already reading online.

RG: Anything else we should know about Ray Josen?

RJ: People tell me that I’m a visionary. They thank me for how comparatively loud my voice is online compared to other journalists-critics, especially those that actaully work in the industry. This is all true. But when you dig down to the man behind the mindthinker, my hope still is to leave the world a bit better than when I got here.