Jay teaches journalism at NYU, where he has been on the faculty since 1986. From 1999 to 2004 he was chair. He is the author of PressThink, a blog about journalism's ordeals in the age of the Web, which he launched in 2003. In 1999, Yale University Press published his book, What Are Journalists For?, which was about the rise of the civic journalism movement. Jay has a Ph.D in media studies from NYU. He writes and speaks frequently about new media and the predicament of the press in a time of rapid transformation. In March 2017 he founded the Membership Puzzle Project, funded by the Knight Foundation and Democracy Fund. It will study what works in membership models in news.