Jeff Jarvis

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Jeff Jarvis on MSNBC

Jeff Jarvis (born 1954) is an American journalist. He is the former television critic for TV Guide and People magazine, creator of Entertainment Weekly, Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News, and a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner.

Until recently he was president and creative director of Advance.net, the online arm of Advance Publications, where he developed the children's educational site "Yuckiest Site on the Internet" with Susan Mernit.

Under Jarvis’s tutelage, Advance.net helped pioneer lightly-moderated message boards that attracted high numbers of webpage hits until a more restrictive stealth moderation was put in place. A BuzzMachine blog entry by Jarvis dated July 28, 2005, alluded to the old forum moderation as “old-media” and suggested a now-controversial forum practice of letting frequent forum users delete and ban other posters at their discretion, while not identifying themselves as moderators. The policy became controversial in late 2005 when the Cleveland.com Browns Forum employed two of the biggest repeat violators of Advance.net’s User Agreement to help moderate the forum. Jarvis referred to the practice as “community policing,” and although he is no longer at Advance.net, the site’s forums community still employs the practice of allowing persistent forum offenders to moderate its message boards.

Jarvis consults for Advance.net and the New York Times Company at About.com, where he works on content development and strategy. In 2006 he became an associate professor at City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, directing its new media program. He has a fortnightly column in the MediaGuardian supplement of the British newspaper The Guardian.

In 1974 Jarvis was an undergraduate at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University when he was hired by the Chicago Tribune.

Jarvis is also the creator of the popular weblog BuzzMachine. He gained national notoriety when he wrote about his negative experiences in dealing with Dell Computer's customer support system on the website. Jarvis's son also runs a weblog at WireCatcher.com. [1]

Jarvis describes himself as "a liberal: a centrist leaning left," claiming to have voted for Democrats in most elections. Nonetheless, he notes that he upsets some Democrats for not always agreeing with them and for linking to those with whom they disagree. Jarvis says that is why he likes the blogosphere so much: because it allows him to talk with people whose opinions don't align with his views. [2]

Jarvis also describes himself as "a post-9/11 hawk, having survived the attacks on the World Trade Center."