Jeff Jarvis

Career Jarvis began his career in journalism in 1972 writing for the Addison Herald-Register, a local weekly newspaper at which he was the sole journalist. In 1974 Jarvis was an undergraduate in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University when he was hired by the Chicago Tribune. He completed his degree and holds a BSJ from Northwestern.

Jarvis went on to work as a television critic for TV Guide and People magazines. In 1984, while still at People, Jarvis proposed the idea for Entertainment Weekly, a magazine which he hoped would feature "tough reviews and offbeat subjects" pertaining to the entertainment industry. The first issue was published in February 1990, with Jarvis as creator and managing editor.

Jarvis is former Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News and a former columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. He was president and creative director of Advance Internet—the online arm of Advance Publications—until 2005. He has consulted for numerous other media companies. In 2005, he became an associate professor at City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, directing its new media program.

Along with Leo Laporte and Paris Martineau, Jarvis is a co-host on Intelligent Machines, a live-streamed podcast show on the TWiT Network which covers Artificial Intelligence and future computing news.

Books In 2009, Jarvis wrote a book called, What Would Google Do? In the book, he argues that companies and individuals should study and perhaps copy Google's methods for succeeding at Internet entrepreneurship. Jarvis said of the book, "Just as I try to look admiringly from a distance at Google, I include anecdotes and examples from Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Craig Newmark at Craigslist and Jeff Bezos at Amazon."

In 2011, Jarvis published Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live, in which he defends the openness of the Internet, discusses ways in which the Internet has made modern life public, and argues against regulations to protect privacy. Public Parts was reviewed scathingly by fellow Internet scholar Evgeny Morozov in the November 3, 2011, issue of The New Republic.

In 2012, Jarvis published the Kindle single Gutenberg the Geek, in which he suggests that Johannes Gutenberg was "the world's first technology entrepreneur" and was comparable to Steve Jobs because they both "accomplished greatness through trial and error, vision, and determination."

Politics Jarvis describes himself as a "liberal: a centrist leaning left."

Jarvis also describes himself as "a post-9/11 hawk." Jarvis and his wife, Tammy, have two children.

Twitter parody Jarvis is the subject of a popular Twitter parody account, @ProfJeffJarvis, curated by Rurik Bradbury. The parody account has been enthusiastically received among many in media circles with over 30,000 followers. "I chose Jarvis because he epitomizes a certain type of 'thinkfluencer,' " Bradbury explains, "someone with an online influence massively greater than the thoughtfulness of his positions. It's all style and rhetorical flourishes which don't stand up to scrutiny—but do grab attention."