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About
Marist College to Become Marist University
University designation reflects breadth of global opportunities and bold vision for Marist's next century.
About
-
Academics
Marist College to Become Marist University
University designation reflects breadth of global opportunities and bold vision for Marist's next century.
Academics
-
Admission & Financial Aid
Marist College to Become Marist University
University designation reflects breadth of global opportunities and bold vision for Marist's next century.
Admission & Financial Aid
-
Student Life
Marist College to Become Marist University
University designation reflects breadth of global opportunities and bold vision for Marist's next century.
Student Life
- Athletics
Kevin M. Lerner
Associate Professor of Communication/Journalism and Department Chair, Communication
Bio
Kevin M. Lerner is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Chair of the Department of Communication at Marist College. His research focuses on the intellectual history of journalism through press criticism, satire, and magazines. His book, Provoking the Press: (MORE) Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism was published by the University of Missouri Press in the summer of 2019. He serves as corresponding secretary for the International Association of Literary Journalism studies, and is a past head of the Magazine Media Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He edited the Journal of Magazine Media from 2016–2021. He is at work on his second book, and is also editing a volume on literary journalism.
Lerner has judged the National Magazine Awards, the ASME Next Awards, and the Columbia Scholastic Press Awards. He earned his Ph.D. from Rutgers University, a master’s in journalism from Columbia University, and a B.A. in nonfiction writing from the University of Pennsylvania. He was the founding editor of the website for Architectural Record magazine—where he was part of a team that won the National Magazine Award—and has published journalism in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York magazine, Slate, The Columbia Journalism Review, Boston Review, The Conversation, and The Nieman Lab.
Education
BA, University of Pennsylvania
MS, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
PhD, Rutgers University School of Communication and Information
Research Interests/Areas of Focus
Press criticism
The intellectual history of journalism
Literary journalism
Selected Publications
Book
Provoking the Press: (MORE) Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism. (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2019).
Refereed journal publications
“The Accidental Press Critic: Newsroom Ethnography and Resistance to Self-Criticism and Management Change at The New York Times in 1974.” American Journalism, 35(3), 276–297, DOI: 10.1080/08821127.2018.1491203.
McDevitt, M., Parks, P., Stalker, J., Lerner, K., Benn, J., & Hwang, T. (First published online May 25, 2017). Anti-intellectualism among US students in journalism and mass communication: A cultural perspective. Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism.
“A System of Self-Correction: A.M. Rosenthal, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Press Criticism, and the Birth of the Contemporary Newspaper Correction in The New York Times.” Journalism History, January 2017.
Peer-reviewed book chapters
“Ideas in America and Ideas of America: Thought Leader Magazines and the Life of the Mind in the Twentieth Century.” In Bloyd-Peshkin, S., & Whitaker, C. (2021). Curating Culture: How Twentieth-Century Magazines Influenced America. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated, 9–24.
“Read Them for the Articles: Masculinity, U.S. Men’s Magazines, and the Tension between Niche and Mainstream Audiences.” In Bloyd-Peshkin, S., & Whitaker, C. (2021). Curating Culture: How Twentieth-Century Magazines Influenced America. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated, 135–148.
“Abe Rosenthal’s Project X: The Editorial Process Leading to the Publication of the Pentagon Papers.” In Media Nation, ed. Julian Zelizer and Bruce Schulman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania), 2017.
“How Spy, The Iconic Satirical Magazine of the 1980s Invented Contemporary Snark, and How Internet Journalism Misappropriated It,” in The Funniest Pages: International Perspectives on Journalism and Humor ed. David Swick and Richard Lance Keeble (New York: Peter Lang, 2016).
Selected Presentations
“How a Magazine Defines a Community of Journalists and How Those Writers Can Change Journalism: The case of Lingua Franca.” Accepted for presentation at Mapping the Magazine V, Chicago, Illinois, July 2018.
“Impudent Snobs: The Coalescence of the Liberal Elite Media.” Accepted for presentation in the Media History division of the International Communication Association for the 2018 conference in Prague, May 2018. Awarded Top Poster Presentation.
“Assessing James W. Carey’s Culture of Journalism Criticism Four Decades Later: A Case Study of the New York Times Profile of a White Nationalist.” Accepted for presentation at the International Association of Literary Journalism Studies Conference in Vienna, May 2018. Awarded Susan L. Greenberg Prize for Best Research Paper.
“Reported Satire as a Form of Literary Journalism.” International Association of Literary Journalism Studies Conference, Vienna, May 2018.
“Priming the Public for the "Fake News" Epithet: Destabilizing the Cosmopolitan Elite Press,” Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference,” March 10, 2018.
“The Effete Corps of Impudent Snobs, From Agnew to Trump: Toward a History of the Liberal Elite Media,” Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference,” March 10, 2018.
“Recusing Themselves to Death: How the Era of Mass Media Objectivity Brought on the ‘Fake News’ Crisis,” Susquehanna University, November 9–10, 2017.
Awards and Honors
Susan L. Greenberg Prize for Best Research Paper, for the paper “Assessing James W. Carey’s Culture of Journalism Criticism Four Decades Later: A Case Study of the New York Times Profile of a White Nationalist.” International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, Vienna, Austria, May, 2018.
Top Poster Presentation, Communication History Division, for the paper “Impudent Snobs: The Coalescence of the Liberal Elite Media.” International Communication Association Conference, Prague, Czechia, May, 2018.
Honorable Mention, 2015 Margaret A. Blanchard Doctoral Dissertation Prize, American Journalism Historians Association.
National Magazine Award for General Excellence, Architectural Record editorial staff, 2003.
Media Links
“Media Trust,” Marist Poll Hub, August 12, 2022 https://poll-hub.simplecast.com/episodes/bidens-best-week-distrust-in-the-media-vYavV6R_
“The News is Dead, Long Live the News,” Boston Review, August 10, 2021 https://bostonreview.net/articles/the-news-is-dead-long-live-the-news/
“(MORE) guided journalists during the 1970s media crisis of confidence,” Columbia Journalism Review, May 10, 2018. https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/more-journalism-review.php
“Perspective: The Missing Piece of ‘The Post,’” Made by History, The Washington Post, March 4, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/03/04/the-missing-piece-of-the-post/
“The mourning of AJR is less about a decline in press criticism than the loss of an institution.” Nieman Lab. August 27, 2015.
