Author Archives: Kevin M. Lerner
Great moments in the intellectual history of journalism?
I was working on my PowerPoint for my presentation today at the AEJMC convention, trying to find online photos of University of Wisconsin journalism instruction pioneer Willard Bleyer and found a Wisconsin page that mentioned that he and First Amendment theorist and philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn overlapped in their time at Wisconsin, and that both were […]
ProPublica’s daily email
I really like a lot of what ProPublica is doing. I think the not-for-profit model is a good idea, if not the future of professional journalism. And I don’t just say this because I met Paul Steiger in his last week at the WSJ. But their daily email is impossible to read. It’s like a […]
FCC, see-ya!
Proposition, in re the “wardrobe malfunction” decision: The Federal Communications Commission is at best an out-of-touch relic from an earlier era (that of the “mass media”) and at worst is unconstitutional. Discuss.
I’m (going to be) Huge in Japan
So sometimes I ride my bike around Central Park. And when I do, I often like to pull off at West 100th Street, which is one of my favorite parts of the Park, and I buy a bottle of water. Today, I did that, and as I was getting off my bike, I was approached […]
Blogging my quals
My main task this summer, besides prepping three courses for my new gig, is to begin reading for my qualifying exams. I haven’t set a date, but I’m probably going to take them in the spring, likely over spring break at Seton Hall, when I won’t have teaching commitments to interfere with writing. Between now […]
Lorber or hate her
We media types seem to be obsessed–not quite to a creepy extent–with MTV’s The Paper, a “reality” show about a high school newspaper in Broward County, Florida. And I’ll admit to being one of them. I never worked on my high school paper (that was mostly the province of a classmate I barely knew who […]
Professionalization Without Standardization: Journalism Education, Voice, and Democracy
I attended two conferences a week ago on a sort of crazy schedule: Auburn, Alabama on Friday afternoon; back in New York City for conference number two on Saturday morning. But I presented two papers I care quite strongly about. Friday’s paper was the first in what I hope will be a series developing a […]
Discovering the Schudson
Giving the keynote address today was MacArthur “genius” and author of Discovering the News (which is probably the one book I cite in everything I’ve ever written), Michael Schudson. He gave props to my professor David Greenberg in addressing his topic–the history of frankness (Greenberg is writing a history of spin. That’s the joke). He […]
The return of rewrite
I just attended the first half (of what I plan to attend) of an anniversary conference for my graduate school, SCILS at Rutgers. The panel was “Journalism Education at Rutgers: Past, Present, Future, ad the Challenges for Journalists in the Digital Age.” Doesn’t sound thrilling, but for someone like me who find journalism education fascinating […]
Celebrity
I tried to think of a way to make this post have something to do with the media or with education–maybe something about how the media make a celebrity a culture or somesuch. But really, I just thought it was cool that I saw Alex Rodriguez at 61st and Madison today. I regret not stopping […]
Press Criticism 