Provoking the Press: Kevin M. Lerner on [MORE] Magazine

The 1970s was a time of enormous upheaval in the world of the news. [MORE] magazine, created by reporters for the purpose of providing critical feedback to reporters and editors, was both a reflection of those changes and an instigator of them as well. Kevin M. Lerner, Associate Professor of Communication/Journalism at Marist College, has written a book about the history of [MORE] (the name comes from the traditional indicator at the bottom of a news story draft that there was more text on the next page) and the changes that are indicated by the magazine’s change of self-description from covering journalism to covering media.

I remember [MORE] magazine very well. For those who never heard of it, tell me how you would describe it and where the name comes from.

[MORE] was a journalism review that was started by a group of reporters who found themselves chafing against the limitations of daily journalism. It was sort of the culmination of a movement to launch regional journalism reviews, and J. Anthony (Tony) Lukas, a Pulitzer-winning New York Times writer was inspired by the Chicago Journalism Review to start [MORE]. In his own life, he was also annoyed that the institutional style of supposedly objective journalism that the Times practiced was insufficient to cover the roiling cultural atmosphere of the late 1960s…