Who

A former staffer at the New Yorker, Lemann is the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism.

Backstory

Lemann (pronounced "lemon") started his journalism career as a teenager, writing for an alternative paper in his hometown of New Orleans. After graduating Harvard (where he was president of the Crimson), Lemann joined the inside-the-Beltway journal the Washington Monthly, followed by stints at Texas Monthly and the Washington Post. In 1983, he joined the Atlantic Monthly as national correspondent. After a decade and half at the Atlantic, in 1999 Lemann was recruited by David Remnick to serve as Washington correspondent at the New Yorker, where Lemann also later began writing the "Wayward Press" column. In 2003, Columbia's Lee Bollinger tapped Lemann to head up the search committee for a new dean for the university's journalism school. Suitably impressed by his plan for beefing up the curriculum, Bollinger ended up picking Lemann for the position instead.

Of note

As the head of the journalism school, Lemann supervises some 300 students and oversees the Columbia Journalism Review, a bi-monthly publication funded by the Ford Foundation, the Knight Foundation, Cabot Family Charitable Trust, and the MacArthur Foundation. His tenure at Columbia hasn't been without controversy: Feathers were ruffled in 2006 when he emerged as a sharp critic of "citizen journalism" in a New Yorker piece that earned him some derision from bloggers (who dubbed him the "Pope of mainstream media"). He was also criticized by some media observers for his decision in 2006 to cut back the online arm of CJR in order to boost the print version.

In print

Lemann has authored five books over his career, including The Promised Land: Black Migration and How it Changed America in 1991 and 2006's Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War.

Personal

Lemann lives in Pelham with his second wife, Judith Shulevitz, a critic and author. (Shulevitz's mother, a rabbi, married the couple in 1999.) They live just five blocks away from Lemann's first wife, former House and Garden editor Dominique Browning. Lemann has two children from his marriage to Browning, Alex and Theo, and two children with Shulevitz.