Mark Leccese

Biography

Mark Leccese, as associate professor in the Journalism Department at Emerson College, has been a jazz trumpet player for many years, playing in amateur jazz combos around Boston. His horns are include a Jupiter XO 1600i Roger Ingram professional model, a vintage Conn Connstellation, and a Cuesnon flugelhorn. He also plays bass – a sweet cobalt blue Fender Precision. Before his knees went out, Mark spent summer nights as a catcher in the Boston Men’s Senior Amateur Baseball League. He never could hit the curveball with any authority.

Mark spent 30 years covering politics and government as a wire service reporter, a daily newspaper reporter, the editor-in-chief of the largest-circulation weekly newspaper in New England, the State House bureau chief for a large chain of Massachusetts newspapers, the founding editor of Beacon Hill: The Weekly Newspaper of Massachusetts Politics and Government, and a correspondent for The Boston Globe.

He has also been a magazine writer and editor, a literary critic, and Associate Editor of The Boston Business Journal. His freelance reporting and writing has appeared in publications including The Columbia Journalism Review, The Quill, The Boston Phoenix, Commonwealth, America, and Boston Magazine.

Before coming to Emerson College, Mark taught journalism and writing as an adjunct faculty member at Boston University and Northeastern University, and he was a Teaching Fellow in the English Department at Boston College, where he received his M.A in English.

From 2010-2014 he wrote a media criticism blog, called “Gatekeeper,” for Boston.com, the website of The Boston Globe, and then wrote a media criticism blog for “Cognoscenti: Thinking That Matters” at wbur.org, the website of Boston’s National Public Radio affiliate, WBUR-FM.

Mark’s scholarship on political blogs has been published in the academic journals Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly and Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies.

His book, The Elements of Blogging: Expanding the Conservation of Journalism, with co-author Jerry Lanson, was published in July 2015.

At Emerson, the courses Mark teaches include Public Affairs Reporting, Blogging, Interactive News, Beat Reporting, Feature Writing, the introductory lecture Discovering Journalism, and the graduate seminar Reporting and Writing.

Education

B.A., University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1979
M.A., Boston College, 1992

Books

Articles

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