After Nicholas Lemann took over the Columbia School of Journalism in 2003, one of his first projects was to find someone to breathe life into the Columbia Journalism Review. He said he felt the magazine’s pint-size circulation didn’t match its ambitions mission to be a major monitor of the press.

His search quickly led him to the publisher and editorial director of the left-leaning Nation magazine, Victor Navasky, who is credited with increasing the magazine’s circulation nine-fold since taking it over in 1978. In the past six months, after an extended period of negotiations with Mr. Lemann, Mr. Navasky has quietly taken the reins of CJR, while letting them go at the Nation. Mr. Navasky has not been listed on the masthead of the university’s magazine.

While Mr. Lemann intended Mr. Navasky to oversee CJR, his exact role at the magazine wasn’t agreed upon until this week, after a New York-based blogger, who goes by the name David M, wrote on Tuesday of the CJR’s high profile hire. Shortly after that blog entry, Mr. Lemann and Mr. Navasky settled on the title of “chairman,” and said Mr. Navasky’s name would be on the masthead in the next issue of CJR. In his new role, he essentially succeeds a former publisher of Newsday and the Los Angeles Times, David Laventhol, who served as publisher of CJR between 1999 and 2003.

Mr. Navasky said the staff of the review “wanted me to be listed” on the masthead. He preferred to keep a lower profile, he said, because “I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing here.”

CJR, which publishes bimonthly, was founded in 1961 and is backed by the Ford Foundation, the Knight Foundation, Cabot Family Charitable Trust, and the MacArthur Foundation. Mr. Lemann would not disclose the magazine’s budget. Columbia University supplies the office space and the staff reports to Mr. Lemann.

Mr. Navasky said his focus has been “99% on the business side,” holding weekly meetings with the business staff of the publication. “They have very good people there, and they lose a lot of money,” Mr. Navasky said.

Mr. Navasky has a reputation as a leading left-of-center intellectual, and the Nation has been relentless in its criticism of the Bush administration. Mr. Lemann insists, however, that he hired Mr. Navasky for his talent as a magazine publisher – not for the “nefarious motives supposed by the blogosphere.”

A popular conservative blog, Power Line, had sounded a suspicious note. “CJR purports to be an unbiased media watchdog publication. Yet … a major left-wing polemicist is calling the shots at CJR without any mention on the masthead,” it said.

Mr. Lemann said he’s hoping Mr. Navasky can do to CJR, which has a circulation of 22,000, what he did to the Nation, whose circulation grew to 184,000 from around 20,000 in his years there. In the past four years, the circulation of the Nation has doubled, according to the magazine’s circulation director, Arthur Stupar.

The executive editor of CJR, Michael Hoyt, said: “I have certainly talked with Victor about stories. That said, Victor knows what the mission of the magazine is. He knows the difference between the CJR and the Nation.”

The Delacorte Professor of journalism at the journalism school, Mr. Navasky in recent years has run a workshop for students who produce for academic credit “The New York Review of Magazines.” A book he wrote recapping his career at the Nation, “A Matter of Opinion,” came out last month, and was favorably reviewed in the Sun, which said Mr. Navasky had led the Nation to “a triumphant spot in our national journalism” and noted its circulation “has outstripped its competitors on the left, and the magazine has at times come close to confounding those who insist a journal of opinion can never make a profit.”