Dr. Krystal Akehinmi’s (Tennessee Tech University) article, “‘To Make Pen-Friends through the Medium of Your Journal’: The Role of the Chicago Defender’s Bud Billiken Club in Forging Foreign Reporting and a Transnational Cohort among 1930s Black Youth,” published in 2025 in Volume 52, Issue 2 of Journalism History, has been selected as the 2026 winner of the Michael S. Sweeney Award, an annual celebration of the best article published in the journal.

The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) has selected the winner of its award honoring the best journalism and mass communication history book published in 2025. It is Tom Arnold-Forster’s Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton University Press, 2025).

The committee of judges – Drs. Kathryn McGarr, Will Mari, David T. Z. Mindich (chair), and Cristina Mislan—selected the book after considering many quality entries.

The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) congratulates Dr. Kathryn Montalbano (University of Kentucky) as winner of the annual Covert Award for best mass communication history article, essay, or book chapter published in the previous year.

The award memorializes Dr. Catherine L. Covert (right), professor of journalism at Syracuse University, the first woman professor in Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Journalism and the first woman to head the AEJMC History Division, in 1975.

The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication has selected Dr. David T. Z. Mindich as the 2026 recipient of the Donald L. Shaw Senior Scholar Award. A historian and public intellectual whose work examines journalism ethics and the role of media in a democracy, Mindich serves as a professor of journalism in the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University.

“I am deeply honored to receive this award, especially from a division made up of so many extraordinary scholars whose research has so deeply informed and enabled my own,” said Mindich. “And it is a special honor to receive an award named after Dr. Donald Shaw. Knowing that his foundational ‘agenda setting’ article was rejected before it was accepted is a powerful reminder for us all: We can’t all be as brilliant as Dr. Shaw, but we can emulate his persistence.”