Several members of the AEJMC History Division participated in the American Journalism Historians Association conference that met Oct. 4-6 in Salt Lake City. The conference took place in the downtown Hotel RL, surrounded by picturesque mountains. The following photos depict some of the conference happenings (click each photo to enlarge; photos by Erika Pribanic-Smith, unless otherwise noted). For the full program and a listing of award winners, visit the AJHA Salt Lake City conference microsite.

Many academics spent the summer poring over manuscripts or rustling up new source documents at archives. But not Ellen Gerl.

Gerl spent a richly-deserved several months traveling across the United States, stopping to mountain bike along the way. And she’s headed back out on the road soon, this time to New Mexico, where she’ll spend several weeks prepping for her daughter’s wedding at a ranch that served as inspiration for painter Georgia O’Keeffe.

Following decades of teaching, Gerl retired as an associate professor at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University this May. While at OU, Gerl taught public relations writing and magazine feature writing courses. Prior to joining the academic world, Gerl spent more than fifteen years in public relations positions in healthcare and higher-education settings.

We sat down over coffee to look back on Gerl’s historical research, the ways she integrated her work and teaching, and advice she had for budding historians.

Continue reading →

Name: John S. Armstrong
Where you work: Department of Communication Studies, Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina
Where you received/are receiving your Ph.D.: Ph.D. received at the University of Utah in 2002
Current favorite class: Media History
Current research project: History of South Carolina Broadcasting

Continue reading →

Stephen Bates (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) is one of the three petitioners who are trying to dislodge what may be Watergate’s last secret: the special prosecutor’s report to the House as it considered impeachment of President Nixon. The judge put the report under seal in 1974, and it has stayed that way ever since. Bates filed the petition on Sept. 14 in collaboration with Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and the editor in chief of Lawfare, an online publication that specializes in national security legal policy issues, and Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush Administration. Bates is a law professor who, as a federal prosecutor working for Ken Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton, co-wrote the report to Congress recommending that Mr. Clinton be impeached. The three are represented by Protect Democracy, a government watchdog group.

Nicholas Hirshon (William Paterson University) will celebrate the publication of his book, We Want Fish Sticks: The Bizarre and Infamous Rebranding of the New York Islanders, by the University of Nebraska Press on December 1. The book, which is based on his doctoral dissertation at Ohio University, chronicles the wacky story of the National Hockey League team in the mid-1990s, when the franchise abandoned its original logo—a map of Long Island with the bold letters “NY”—in favor of a cartoon fisherman similar to the mascot for Gorton’s frozen seafood. The book’s title alludes to a chant that fans of opposing teams used to taunt the Islanders.

Berkley Hudson (University of Missouri-Columbia) has published a book chapter with two recent Mizzou doctoral graduates in journalism — Carlos A. Cortés-Martínez of the Universidad de La Sabana in Colombia, and Joy Jenkins of the Reuters Institute for Journalism Studies at the University of Oxford in England. They analyzed stories in SoHo, a Colombian men’s publication that’s been compared to Esquire, GQ and Playboy. The authors investigated the place of female reporters in South America in the sphere of Gonzo — a field traditionally studied through the works of Western, male journalists. The chapter, titled “La Revista Prohibida Para las Mujeres: Gonzo By Women in SoHo Magazine of Colombia, South America,” appears in Fear and Loathing Worldwide: Gonzo Journalism Beyond Hunter S. Thompson, edited by Robert Alexander and Christine Isager and published by Bloomsbury.

Tom Mascaro (Bowling Green State University) has been awarded American Journalism’s “Article of the Year” for his study that appeared in the spring issue of the journal. “The Blood of Others: Television Documentary Journalism as Literary Engagement” argues documentary journalists have been too narrowly defined as strictly journalists. Mascaro posits documentarians, like their counterparts in literature, intimately engage with and immerse themselves in the topics they research, which warrants examining documentaries as both acts of journalism and engaged literature. Mascaro was recognized for his work at the American Journalism Historians Association’s National Convention in Salt Lake City.

Victor Pickard (University of Pennsylvania) has a new article in the International Journal of Communication titled “The Strange Life and Death of the Fairness Doctrine: Tracing the Decline of Positive Freedoms in American Policy Discourse.” One of the most famous and controversial media policies ever enacted, the Fairness Doctrine suffered a final deathblow in August 2011 when the Federal Communications Commission permanently struck it from the books. However, the Doctrine continues to be invoked by proponents and detractors alike. Using mixed methods, Pickard’s study historically contextualizes the Fairness Doctrine while drawing attention to how it figures within contemporary regulatory debates.

Kimberly Wilmot Voss, Re-Evaluating Women’s Page Journalism in the Post-World War II Era: Celebrating Soft News (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Women are most likely to be included in journalism history if they make it to the front pages of newspapers, cover sports or become wartime correspondents – when they dared to take on men’s turf.[i] Only during wartime did women leave the women’s section, other than a token few. They were rarely part of newsrooms at most metropolitan newspapers. Yet, in the years between World War II and the beginnings of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s, many women’s page journalists were also redefining women’s roles.

For much of the scholarship on journalism history, the story of women’s pages has been consistently defined with a broad stroke, described as the four Fs of family, fashion, food and furnishings. The women’s pages were also the place to find high society news, advice columns, and wedding information. More often, the term fluff was applied to women’s page material. Yet, the sections were rarely examined to see if there was more to it. Recent scholarship has begun to shine a light on the women who covered soft news.[ii] The truth is more complicated as many women’s pages had long been refining roles for women as recent scholarship has shown.[iii]

Continue reading →