Monthly Archives: September 2020

Member News Round Up- Elizabeth Atwood, Michael Schudson, Jon Marshall, Pam Parry, Teri Finneman, Owen Johnson, Dane Clausson, Will Mari

By Kathryn J. McGarr, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Membership Co-Chair

Elizabeth Atwood (Hood College) has written a biography of Baltimore Sun reporter Marguerite Harrison, who was a spy for the Military Intelligence Division in the early 1920s. The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison, America’s First Female Foreign Intelligence Agent is published by Naval Institute Press and is available on Amazon and at other major booksellers.

Michael Schudson (Columbia University) has written Journalism: Why It Matters (116pp plus notes). The book, published in spring 2020, is part of Polity’s “Why It Matters” series of short books directed to undergraduates. It is focused on U.S. journalism, especially over the past 50 years, and also offers some international comparisons.

Jon Marshall (Northwestern University) was promoted to associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism. He was interviewed in August on WBAI radio on presidents and elections.

Pam Parry (Southeast Missouri State University) and Teri Finneman (Kansas University) recently spoke at an online event, “‘19 & ’52: Ike, Women and Equality,” sponsored by the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum.

Owen V. Johnson (Indiana University) has written “Ernie Pyle & Harriett Davidson: Two Red-Headed Travelers,” published in Traces of Indiana & Midwestern History 32:3 (Summer 2020), pp. 46-55. The article tells the story of Ernie Pyle’s college girlfriend, both before she met him, and then after. Although she died in 1994 at age 91, Johnson was able to locate her family, and also talk to some people who knew her well.

Dane S. Claussen was appointed Lecturer of Strategic Communications at the University of Idaho in August. Over the summer, the national nonprofit news organization he launched in March 2020, Nonprofit Sector News (also on LinkedIn and Facebook), had eight journalism interns and two IT interns from nine universities. He continues to edit Newspaper Research Journal, which he has done since November 2017.

Will Mari

Will Mari (Louisiana State University) will have an article published this fall in First Monday. “A Short History of Pandemic Coverage on the Internet” examines how previous pandemics, namely, SARS, H1N1 and MERS, were reported online in the early 2000s through the early 2010s.

In A League of Their Own: AEJMC History Division Mini-Profiles – Shelia Webb

Where you work: Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington, Department of Journalism.

Where you got your Ph.D.: University of Wisconsin.

Current favorite class: I enjoy all of my classes, which include History of U.S. Journalism, Mass Media Ethics, Senior Seminar, Intro to Visual Journalism, and Publications: from Concept to Design.

This summer, I am teaching 2 classes—the history class, in which students do a blog based on their dream team, and the publications class, in which students create a niche magazine—so they are my favorites at the moment!

Current research project: Cultural importance of the Reiman publications, especially Taste of Home and Country Woman, and what they tell us about the enduring resonance of pastoral values in our partisan climate.

Fun fact about yourself: Friends, also from Wisconsin, Suzanne and Hawkins Pingree, moved to San Juan Island and started a distillery, so I got my taster’s license and help them out on occasional weekends. Covid-19 has presented challenges to that activity, for sure. Especially enjoyable—watching the Orcas make their way through Haro Strait and the sunset over Victoria.

Book Q & A: Promoting Monopoly: AT&T and the Politics of Public Relations, 1876-1941

By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair

Name: Karen Miller Russell

University Affiliation and Position: University of Georgia, Jim Kennedy Professor of New Media and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor

Book Title: Promoting Monopoly: AT&T and the Politics of Public Relations, 1876-1941

1. Describe the focus of your book.

AT&T had one of the best known and respected U.S. publicity departments by the mid-20^th century, despised by critics but praised and emulated by other corporations. Publicity was integral to the growth of the telephone industry, and AT&T was central to the development of corporate public relations. I wanted to understand why PR was so important to AT&T and how exactly it used PR strategies and tactics to promote its views. I learned that the company’s desire to promote and protect the telephone monopoly propelled the creation of a PR program that in turn shaped the U.S. legal, political, media, and cultural landscape.

2. How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?

Everyone who knows anything about U.S. public relations history knows about Arthur Page, but most scholars have vastly underestimated AT&T’s commitment to public relations before the company hired him in 1927. I started off writing a biography of Page, but gradually realized that publicity started as soon as the telephone was invented, and that a formal system was in place before 1910. I decided that I needed to schedule a second trip to the archives to explore the earlier years and found a lot more than I expected.

3. What archives or research materials did you use?

I conducted research using the Page collections at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Page Society in New York, and most importantly at the AT&T corporate archive in New Jersey, which was not available to many of the previous scholars studying Page. That’s where I found evidence of a previously forgotten corporate publicist, William A. Hovey, whose work included visits to antagonistic newspaper editors in 1886 and publicity for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. I also used databases including Newspapers.com to explore the company’s earliest attempts to influence press coverage. That allowed me to explore AT&T’s influence on local papers.

4. How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

In 1903 AT&T hired the Publicity Bureau to promote both its service and its political perspectives. The AT&T archive included a list of newspapers that printed stories provided by the company, and I used newspaper databases to track them down. AT&T’s representatives used every strategy they could think of, from paying for advertising in hopes of influencing editorial coverage (it worked) to golfing with an editor in hopes that a personal relationship would result in AT&T’s perspective at least being included in the newspaper (it did). It’s a pretty good precursor to discussions about sponsored content and native advertising.

5. What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects

My advice for other historians is twofold: (1) don’t believe received wisdom, and (2) read everything. Received wisdom suggested that James Ellsworth, who started at the Publicity Bureau and moved to AT&T in 1908, was a bit of a huckster, successful though not terribly ethical, and that his importance was simply that he preceded Arthur Page at AT&T. The more research I did, the more my opinion of him changed, and I ended up writing three chapters on Ellsworth and only two on Page. Ellsworth deserves the credit for creating and institutionalizing the publicity function at AT&T and its regional operating companies (the “baby Bells”). He innovated advertising and then film as corporate publicity tools, and he was responsible for the development of the company’s employee benefits program. Page certainly was an important pioneer in corporate PR, but his legacy has unfairly and inaccurately overshadowed Ellsworth’s contributions.

As for reading everything, I discovered William Hovey because a telephone engineer mentioned him on a single page in his memoir about Bell Telephone’s earliest years. I asked the archivist at AT&T’s history center if they had anything on this man – not very optimistically, because the earliest years of the company are not always well documented – and he replied that they had two folders that included his name. When I started reading about Hovey and realized what he had done at AT&T, I gasped so loudly that the archivists asked me what was wrong. Believe me, nothing was wrong! It’s not every day that you find the earliest known U.S. corporate publicist.

September Chair Column: ‘Clio:’ surviving this fall right now with teaching: how to use digital archiving projects in class

By Will Mari

Hi again, folks,

I don’t know about you, but so far, a month into this semester, it feels like it’s been three (or four) months. And so knowing that things are hard out there for a lot of us, I wanted to offer some practical, “off-the-shelf” teaching ideas that you can use in your media-history classes.

If you don’t teach media history right now, these could work in other journalism or mass-comm courses that either feature a history component or even just a section on the use of the college/university library or digital archives. They can be part of a lecture day, an activity-oriented day, either synchronous, asynchronous, or as a standalone out-of-class activity.

I’ll focus on a short list of volunteer public-history projects that are interactive, engaging and rewarding for undergraduate and graduate students alike and that use transcription as their main vehicle. I’ve used these to invite conversation about the role of media history in the ongoing, complex, American story. You might find them helpful, too.

1) Freedom on the Move

A project led by Cornell, it guides volunteers through scanned but-as-yet transcribed ads for enslaved people from before the Civil War, and has them either do the actual transcription or check the work of others. I was a bit hesitant to ask students to do this, but many felt that it was a way to give back and give voice to previously unheard people. I’ll talk a bit more about how I structured this assignment below.

2) Digital Volunteer at the Smithsonian

3) Citizen Archivist with the National Archives

4) By the People with the Library of Congress

5) Papers of the War Department

6) Digital Newberry

7) Various other projects: including this portal, and this list by the American Historical Association.

The Smithsonian, National Archives and Library of Congress’ projects tend to be trickier in that they sometimes require the ability to read cursive, which might be challenging for some students. That same challenge is present with the War Department and Digital Newberry projects, but some later-in-the-20th-century efforts are more straightforward, and just involve tagging images versus transcribing writing. One immensely popular project with the New York Public Library transcribes menus (“What’s on the Menu?”), but it often has more volunteers than it has un-transcribed material!

One alternative is to have students look at finished projects and their curated artifacts, online, and talk about the long journeys these physical things have taken to survive to the present, or what they meant, perhaps, for the people who once used them.

But the initiative I’ve had the most success with this semester is Freedom on the Move, which offers helpful tutorials, videos and other “explainer” material, and is perhaps the most user friendly. I had students take a screenshot of a finished contribution and respond to just two prompts: first, why did they pick their project, and second, what did they learn while working on it? Most of my students choose Freedom on the Move and reported feeling convicted and surprised. They hadn’t realized that slavery was such an embedded part of American society—“even” in the northern part of the country—for so long. At least a few said that doing the transcription drove home that lesson more than reading our textbook.

I would add that it’s good to let students pick, to a certain degree, what project they want to help out on, and to make sure that they have enough time to complete them (I gave my students an extra day). But I highly recommend this as a way to enhance an existing class, and to give yourself some mental space, if you need the support.

A final idea: some university and public libraries are documenting the pandemic and are encouraging students to contribute (this is happening at Louisiana State, where I work). But that might require another conversation to unpack more fully.

If you do have your students use an interactive, volunteer project for an activity, I would invite you to have them tweet about it to our fall media-history awareness campaign, #mediahistorymatters.

Please reach out to me with suggestions or ideas, to wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter. We’ll have more updates later in the fall on our panel line-up for next year’s conference, as well as other initiatives and efforts.

Until then, take care,

Will