Maddie Liseblad (Middle Tennessee State University) has written American Consultants and the Marketization of Television News in the United Kingdom, part of Peter Lang’s “Mediating American History” series. Liseblad combined previously inaccessible Frank N. Magid archives with interviews with Magid staff and British journalists to examine how television news evolved in the U.K. in the 1990s. American consultants spread the U.S. model—the origin of today’s on-air style—and changed television news globally by working with indigenous media.
Nicholas Hirshon (William Paterson University), Amber Roessner (University of Tennessee), and Kristin L. Gustafson (University of Washington, Bothell) have written “Reporting Today, With Yesterday’s Context” for the Columbia Journalism Review. They address the role of historical reporting in covering today’s news. The article emerged in part from Roessner and Gustafson’s work while serving as the History Division’s teaching standards co-chairs. In 2019, they set a goal to advocate nationally and internationally for the importance of history in journalism and mass communication curricula and established a teaching salon to support public scholarship that focuses on that advocacy.
Flora Khoo (Regent University) has written “The Ideological Influence of Political Cartoons on the 1884 U.S. Presidential Race” for American Journalism. Khoo analyzes the influence of political cartoons in Harper’s Weekly and Puck magazine, looking at their persuasive power as well as the public’s role in reinforcing the agenda in the 1884 U.S. presidential campaign (Grover Cleveland vs. James G. Blaine), a significant moment in political history.
Andrew E. Stoner (California State University, Sacramento) has written his tenth book, Courthouse Chaos: Famous and Infamous Trials, Mob Violence and Justice (Blue River Press), which details notable instances of mob violence at famous and infamous trials. In 2019, he released The Journalist of Castro Street: The Life of Randy Shilts (University of Illinois Press).
George Garrigues, a journalist and author, has written Marguerite Martyn: America’s Forgotten Journalist, which drills down to the newsroom level of Joseph Pulitzer’s 1905-1941 St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This illustrated book for general audiences highlights and interprets Martyn’s articles and drawings on child labor, the fight for women’s suffrage, and some of the earliest female politicians. A companion book, Liberty Bonds and Bayonets, offers keen observations on the Great War by Martyn, on the home front, and her husband, the foreign correspondent Clair Kenamore, with the troops on the Western Front.
Will Mari’s (Louisiana State University) new book, The American Newsroom: A Social History, 1920-1960, is now available for pre-order with the University of Missouri Press. The book covers a time of great change and controversy in the field, one in which journalism was produced in “news factories” by news workers with dozens of different roles, and not just once a day, but hourly, using the latest technology and setting the stage for the emergence later in the century of the information economy. Mari uses memoirs, trade journals, textbooks, and archival material to show how the newsroom expanded our ideas of what journalism could and should be.
Owen Johnson’s (Indiana University) book, At Home with Ernie Pyle, originally published in 2016, is now available in paperback. The biography of the legendary World War II reporter celebrates Pyle’s Indiana roots, gathering for the first time his writings about the state and its people. In them, readers will discover the Ernie Pyle who was able to find a piece of home wherever he wandered.
