Monthly Archives: August 2021

A Word From the Chair: Our Goals for the Year Ahead

Cayce Myers, associate professor of public relations and director of graduate studies at Virginia Tech’s School of Communication, is the new chair of the History Division.

Thank you to all of the History Division members who helped create a great 2021 virtual conference.  Despite the ongoing pandemic, our division maintained its high quality scholarship, while also continuing our division’s continued support for scholars, especially graduate students and newer faculty.  As we begin to work toward our 2022 conference in Detroit (hopefully in-person!), there are a few things that I want to mention as the Chair of the History Division.

First, thank you to last year’s leadership team, especially Dr. Will Mari (Louisiana State) who did a fantastic job as Chair for our 2021 conference.  Additionally, I want to thank Dr. Maddie Liseblad (California State University, Long Beach) our Second Vice Chair and Research Chair, who managed our paper submission process resulting in a series of high quality papers by both faculty and graduate students.  We also welcome Dr. Rachel Grant (Florida), our new addition to the leadership team, who is the Second Vice Chair and Research Chair for the Division.

Our 2020-2021 year in the History Division had many accomplishments including the expansion of outreach and mentorship under the direction of former Chairs Dr. Erika Pribanic-Smith (Texas-Arlington) and Dr. Teri Finneman (Kansas).  Dr. Pam Parry (Southeast Missouri State) assumed her role as the editor of our division’s journal, Journalism History, ahead of schedule in June 2021.  With the help of Dr. Keith Greenwood (Missouri) the division also launched its new website https://mediahistorydivision.com, which contains a wealth of content about scholarship, teaching, and division news that can be utilized by our members in their research and classes.  The website also contains the links to the division’s highly successful Journalism History Podcast, which contains a cross section of interviews about a variety of historical subjects produced by Dr.Teri Finneman.  

As we approach the 2021-2022 academic year, we face an evolving situation with the global pandemic that affects our lives, work, and society.  What that means for the History Division is that our goals for the next year are aspirational and tempered with the knowledge that things may evolve with the pandemic over the next year.  With that said, the 2021-2022 goals for the History Division are:

  1.  Support our members in their teaching, scholarship, and service as we transition back toward in-person meetings in 2022.
  2. Continue our division’s mission of recruiting new scholars into the division, and support young and seasoned scholars through our division’s mentorship program.
  3. Continue our support for and presence at our regional AEJMC conferences, which supports younger scholars, especially graduate students.
  4. Continue our outreach and engagement with the broader historical research community, and look for ways to create partnerships between those organizations and our division.
  5. Explore the possibility of holding a pre-conference ahead of next year’s AEJMC conference in Detroit.

All of these goals are only possible with the help of our dedicated History Division members, and I appreciate the willingness over this past year of members’ work on mentorship, research outreach, teaching initiatives, and awards.  It is this work that makes our division a great place for scholars at any stage to share their work.

As we begin this new academic year there are a few things to note.  Our research panels for the 2022 annual conference are due by September 15th.  Please review the call for papers, and submit proposals to our Vice Chair Dr. Maddie Liseblad at madeleine.liseblad@csulb.edu.

I also welcome any suggestions, questions or comments.  Feel free to contact me at mcmyers@vt.edu.  Once again, thank you all for your work for the division, and best wishes for the upcoming year.

– Cayce Myers

Journalism History Podcast Spotlight

Each month, Clio will highlight the latest episode of the Journalism History podcast and recommend a set of episodes from the archives. The podcasts — available on the website and through many podcast players — are excellent teaching tools, easy to add to your syllabi. Transcripts of each episode are available online.   

Latest episode: Episode 86, Woodrow Wilson’s Ministry of Propaganda – John Maxwell Hamilton on the Committee on Public Information.

This month’s recommendations from the archive:

Episode 50.5: Why Does Journalism History Matter? To celebrate the first 50 episodes, the podcast hosts reflect with prior guests on the central question of the show: Why does journalism history matter?

Bonus Episode: The History of American Epidemics Katie Foss discusses her upcoming book, Constructing the Outbreak, which analyzes seven epidemics spanning more than 200 years. She covers how shifts in journalism and medicine influenced the coverage, preservation, and fictionalization of different disease outbreaks

Episode 83: America’s ‘Tory’ Printer Autumn Linford discusses the real story of James Rivington, the most infamous printer of the American Revolution. Her research seeks to broad the historical understanding of Rivington beyond the textbook mentions of his work as a Tory newspaper printer.  

Member Spotlight: Michael Buozis

Where you work: Muhlenberg College, Department of Media & Communication

Where you got your Ph.D.: Temple University

Current favorite class: Media & Society: Social Media. Introducing students–often freshman–to critical perspectives on social media, something that so many of them are immersed in, has been endlessly rewarding. I aim to give students the space and time to think and write about the media that shape their social lives and the political and cultural contexts they inhabit, so every semester feels different and exciting as the platforms that dominate our conversations change even if the concerns they evoke persist.

Current research project: I’ve begun digging through the Industry Documents Library maintained by UCSF, exploring how industries–in particular tobacco and fossil fuel–have exerted influence on sites and actors producing metajournalistic discourses, like trade publications, professional/press associations, and J-schools. I’m hoping to find ways to explore how Big Tech has done the same more recently. 

Fun fact about yourself: My favorite summertime lawn game is slate-board quoits, an adaptation of an English pub game that my mother’s family has played for generations and is only common, as far as I can tell, in Pennsylvania’s Slate Belt region.

Reminder: Apply by September 3 for the History Division Mentorship Program

Are you looking for help with your career path, research, or teaching? Our division’s experienced scholars have the answers. Whether you’re a grad student, assistant professor, associate professor, or other, our mentorship program is open to you.We also need willing mentors at all levels to provide guidance and support. 

We are entering our third year of this successful program. Prior mentors and mentees alike have found their mentoring relationships to be beneficial, and many have chosen to continue informally after their year in the program has ended. 

Applications for mentors and mentees close at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time Sept. 3. Apply now at https://historymentor2021.questionpro.com/ Pairings will be notified via email by Sept. 17; the partnerships officially last one year. Contact Erika Pribanic-Smith epsmith@uta.edu if you have questions.

AJHA Virtual Conference Oct. 8-9, 2021

American Journalism Historians’ Association will host its 40th annual conference Oct. 8-9 on the Whova virtual conference platform. Registration is open now at ajhaonline.org. Cost is $25 for all members; additional fees apply for non-members as well as members who would like to bundle membership renewal with conference registration. Access information will be emailed to registered attendees beginning in September.

Member News: Lisa Burns, Kathleen Wickham, Elisabeth Fondren, Gregory Borchard & David Bulla, Kimberly Wilmot Voss, Nicholas Hirshon, Jonathan Bullinger

Lisa Burns, Professor of Media Studies at Quinnipiac University, and her colleague Courtney Marchese have published a chapter on “Political Branding in a Digital Age: The Role of Design and Image-Based Messaging Strategies in the 2020 Presidential Election” in The 2020 Presidential Campaign: A Communications Perspective (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), edited by Robert E. Denton.

Kathleen W. Wickham, Professor of Journalism at the University of Mississippi, served as executive producer of the Theatre Oxford play The Heartbreak Henry, written and directed by David Sheffield, a former writer for Saturday Night Live. She chaired the fundraising, publicity, program, and marketing committees for the sold-out show, which was co-sponsored by the School of Journalism & New Media.

Elisabeth Fondren, Assistant Professor of Journalism at St. John’s University, published a chapter, “Media in Western & Northern Europe,” in Global Journalism: Understanding World Media Systems (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), edited by Daniela V. Dimitrova. She traces the historical origins of political reporting across Northern and Western Europe, and discusses media pluralism, technology and law, public service broadcasting, and freedom of speech in EU member states.

Lincoln Mediated: The President and the Press Through Nineteenth-Century Media by Gregory A. Borchard, Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and David W. Bulla, Associate Professor of Communication at Augusta University, was republished by Routledge in December 2020. Bulla and Borchard are also working on the second edition of Journalism in the Civil War Era (Peter Lang, forthcoming).

Kimberly Wilmot Voss, Professor of Journalism at the University of Central Florida, has written a new book, Newspaper Fashion Editors in the 1950s and 60s: Women Writers of the Runway (Palgrave, 2021), which documents the careers of newspaper fashion editors and details fashion sections of the post-World War II years. The analysis covers social, political, and economic aspects of fashion. The book–Voss’s fourth on women’s page journalism–also addresses journalism ethics, fashion show reporting, and the decline in fashion journalism editor positions.

Nicholas Hirshon, Assistant Professor of Communication at William Paterson University, was named the first two-time winner in the 43-year history of the Outstanding Campus Adviser Award presented by the Society of Professional Journalists. The award recognizes an adviser who has made “an exceptional contribution” to their campus chapter. In their nomination, Hirshon’s students cited his organizing nine installments of a Zoom discussion series with reporters during the 2020-2021 academic year and providing a “rich journalism experience” to the campus community.

Jonathan M. Bullinger, a lecturer at SUNY Geneseo and SUNY Oneonta, has begun hosting a new season of Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, which introduces concepts from the disciplines of history and collective memory. This season includes episodes on sports media (NFL Films vs. NFL Media, nostalgia disguised as documentary), cultural figures (Bruce Lee and Chadwick Boseman), resuscitation of old narratives when new archives are found (Belushi documentary), and re-framing popular music with new iconography (Universal Music’s new holiday animated music videos).

Q&A with author Will Mari about The American Newsroom

The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960 (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2021)

Describe the focus of your book. 

The focus of the book is on the lived experiences of rank-and-file news workers in and out of the newsroom spaces of the interwar years and early Cold War. I really wanted to show the development of the idea of “the newsroom” in the generations leading up to the newsrooms observed by Gans and Tuchman in the 1970s, and taking up the work of early journalism-studies scholars and media historians such as A.M. Lee, as well as the more recent work of Bonnie Brennen, Linda Steiner and Ted Curtis Smythe. 

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

I was doing research on journalism textbooks while working with my adviser, Richard Kielbowicz, at the University of Washington. And these texts kept describing these dynamic, slightly crazy, and definitely already mythologized spaces that I knew from reading journalists’ memoirs. But they were also real, often exclusive, sometimes harsh, but ironically beloved spaces. And so I wanted to find out what they were really like, as best as one can, as physical spaces with a corresponding culture. But I couldn’t find a comprehensive history of the newsroom anywhere! There were lots of short, capsule-style histories, and some scholars, like Fred Fedler, but also Julia Guarneri, Michael Stamm and Aurora Wallace, had written these great, materiality-centered histories of news production and buildings. And so I wrote the book I wished I could have used to answer my questions, if that makes sense. 

What archives or research materials did you use? 

I used Quill, published by the Society of Professional Journalists, Editor & Publisher (now mostly scanned by the Internet Archive, and available online, just not in color), and the American Newspaper Guild’s Reporter. I also used the annual reports of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, the American Society of News Editors, and other trade groups (and their publications), along with memoirs, textbooks and government documents from the National Archives II in College Park, Maryland, and the regional National Archives located in Seattle.

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

As newsrooms change, getting smaller, more mobile, or even closing altogether (with journalists once again, as they did in the 18th century, working from their homes or coffee shops), I wanted to talk about why these spaces mattered and how they both reflected their temporal, cultural and societal contexts, and how they shaped journalism as we know it. That includes great things — holding governments and corporations to account — but also bad things, like being distinctly unfriendly places for women and people of color for many years. That would change by the end of the century. But their legacy is complex, like all human institutions. They represented a kind of precursor to the information society we live in today. 

But to summarize the relevance for the present moment: The industrial journalism of the 20th century and big, metro newsrooms grew up together, influenced by forces such as unionization and early portable technologies (i.e. early mobile tech). While many of the examples of these large newsrooms may go away, I think they’ll always be a role for some kind of physical newsroom space, even if it’s a small one. And so again I wanted to show where that ideal and that idea had come from, to help understand where they may be going. 

What advice do you have for other historians that are working on or starting book projects?

I had originally wanted to tell the story of the newsroom right on through the 20th century, the “entire thing,” as it were. That would have been too much (as it is, it took me nearly five years to finish the project). Richard wisely suggested cutting things off in the 1960s, as other scholars had and have done a great job of telling the newsroom’s story since, including folks like Matthew Pressman. 

And so I guess my advice would be to be ok with stopping at a certain point. There’s plenty of research to go around. Ultimately, a lot of what I wanted to do in the original longer version turned out to be better in my two books for Routledge, that function as a kind of pair of short sequels; the first being a history of newsroom computerization (A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies, 2019), and a forthcoming book (early next year) on the history of the news industry and the internet (wish me luck!).

2022 AEJMC Conference Panel Proposals

It’s time to start submitting your 2022 AEJMC conference panel proposals. If you have a good idea for a history division panel – with a focus on teaching, research or PF&R – please send Maddie Liseblad (madeleine.liseblad@csulb.edu) an email with the following details:

  1. The title of the proposal
  2. Whether the panel is teaching, research or PF&R
  3. A short summary of the panel topic that clearly indicates why it fits the history division
  4. Whom you propose as panelists, including a short bio of each, a brief description of what each would discuss, and their contact information. Please also indicate the panelists willingness to participate, if panel is selected
  5. The potential co-sponsor you envision for this panel (another AEJMC division/interest group/commission)

Please send these panel proposals by 11:59 p.m. EST on Wednesday, Sept. 15 (please note the date!) to madeleine.liseblad@csulb.edu.

The final selection of panels/panelists will be determined after our negotiations with other AEJMC divisions/interest groups/commissions. If you have questions, please reach out to Maddie.