The Covert Award is awarded annually to the author of the best mass communication history article, essay or book chapter published in the previous year.

The $400 award recognizes the late Catherine L. Covert, professor of public communications at Syracuse University. She was the first woman professor in Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Journalism and the first woman to head the History Division in 1975. She received the AEJMC Outstanding Contribution to Journalism Education Award in 1983.

Nominations for the Covert Awards are solicited in the spring each year.

Current recipients

2023 Michael Stamm, “The International Materiality of Domestic Information: The Geopolitics of Newsprint During World War II and the Cold War,” The International History Review, 44:6 (2022), 1286-1305, DOI: 10.1080/07075332.2021.2011371

2023 Gerry Lanosga, “‘Behold the Wicked Abominations That They Do’: The Nineteenth-Century Roots of the Evidentiary Approach in American Investigative Journalism,” American Journalism 39:4 (2022), 368-391, DOI: 10.1080/08821127.2022.2133024

Past Covert Award recipients

2022 Elisabeth Fondren, “Fighting an Armed Doctrine: The Struggle to Modernize German Propaganda During World War I (1914-1918),” Journalism & Communication Monographs, 23:4 (2021), 256-317.

2021 L. Amber Roessner, “The Voices of Public Opinion: Lingering Structures of Feeling about Women’s Suffrage in 1917 U.S. Newspaper Letters to the Editor,” Journalism History, 46:2 (2020), 124-144.

2020 Katie Day Good, “Sight-Seeing in School: Visual Technology, Virtual Experience, and World Citizenship in American Education, 1900–1930,” Technology and Culture, 60:1 (2019), 98-131.

2019 Ana Stevenson, “Imagining Women’s Suffrage: Frontier Landscapes and the Transnational Print Culture of Australia, New Zealand and the United States,” Pacific Historical Review 87:4 (2018), 638-666.

2018 Andie Tucher, “I Believe in Faking: The Dilemma of Photographic Realism in the Dawn of Photojournalism,” Photography & Culture 10:3 (2017), 195-214.

2017 Sheila Webb, “Creating LIFE: ‘America’s Most Potent Editorial Force’,” Journalism and Communication Monographs 18:2 (2016), 55-108.

2016 Richard B. Kielbowicz, “Regulating Timeliness: Technologies, Laws and the News, 1840-1970,” Journalism and Communication Monographs 17:1 (2015), 5-83.

2015 Katherine Fink and Michael Schudson, “The Rise of Contextual Journalism, 1950s-2000s,” Journalism, 15:1 (2014), 3-20.

2014 Michael S. Sweeney and Patrick S. Washburn, “’’Aint Justice Wonderful’: The Chicago Tribune’s Battle of Midway Story and the Government’s Attempt at an Espionage Act Indictment in 1942,” Journalism Monographs, 20:10 (December 2013), 1-91.

2013 Kathy Roberts Forde and Katherine A. Foss, “‘The Facts—The Color!—The Facts’: The Idea of a Report in American Print Culture, 1885-1910,” Book History (2012), 123-151.

2012 Kathy Roberts Forde, “Profit and Public Interest: A Publication History of John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima,’” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 88:3 (Autumn 2011), 562-579.

2011 Sheila Webb, “Art Commentary for the Middlebrow: Promoting Modernism & Modern Art through Popular Culture—How Life Magazine Brought ‘The New’ into Middle-Class Homes,” American Journalism, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Summer 2010), 115-150.

2010 Patrick Daley, “Newspaper Competition and Public Spheres in New Hampshire in the Early Revolutionary Period,” Journalism & Communication Monographs, Spring 2009.

2009 Jeffery Smith, “Moral Guardians and the Origins of the Right to Privacy,” Journalism & Communication Monographs, Spring 2008.

2008 Betty Houchin Winfield and Janice Hume, “The Continuous Past: Historical Referents in Nineteenth-Century American Journalism,” Journalism & Communication Monographs, 2007.

2007 Richard Kielbowicz, “The Law and Mob Law in Attacks on Antislavery Newspapers, 1833-1860,” Law and History Review, Fall 2006.

2006 Thomas Mascaro, “Flaws in the Benjamin Report: The Internal Investigation into CBS Reports’ Documentary ‘The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,’” Journalism History, Summer 2005, and Reed W. Smith, “Southern Journalists and Lynching: The Statesboro Case Study,” Journalism & Communication Monographs, Summer 2005.

2005 Susan Henry, “Gambling on a Magazine and a Marriage: Jane Grant, Harold Ross, and The New Yorker,” Journalism History, Summer 2004, and Michelle Jolly, “The Price of Vigilance: Gender, Politics, and the Press in Early San Francisco,” Pacific Historical Review, November 2004.

2004 David Nord, “The Practice of Historical Research,” Mass Communication Research and Theory, Guido H. Stempel III, David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit (eds.), Allyn & Bacon, 2003.

2003 Menahem Blondheim, “’Public Sentiment is Everything’: The Union’s Public Communications Strategy and the Bogus Proclamation of 1864,” The Journal of American History, December 2002.

2002 Nathan Godfried, “Struggling over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD during the 1930s,” Labor History, November 2001.

2001 Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone, “Civic Picturing vs. Realist Photojournalism: The Regime of Illustrated News, 1856-1901,” Design Issues, Spring 2000

2000 Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, “Creating a Favorable Business Climate: Corporations and Radio Broadcasting, 1934 to 1954,” Business History Review, Summer 1999.

1999 Janet Cramer, “Woman as Citizen: Race, Class, and the Discourse of Women’s Citizenship, 1894-1909,” Journalism & Mass Communication Monographs, March 1998.

1998 David Domke, “Journalists, Framing, and Discourse about Race Relations,” Journalism & Mass Communication Monographs, December 1997.

1997 Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Political News and Female Readership in Antebellum Boston and Its Region,” Journalism History, Spring 1996

1996 Richard Kaplan, “The Economics of Popular Journalism in the Gilded Age: the Detroit Evening News in 1873 and 1888,” Journalism History, Summer 1995.

1995 Karen K. List, “Realities and Possibilities: the Lives of Women in Periodicals of the New Republic,” American Journalism, Winter 1994.

1994 Gerald Baldasty, “The Rise of News as a Commodity: Business Imperatives and the Press in the Nineteenth Century,” in Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U.S. Communication History, William S. Solomon and Robert McChesney (eds.), University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

1993 Carol Smith and Carolyn Stewart Dyer, “Taking Stock, Placing Orders: A Historiographic Essay on the Business History of the Newspaper,” Journalism Monographs, April 1992.

1992 Steven J. Ross, “Struggles for the Screen: Workers, Radicals, and the Political Uses of Silent Film,” American Historical Review, April 1991.

1991 David Nord, “Teleology and News: The Religious Roots of American Journalism, 1630-1730,” The Journal of American History, June 1990.

1990 Carolyn Stewart Dyer, “Political Patronage of the Wisconsin Press, 1849-1860: New Perspectives on the Economics of Patronage,” Journalism Monographs, February 1989.

1989 Ronald Zboray, “Antebellum Reading and the Ironies of Technological Innovation,” American Quarterly, Spring 1988.

1988 Mary Kupiec Cayton, “The Making of an American Prophet: Emerson, His Audiences, and the Rise of the Culture Industry in Nineteenth Century America,” American Historical Review, June 1987.

1987 Clayton Koppes and Gregory Black, “Blacks, Loyalty and Propaganda in World War II,” Journal of American History, September 1986.

1986 James L. Baughman, “Television in the Golden Age; An Entrepreneurial Experiment,” The Historian, February 1985.

1985 David Nord, “The Business Values of American Newspapers: The 19th Century Watershed in Chicago,” Journalism Quarterly, Summer 1984.