A former journalist and copyeditor for several newspapers including, the Niagara Falls Gazette, Greensboro News & Record, Miami Herald, St. Petersburg Times, Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer, the University of South Carolina’s Kenneth Campbell now applies his reporting skills to adding to journalism’s history. 

As an Associate Professor and Mass Communications Sequence Head, Campbell teaches mass communications theory, representation of women and minorities in the media and mass media history. He also taught journalism workshops in Zambia and Greece and participated in a faculty development experience in Cameroon.

Name: David W. Bulla

Where you work: Augusta University, as an associate professor and interim dept. chair in Communication.

Where you got/are getting your Ph.D.:  University of Florida, in mass communication (August 2004).

Current favorite class: COMM 4950 (Sports Communication).

Current research project: Working on two projects, one on Frederick Douglass and the other on Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Fun fact about yourself: I am a fan of northern European mystery fiction, especially Ann Cleeves, the late Colin Dexter, the late Henning Mankell and Ian Rankin. I have visited both Oxford (locale of Dexter’s Morse novels) and Edinburgh (where Rankin’s Rebus novels are set), and plan to visit both the Shetlands (Cleve’s Jimmy Perez novels) and southern Sweden one of these days to complete the cycle. I have actually been to Newcastle upon Tyne, England, where Cleves lives, and I have spent time at the Literacy and Philosophical Society Library where she gives readings, though I still have not seen her give a lecture or reading. I did meet Rankin at the Dubai Literary Festival a few years back. Yes, he says Rebus loves the Rolling Stones more than the Who. But Rebus’ brother was a big Who fan. A partial victory.

The University of Missouri Press recently published Randall Sumpter’s new volume, Before Journalism Schools: How Gilded Age Reporters Learned the Rules, in their new series, “Journalism in Perspective: Continuities and Disruptions.” Sumpter’s book uses a community of practice model to describe and to organize the many ways used by late nineteenth century reporters to master the basics of journalism. Sumpter, an associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University, College Station, recently took a few minutes to share some insights about the focus and research process involved in Before Journalism Schools with history division membership co-chair Rachel Grant.

Q: Can you describe the focus of your book? 

A: Before the proliferation of journalism schools at public universities, novice reporters had to rely on other sources of information to master journalistic skills. Before Journalism Schools describes those resources and explains how knowledge brokers in the guise of experienced editors and reporters controlled the flow of information through these resource networks.

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

A: As a young reporter working on my first metro daily, I soon realized that there was more to “doing” journalism than I had learned in college. There were additional rules and other masters of those rules. It soon became apparent to me that I would not survive my initial encounter with journalism without learning the rest of its rule book. My interest in this non-collegiate knowledge, those that controlled it, and how it moved through professional networks became a research interest after I earned my Ph.D.

By Erika Pribanic-Smith

The AEJMC History Division is launching a Mentorship Program, intended to provide practical advice to our members by connecting them with more experienced members of the division.

All division members are eligible to participate, either as a mentor or a mentee. A variety of pairings may come out of this process that could assist scholars at any phase of their careers. For instance, recently-graduated assistant professors or lecturers may be paired with students to assist them with the process of becoming professional academics. Senior scholars may be paired with junior faculty to assist them with their teaching or mentor them through the tenure process. Full professors and professors emerita/emeritus may be paired with associate professors to assist with later-career transitions.

If you are interested in applying to be a mentor or mentee, please fill out the application form at https://tinyurl.com/AEJHistoryMentor by 11:59 p.m. Pacific time on March 29.

The History Division is re-launching its Facebook group for graduate students as a space to support graduate studies, build community, and network. “AEJMC History Division – Graduate Student Group,” the closed group, available only to the history division’s member students, can be found at https://www.facebook.com/groups/626716654022386/. Although the Facebook group has been in existence for several years, it is being revamped into a more active site. Moderators include graduate student co-liaisons Bailey Dick (Ohio University) and Colin Kearney (University of Florida). All graduate students are highly encouraged to join the group. It’s a great space to learn from one another and share experiences and opportunities for funding, paper calls, etc.

Please remember the deadline for AEJMC History Division’s “Transformative Teaching of Media and Journalism History Competition” is Feb. 1. We’ve added a $75 prize for four winners of the teaching-idea competition. Applicants share one of their best teaching practices that we as journalism educators and media historians use in classrooms. Winners will frame and share their practices via a 12- to 15-minute mini, hands-on teaching module at the 2019 AEJMC convention. At least one prize will go to a student scholar or a team entry with a student member. Teaching ideas should help professors address one or more pedagogies of diversity, collaboration, community, or justice. The competition welcomes a variety of teaching ideas, including those taught across a quarter/semester or taught as a module within an individual course. See the full call:https://aejmc.us/history/transformative-teaching-of-media-and-journalism-history-call-for-entries/

Christopher Daly (Boston University) will be appearing in a new historical documentary titled “Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People.” It has been shown at several film festivals (and is due to show at the NY Jewish Film Festival on Jan. 10), and it is scheduled to appear on PBS in the “American Masters” series on April 12.

W. Joseph Campbell (American University) wrote an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun in the run-up to the 70th anniversary of the 1948 “Dewey defeats Truman” upset that identified parallels between polls and media coverage in that election and in the widely unexpected outcome of the 2016 presidential vote.

Berkley Hudson (University of Missouri) now serves on the campus-wide “MU History Working Group.” The group will make recommendations to Chancellor Alexander Cartwright about the best ways “to acknowledge and honor laborers and enslaved people who built Mizzou.” This committee is emblematic of similar efforts at other universities such as the University of Virginia, Princeton, Brown, University of Southern California, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Hudson’s work on this committee is connected with his previously serving as chair of the Mizzou Race Relations Committee, formed in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown and subsequent protests in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014.

John M. Coward, professor and former chair of the Department of Communication (now Media Studies) at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, worked as a newspaper reporter and editor in his native East Tennessee before completing a Ph.D. in communication at the University of Texas at Austin. Coward’s primary research area is the representation of Native Americans in the nineteenth-century press. His research has been published in American Journalism, Journalism History, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Visual Communication Quarterly, and other journals. Coward has lectured on Native American images at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio, and other venues. His first book, The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press, 1820-90, was published in 1999 by the University of Illinois Press. In 2005, Coward published an edited collection of news stories and editorials about the nineteenth-century Indian wars as part of the eight-volume Greenwood Library of American War Reporting. His most recent book, Indians Illustrated: The Image of Native Americans in the Pictorial Press, was published by Illinois in 2016. We chatted by email about the impetus of his work, his most recent research project, and how his research informs his teaching.

Q. What is the most recent historical research project you have been (or are) working on?

A: My recent research has focused on Native American journalism, specifically the Red Power newspapers of the 1960s and ‘70s. I’ve presented conference papers in the last couple of years on an activist newspaper called The Warpath, published in San Francisco, and on Akwesasne Notes, a paper published in upstate New York. Both papers advocated for indigenous rights and attacked government bureaucracy, which made them interesting to me as a researcher. This area is a switch for me—I worked for many years on representations of Native Americans in the mainstream press in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But after two books on that topic, I needed a new research project, and I didn’t want to start in a completely new area. So the history of the Native press was appealing because it’s related to my earlier work and because it’s an understudied part of journalism history. A lot of people know about the Cherokee Phoenix, which was founded in 1828, but there have been hundreds and hundreds of Indian newspapers over the decades, and I wanted to find out what sort of Native journalism was being produced at various points in U.S. history. I was drawn to the Red Power newspapers because I wanted to see how the Native press covered the occupation of Alcatraz, the standoff at Wounded Knee, and other conflicts that marked the civil rights era.