Melita M. Garza
Professional Freedom and Responsibility Chair
Texas Christian University
melita.garza@tcu.edu

For Capital Gazette staffer Chase Cook’s determined words, “we are putting out the damn paper tomorrow,” I offer this translation: the free press lives. On Thursday, June 28, 2018, Cook, a graduate of the University of Oklahoma’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication, was on a day-off when a murderer took a shotgun to the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, killing five of Cook’s colleagues. In a blink of an eye, Rob Hiaasen, Wendi Winters, Gerald Fischman, John McNamara, and Rebecca Smith, all dedicated to truth telling and community journalism, were gone.

The violence leveled against the Capital Gazette is still a relative rarity in the United States compared to many other countries, even in an era of increasingly strident anti-media rhetoric. Nonetheless, the issue of journalists’ safety was top of mind for me when these five Capital Gazette employees were slain. Just two days before the shooting, I was at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., attending an awards ceremony honoring freelance conflict journalist James W. Foley, a Medill and Marquette graduate who was murdered in 2014 by ISIS in the Raqqa region of Syria. The awards’ ceremony, put on annually since his death by the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, is one way the organization honors the storytelling of intrepid reporters and highlights its own work to insure the safety of journalists, whether working at home or internationally.

Tellingly, the keynote speaker, MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews, turned first to journalism history to provide some context to discuss the dangerous life that Foley and other journalists often face. Matthews mentioned “people like Ernest Hemingway on the way back from covering the Civil War in Spain; Ernie Pyle, who told the life of the average GI in World War II and was killed telling that story, (and) Neil Sheehan, who exposed the great shining lie of the Vietnam war.” There are of course, others he might have mentioned, including Dickey Chapelle, the brilliant war photographer who was killed in Vietnam in 1965, or Ruben Salazar, the Spanish-language KMEX TV reporter and former Los Angeles Times staff writer killed in 1970 by a law enforcement officer while covering a Chicano Vietnam war protest, or the five Vietnamese immigrant journalists assassinated in the United States between 1981 and 1990, whose murders remain unsolved. There are more recent examples, among them Marie Colvin, an American journalist working for the Times of London who was killed covering the Syrian Civil War in 2012, and Mexican journalist Miroslava Breach, who was killed in 2017 while documenting murders in her home state of Chihuahua.

And while Matthews might have added more in the way of historical background, he did note, however, the important distinction between conflict journalists and war correspondents. “Unlike the war correspondent” conflict journalists “are not only reporting behind enemy lines, there are no lines,” he said. In retrospect, as the events at the Capital Gazette have reminded us once again, there are no lines, even for domestic reporters. Truly there never were. In the United States, the murder of abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy in 1837 in Alton, Illinois, may have been the earliest such effort to violently silence the voice of journalism.

Beyond history, Matthews added much from a perspective rarely brought to the table in the journalism field. Matthews spoke about a central element he had in common with Foley: a Jesuit education. Both he and Foley grew up knowing the lives of the Saints, “especially the martyrs who endured the unimaginable at the ends of their lives,” Matthews said. “James knew the dangers of reporting war in Libya and Syria. Then he went back again and again knowing those dangers. When he met his end, squarely, in the face, he replaced the dashing face of the foreign correspondent with the stoic face of moral courage.”

To draw the face of moral courage, Matthews once again turned to Hemingway, this time taking a page from For Whom the Bell Tolls. He reflected on the heroic character of Robert Jordan, the American dynamiter fighting in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. “Robert Jordan said he could spot a traitor… He said he could always spot a traitor because they had a sadness that comes before the sellout—sadness in their face.” This emotion, Matthews said, was not visible in Foley.

“When I look at my wallet, at a picture of James Foley, I don’t see sadness,” Matthews continued. “I don’t see what Hemingway knew and was worried about. I see the opposite. In the many times I have looked at that picture— at that young man’s face…. I see a stoic resolution. It says to me:  I will not show fear. I will not show defeat. I can see that you are taping all this. That my captors are going to use all this. I know it will find its way home to my country, to my friends, to my mom and dad. I am going to be strong and resolute and loyal every second of this. Loyal to what brought me here, to this dangerous land, to these captors, to this dire fate. I’ll be true to what I was brought up to be. And true to what brought me here and I wanted to do—to find and show the truth.”

While most of us have not confronted, and will likely never face, such harrowing situations, there is still much that we can do. The issue of journalists under siege needs a more prominent spot on our research, teaching, and professional collaboration agenda. During the 2018 AEJMC Conference in Washington, D.C., the Commission on the Status of Women and the AEJMC Council of Affiliates sponsored the research panel: “Under Attack: Threats, Challenges, and Gender Bias Facing International Female Journalists.” At pre-conference—the time of this writing—the scheduled speakers were Carolyn M. Byerly of Howard University; Celeste González de Bustamante of the University of Arizona; Kimberly Adams, a senior reporter with Marketplace; Hannah Allam, a national reporter with Buzzfeed; and Suzanne Franks, a journalism professor at the City University London.

The topic had one other prominent place on the AEJMC program, courtesy of the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which scheduled a breakfast for conference participants to learn about and offer feedback on the foundation’s Journalists’ Safety Guide.

Moral courage, though, has no standard guide. Therefore, we can and should emphasize that journalism is not only a craft, but also a calling and a spirit. Journalism is not entirely alone as a field offering more than a mere job. Matthews noted this at the close of his Newseum speech when he held Foley up as a role model. “I want my children to be this stoic, to possess this moral courage. Because years ago, in all those years of Catholic school, of studying the martyrs, I read of such heroic souls as his.”

Two days after Matthews said these words, the Capital Gazette’s Chase Cook, in the face of the horror that took the lives of five of his colleagues, exhibited his own form of journalistic stoicism when he tweeted with moral certainty that an assassin’s bullets wouldn’t stop the presses.

Left to right: Mike Boettcher, war correspondent, OU Gaylord visiting professor, Alexandra Stratton, OU Gaylord 2017 grad and Bloomberg reporter, Gloria Noble, OU student; Melita M. Garza, TCU professor; Hannah Allam, OU Gaylord 1999 grad and Buzzfeed national reporter; John Schmeltzer, OU Gaylord professor; Madeline Roper, senior, OU Gaylord

On March 8, 1913, an above-the-fold, front-page article in the Chicago Defender informed readers that “the Modern Joan [of] Arc,” Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931), had marched in the inaugural Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington despite the protests and the “scorn of her Southern sisters.”[i] Robert S. Abbott’s Chicago Defender celebrated Wells-Barnett as both the greatest “race … leader among the feminine sex” and an individual of the “highest type of womanhood.” “She is always to be found along the firing line in any battle where the rights of the race are at stake,” the Defender’s correspondent concluded. On this day, Wells-Barnett was hailed as a conquering heroine.

That was far from the case more than fifty years earlier, on July 16, 1862, when Ida Bell was born to Elizabeth “Lizzie” and James “Jim” Wells of Holly Springs, Mississippi. Still six months prior to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the arrival of a firstborn child to the Wells family received little communal fanfare and no notice in the press of a region that was ravaged by Civil War.[ii] Born into slavery, Ida struggled to survive that first year as Confederate and Union forces fought over the strategic supply post en route to Vicksburg, Mississippi. But survive she did. She would soon come to thrive.

Known most prominently as a daring anti-lynching crusader, Wells-Barnett worked tirelessly throughout her life as a political advocate for the rights of women, minorities, and members of the working class. Until the 1970s, Wells-Barnett’s story was relegated to the footnotes of American history. Since that time, scholars have begun to place the life of Wells-Barnett within the context of the social, cultural, and political milieu of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Political Pioneer of the Press seeks to extend the discussions that these scholars cultivated over the last five decades. This edited collection weighs in on the full range of communication techniques—from lecture circuits and public relations campaigns to investigative and advocacy journalism—that Wells-Barnett employed to combat racism and sexism and to promote social equity in her transnational social justice crusade. It also explores her legacy in American culture and her potential to serve as a prism through which to educate others on how to address lingering forms of oppression in the twenty-first century.

Editors: Lori Amber Roessner & Jodi Rightler-McDaniels.

Contributors: Jinx Coleman Broussard, Chandra D. Snell Clark, Kris DuRocher, Kathy Roberts Forde, Norma Fay Green, Joe Hayden, Jodi Rightler-McDaniels, Lori Amber Roessner, Patricia A. Schechter, R. J. Vogt.

Lori Amber Roessner is an associate professor at the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism & Electronic Media. In fall 2012, Roessner launched the Ida Initiative, a public history initiative designed to promote the study of the life, work, and legacy of Ida B. Wells-Barnett through experiential learning projects at the undergraduate level and through research initiatives in the academy. The public history initiative contributed to the organization of Ida B. & Beyond, a one-day conference held at the University of Tennessee on March 26, 2015, featuring research on the life, work, and legacy of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and other like-minded social justice crusaders.

[i] “Marches in Parade Despite Protests,” Chicago Defender, March 8, 1913, 1.

[ii] Based upon a Chronicling America search, records of only three area newspapers exist in the summer of 1862—the Memphis Daily Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), the Macon Beacon (Macon, Mississippi), and the American Citizen (Canton, Mississippi). Various newspapers serving Holly Springs and Marshal County since 1838 (i.e., the Marshall County Republican, the Southern Banner and the Holly Springs Gazette) had ceased publication by the outbreak of the Civil War.

A Tribute Resolution Commending Professor Emeritus Frank Fee
for His Selfless Work Establishing Journalism History
as the Journal of the AEJMC History Division

Whereas Journalism History is the oldest peer-reviewed journal in the United States dedicated to the publication of high-quality original historical research on mass communication and media;

Whereas the History Division is one of the founding divisions of AEJMC;

Whereas members of the AEJMC History Division have published their scholarship in Journalism History across the 43 years of the journal’s existence;

Whereas Journalism History has been independently published by three universities and multiple professor-editors across its existence;

Whereas changes in the finances and work structures of higher education and academic publishing made the existing publication model for Journalism History unsustainable;

Whereas the Scripps School at Ohio University, the current publisher, and Professor Mike Sweeney, the current editor, of Journalism History have been excellent stewards of the journal and proposed in 2016 that the AEJMC History Division study whether to assume the journal;

Whereas Professor Frank Fee, a longtime and highly respected member of the AEJMC History Division and distinguished scholar of press history, served as the head of an ad hoc task force assigned to study the viability of and procedures for moving the journal to the ownership of the AEJMC History Division;

Whereas Professor Frank Fee has worked tirelessly, selflessly, and effectively during his retirement for three years to shepherd the process of the AEJMC History Division’s adoption of Journalism History as its journal;

Whereas the AEJMC History Division membership voted affirmatively to adopt Journalism History as the division’s journal in 2016;

Whereas Professor Frank Fee worked collaboratively with the AEJMC History Division leadership team and an ad hoc editor search team to solicit a call for a new journal editor and to select Greg Borchard as the journal’s incoming editor in 2018;

Whereas Journalism History will begin its existence as the journal of the AEJMC History Division beginning in Fall 2018, now, therefore, be it

Resolved, that the AEJMC History Division, on behalf of its members:

Acknowledges and celebrates the tireless, generous, effective leadership and commitment to service and the welfare of Division members demonstrated by Professor Frank Fee in his three year effort to shepherd Journalism History into its new status as the journal of the AEJMC History Division.

Mover: Kathy Roberts Forde, Former Chair of the History Division and Member of the Journalism History Ad Hoc Task Force

Seconder: Doug Cumming, Current Chair of the History Division

Approved unanimously: AEJMC History Division Business Meeting, Annual Conference, Washington D.C., Tuesday, August 7, 2018

Jon Bekken (Albright College) was promoted to full professor of communications. His entry on “Unions of Newsworkers” is forthcoming in the International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies. His article on “Incorporating Class into the Journalism and Mass Communication Curriculum” appears in the new issue of Teaching Journalism & Mass Communication 8(1), and his “Toward a Democratic Journalism” will appear in the next The American Historian as part of a special section on journalism and democracy.

Melita M. Garza (Texas Christian University) was featured on CSPAN Book TV, in June discussing her new book They Came to Toil Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression.

Jennifer Moore (University of Minnesota-Duluth) was selected to participate in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholars program, Visual Culture of the American Civil War and Its Aftermath, a two-week summer institute (July 9-20, 2018) in New York City. The instituted focused “on the era’s array of visual media—including the fine arts, ephemera, photography, cartoons, maps, and monuments—to examine how information and opinion about the war and its impact were recorded and disseminated, and the ways visual media expressed and shaped Americans’ views on both sides of and before and after the conflict,” according to the NEH website. Participants engaged in lectures by noted historians, art historians, and archivists and attended hands-on sessions in major museums and archives.

Randall S. Sumpter’s (Texas A&M) Before Journalism Schools: How Gilded Age Reporters Learned the Rules recently was published by the University of Missouri Press. Sumpter’s volume 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.

Carol Terracina-Hartman (Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania) recently was honored with AEJMC’s magazine division’s top paper award for “Love Your Mother: How One Magazine Defined and Refined Environmental Journalism.” She also presented “News and Numbers: Big Data Reporting on a College Campus,” at the College Media Association’s National Conference in Dallas, Texas, where she was a top-three finalist for the College Media Association’s Award of Distinction. Terracina-Hartman also co-authored “Policy, economic themes dominate ethanol headlines” published in Newspaper Research Journal 38(1): 119-133.

With the AEJMC national conference in Washington, D.C. coming up next month, the History Division has created a guide to help separate the division’s activities from the larger conference program.

Designed by Vice-Chair/Research Chair Erika Pribanic-Smith, the History Division Program Guide provides a schedule of all paper presentations, including the titles and authors of all papers to be presented (on pages 1-3). It also includes a listing of all panels that the division is sponsoring (on page 4).

Furthermore, the guide features previews of the History Division Business Meeting (on page 3) and all of the special events that the division has planned (on page 4). Follow the orange hyperlinks in the document for more information, such as directions from the hotel to off-site activities.

We hope our members will find this guide helpful as they plan their time in Washington, D.C. We also encourage you to save the PDF to your phone or print it out to consult on site. Click here for the conference guide

(Photo: Nicolas Raymond | CC by SA 3.0)

Kristin L. Gustafson
Teaching Standards Chair
University of Washington Bothell
gustaf13@uw.edu

When I heard the news of five U.S. journalists killed on the job at their Capital Gazette newspaper, I thought of students who work for our campus news outlets and graduates who work in news organizations around the world.

I thought of the instinct of a journalist, such as Phil Davis, to tweet the news from under his desk while an active shooter moved through his newsroom. I thought, as Poynter Institute’s article that day reminded me, of how the shooting served “as a devastating reminder that journalism is difficult and dangerous work, performed in service to a greater good.”

In the days that followed, I thought of the physical threats and violence against journalists and their organizations, told through documentaries such as “No se mata la verdad” / “You cannot kill the truth” and through data such as those published by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

I thought of the legal and economic pressures making news reporting difficult in 2018. I thought of verbal threats happening as recently as June: people heckling journalists at rallies; a president describing journalists as the enemy of the people; a public call—made a day before the Capital Gazette shooting—for vigilantes to gun down journalists on sight. And I also thought of Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Wells-Barnett’s story of resisting attacks inspired me during my Master of Arts education more than a decade ago when I looked at whether and how journalists spoke about lynching. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931)—a journalist, newspaper editor and owner, suffragist, sociologist, early leader in Civil Rights Movement, and one of NAACP’s founding members—was born to slaves in Mississippi, became college educated, and investigated and documented lynching.

She challenged dominant narratives of lynching and used direct prose to show how lynching was used to control and punish black people who competed with whites. (See Aptheker, Broussard, Giddings, Madison, NAACP, Ratzlaff, Roessner, Streitmatter, and Wells-Barnett herself for more.)

When a lynch mob killed three black men in Memphis in 1889, during the Reconstruction Era, Wells (later Wells-Barnett) encouraged readers to leave the city. About 6,000 residents left; other people boycotted. After she published an editorial in 1892 challenging the rape myth that had been repeatedly used to justify lynching, a white mob destroyed her press.

I tell this snippet of Wells-Barnett’s longer biography to my undergraduate students at the mid-way point of their quarter-long, basic-skills Introduction to Journalism class. For many of them, this is their first and only exposure to journalism within a program that takes a broad view of media and communication studies.

My questions for them following the first half of the Wells-Barnett story are these: Where did she publish after her presses were destroyed? Where and how did she speak? Answers to those two questions then inform new questions about journalism now: Who do we consider to be journalists today? What is their significance today? Where do they and can they publish? What is the context of our time period? Why is journalism relevant today?

As media historians, we know that threats against the press are not new. We know the merit of critiquing the press and challenging problematic reporting. However, examples such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett provide students and us context of the physical, economic, legal, political, and other kinds of threats made against journalists doing what can be “difficult and dangerous” work.

Historical understanding oftentimes cannot provide answers, or even hope, for these contemporary moments. But historical understanding can frame these moments and the role the press plays within a longer and broader arc.

Wells-Barnett left Memphis the year that the white mobs destroyed her newspaper operation. She never returned. Wells-Barnett continued her crusade in the U.S. Anti-Lynching Movement, and she kept working as a journalist. Living in Chicago, she published in two Black newspapers, The New York Age and the Chicago Conservator. She did two anti-lynching speaking tours to Europe in 1893 and 1894. Those tours garnered attention within U.S. mainstream newspapers. Soon the British Anti-Lynching Committee formed.

As journalism educators and media historians, we have excellent classroom practices and curriculum designs. Let’s share them with one another. As teaching standards chair, I invite you to write to me at gustaf13@uw.edu and tell me about your best practices that encourage pedagogues of diversity, collaboration, community, and justice.

Doug Cumming
Division Chair
Washington & Lee University

The recent transition of Clio Among the Media from a quarterly PDF to the monthly weblog you’re reading now is an experiment we will discuss at the division business meeting in Washington D.C. (Please plan to attend; Tuesday, Aug. 7, 6:45-8:15 p.m.)

You now have three examples of the new approach for May, June and this month, instead of a summer quarterly. For comparison, we have the quarterly Clio going back to 2002, edited each year by the “Secretary” who became Research Chair the following year, then Division Chair the next.

(In a related matter, I am hoping the Division will change the assignment of newsletter editorship, giving the job to the two Membership chairs for as long as they remain in that position. That’s a related discussion for our meeting, among proposed changes to the Constitution and Bylaws to be voted on at the meeting. These are changes that I, Vice Chair Erika Pribanic-Smith and Secretary Teri Finneman have agreed on and sent out to the membership.)

Both versions of Clio are linked on the archive page housed on the AEJMC-hosted History Division website. Items that are collected in the monthly issues appear, as soon as they are available, on the right side of the website under “Latest News” as items posted by Teri, the Clio editor this year. The newsletter is then published mid-month with a column by one of these chairs: Division chair, Teaching chair, Graduate chair or Professional Freedom & Responsibility chair.

In contrast, the quarterly PDF has customarily run all four columns.

I have been thinking through the implications of this experiment thanks to a lively email conversation with Teri, who took the initiative to try the new approach, and Erika, the incoming Division chair. Erika was way ahead of me in understanding the meaning of this change, having championed a similar transition of AJHA’s Intelligencer newsletter two years ago from a quarterly PDF to a blog.

I have come to recognize that comparing the two versions is the wrong way to frame the discussion.

There are advantages and disadvantages of both. I see now that with today’s interactive media technology, we have countless ways of blending or discarding elements of a newsletter and other forms of communication among members. As a former writer of two years of the “Teaching” column and an editor of Clio for a year, I don’t want to lose certain elements of the PDF quarterly. But I also appreciate Teri’s argument for change:

• Teri, like me and several others given the one-year editorship, had no knowledge of the Adobe InDesign desktop publishing program for the quarterly, so had the time-consuming job of finding an available designer to work with.
• A web-friendly copy-and-paste system is much simpler for future editors.
• “I think it would modernize the division more since other organizations also do e-newsletters.”
• It’s much easier to share digital content on social media, on our Facebook page or linked to a vita.
• More people will probably read that content if it’s broken into pieces in an e-newsletter.

I agree with these points. But I also come at this as a former magazine editor who came to appreciate the quarterly Clio as a good magazine-like product, treating the muse of history as a literal muse. Going back into the archive, I am impressed with how so many of the 1000-word columns and essays hold up over time.

I find the archive a pleasure to browse, though I admit it’s hard to search. I’m glad to see that old Teaching columns are now available in the “Teaching” pulldown menu of the home page.

I also liked having a familiar design that I could navigate, whether I read the PDF on the screen or printed it out. The format was a bit of a strait jacket for any incoming editor, but that was also an advantage, it seemed to me, for continuity.

A web-friendly newsletter, with items that can be posted quickly, is great for flexibility. That flexibility can mean that future editors can put their own stamp on the thing and make it what they want. So there’s no reason that the incoming editors – Amber Roessner, the Membership co-chair, and the nominated co-chair Julien Gorbach, of University of Hawai’i at Manoa – can’t encourage or assign columns like they were – first-person reflections on changes in our discipline running 1000 words or more.

In theory, at least, the content is the same, as Erika says. I say the medium is the message (not to be original).

Amber says she could probably go any way as the Division wishes – PDF or blog, short or long – but not do both quarterly and monthly. I agree. Maybe we could have a PDF with fewer pages, or cut it back to twice a year, or once a year – an annual. These are all suggestions of former Clio editors I’ve been in touch with.

We need to have a system that is enjoyable for the Clio editor(s) and useful for the Division. We want to grow the Division, welcome and inspire younger scholars and stay in touch with one another.

Gil Klein’s book, “Trouble in Lafayette Square: Assassination, Protest and Murder at the White House” follows the course of American history through true stories of incidents that happened in the park and surrounding homes across the street from the White House.

From assassination attempts on President Truman and Secretary of State William Seward, to a congressman killing the son of Francis Scott Key in broad daylight — and getting away with it — to the women’s suffrage movement that invented the White House protest, to the scandal that nearly brought down the Jackson administration, to enslaved people struggling for their freedom to a president who arranged a drug bust, Lafayette Square has been the backdrop of events small and large that have shaped the country.

All of this with a humorous forward by Washington Post Metro columnist John Kelly.

Copies available on Amazon.

Klein is launching the Washington program for the University of Oklahoma’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is chairman of the National Press Club’s History and Heritage Committee.