By Denitsa Yotova, Ph.D. student at the
University of Maryland
Dr. Tom Mascaro recently retired from his position as professor in the School of Media & Communication at Bowling Green State University. Mascaro is a documentary historian who is currently working on a sequel to his highly acclaimed book, Into the Fray: How NBC’s Washington Documentary Unit Reinvented the News (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012). Into the Fray won the 2013 AEJMC James W. Tankard Award for Best Book on Journalism and received an honorable mention from AJHA. Into the Fray covered 1961 to 1967; Mascaro’s new manuscript will span 1967 to 1989.
Dr. Tom Mascaro has a Ph.D. from Wayne State University and a M.A. from the University of Michigan.Continue reading →
By Rachel Grant, University of Florida, Membership Co-Chair, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu
Pam Parry (Southeast Missouri State University) was promoted to professor in Fall 2019.
Phillip J.Hutchison (University of Kentucky) published an article titled “Gay Talese and Floyd Patterson: Constructing a Liminal Hero for an Ambivalent Age” in Journal of Sports Media Spring-Fall 2019.
Linda
Steiner (University of
Maryland-College Park), Carolyn Kitch (Temple University), and Brooke
Kroger (New York University) edited book titled Front Pages, Front
Lines: Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage will be published in March
2020.
This collection offers
new research on media issues related to the women’s suffrage movement.
Contributors incorporate innovative approaches to social movement, media
theory, and historiography while discussing the vexed relationship between the
media and debates over suffrage. Aiming to correct past oversights, the editors
curate essays on overlooked topics like the participation of African American
and Mormon-oriented media, coverage of black women in the movement, suffrage-related
historiography, suffragist rhetorical strategies, elites within the movement,
suffrage as part of broader campaigns for social transformation, and how views
of white masculinity influenced press coverage.
Contributors: Maurine H. Beasley, Sherilyn Cox Bennion, Jinx C. Broussard, Teri Finneman, Kathy Roberts Forde, Linda M. Grasso, Carolyn Kitch, Brooke Kroeger, Linda J. Lumsden, Jane Marcellus, Jane Rhodes, Linda Steiner, and Robin Sundaramoorthy.
Patrick File (University of Nevada-Reno) received a
$1,000 grant from Kappa Tau Alpha to study how photographers resolved legal
concerns a century ago. The KTA grant will
support File’s travel to review archives in New York City and at the University
of Utah.
Kappa Tau Alpha, the national college honor society for journalism and mass communication, conducts the grant program to provide research assistance to chapter advisers and to recognize their efforts to promote excellence in scholarship. The society has chapters at 97 universities. File has served as adviser of the University of Nevada chapter for two years.
Berkley Hudson
(University of Missouri) is launching a Go-Fund-Me style $250,000 campaign to supplement
his efforts for a nationally traveling photography exhibition and symposia
based on historical Mississippi photographs from the Jim Crow era. The National
Endowment for Humanities already has contributed two grants to the project,
most recently in April for $150,000.
Hudson is reaching out to potential supporters of all kinds:
those who can give perhaps $10, $25, $50 or $100 as well as those who can give
much more. Here’s a link to the Missouri School of Journalismwebsite that
allows donations of any amount, whether via the internet or via snail mail: GiveDirectMizzou
link.
The project will incorporate vintage film and newsreels, oral history audio, an interactive mobile app, and a curriculum guide for secondary students and their teachers. In addition, an illuminated exhibition entry tunnel will be made of scores of facsimile large format, glass plate negatives of photographer O.N.Pruitt (1891-1967). Pruitt worked mainly in northeast Mississippi from 1915-1960.
Kevin Curran’s (Arizona State University) study of the 2006 iHeartMedia leveraged buyout has been accepted for presentation at the biannual World Media Economics and Management Conference to be held in Rome in May 2020.
Poynter recently covered the newspaper launched by Teri Finneman (University of Kansas) and her reporting students. The town lost its newspaper during the Recession. Finneman’s KU students partnered with her alma mater, the University of Missouri, to tackle this news desert.
Dante Mozie (South Carolina State University) presented his paper “‘This, Too, Is Segregation: A Framing Analysis of the 1960 Sit-Ins in Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, N.C., Through the Eyes of Student Journalists” Oct. 3 at the 38th American Journalism Historians Association National Convention in Dallas, Texas.
Students at Temple University tune in to the 1619 Project for Students and Educators session hosted by the New York Times. Photo submitted by Karen Turner.
From left to right: Maddie Liseblad, Rachel Grant and Perry Parks.
As your 2019-2020 committee, we’d like to share our primary goals for this year. First and foremost, our overall goal is to grow our membership. We will continue our outreach work as opportunities arise. For example, when nonmembers present media history research at conferences, we reach out and invite them to join our division.
By Perry Parks, Michigan State University, Membership Co-Chair, parksp@msu.edu
Lillie Fears
Where you work: School of Media & Journalism, Arkansas State University
Where you got your
Ph.D.: University of Missouri School of Journalism
Current favorite class: Mass Communications in Modern Society
Current research
project: I am working on a project
that examines coverage of the historic Memphis-based Universal Life Insurance
Company in African American print media.
Fun fact about yourself: I have always enjoyed organizing information and edited three self-help books about health in the 7th grade.
By Kruthika Kamath, Ph.D. student at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison
A former deejay, music director, and radio consultant, Dr. Donna Halper switched tracks after three decades in broadcasting to become a professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a strong supporter of the Media Ecology school of thought and guides her students with her extensive knowledge of popular culture, media history, and media effects. Her research interests include how women and minorities are represented in media, early baseball history, and unsung heroes and heroines in the history of broadcasting. Moreover, not only is she the author of six books and numerous articles, Halper is also a blogger and a freelance writer.
Dr. Donna Halper is a professor at Lesley University.
This helped guide a conversation about her more recent work, specifically her current inspirations, how she ties her research interests to the evolving field of mass media, and advice for new scholars.
By Rachel Grant, University of Florida, Membership Co-Chair, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu
Dr. Ron Rodgers, an associate professor and graduate coordinator in the department of journalism at the University of Florida, recently wrote a book titled “The Struggle for the Soul of Journalism: The Pulpit versus the Press, 1833-1923.”
Q: Describe the focus of your book.
A: Broadly speaking, my book explores the implications of religion’s powerful critique of the
press during the rise of the modern, mass-appeal media beginning with the penny
press in the 1830s. It looks at the effect of the critique on the shaping of
the norms of journalistic conduct and content leading to the notion of the
social responsibility of the press – most notably formalized in the ASNE’s
Canons of Journalism in 1923. This critique had many forms. And it came from the
pulpit in alliance with politicians, social scientists, educators, members of
the Progressive movement, and journalists themselves.
The one major impulse for this critique was
religion’s growing acquiescence to a new reality – that in an increasingly
complex modern society – and especially with the tsunami of demographic changes
of the era – it no longer held power over public opinion as it once did. That
now belonged to the newspaper with its growing influence on society. And if
that was the case, religious critics believed the increasingly commercialized
newspaper needed to take over that responsibility. It sought to do so to
protect what it defined as the true mission of journalism from the modern
world’s toxic influence of secular market and ideological constraints on
journalistic conduct and journalistic content – the news.
And at the core of this effort was the pulpit’s challenging the notion of journalistic objectivity grounded in commercialism. Instead, it sought to redefine news as interpretive and advocatory in order to comport with a journalistic ideal grounded in the gospel.
The History Division of the Association for
Education in Journalism and Mass Communication invites applications for editor
of Journalism History.
Adopted as the official journal of the History
Division in 2018, Journalism History is well respected as the
oldest peer-reviewed journal of mass media history in the United States.
Continuously published since 1974, this scholarly journal is a
quarterly publication that features excellent scholarship on media history.
The division seeks an editor to start in August 2020 as an apprentice to the current editor until the new editor’s three-and-a-half-year term commences in August 2021. The term is renewable.
Dr. Jinx Broussard is a professor at Louisiana State University.
The AEJMC History Division is pleased to announce the creation of the Jinx Coleman Broussard Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Media History.
The History Division officers unanimously voted to name the award after Broussard with the support of the full leadership team.
“I am unbelievably honored to have my name associated with this award,” Broussard said. “I hope to continue inspiring students, teachers and scholars of media history to uncover the past and make sense of the role media have played and the impact they continue to make in our world.”
By Will Mari, Louisiana State University, Vice Chair/Program Chair, wmari1@lsu.edu
Teri and I are excited to announce the results of the panel competition for AEJMC 2020. We received a number of very worthy and interesting panel pitches (nearly 20!), but had to pick just six to bring forward to our sibling divisions for negotiation as cosponsors, with AEJMC’s chipping system. After a lot of back and forth, we’re proud to continue partnerships and add new and important ones, for the division:
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass
Communication History Division is soliciting entries for its annual award for
the best journalism and mass communication history book. The winning author
will receive a plaque and a $500 prize at the August 2020 AEJMC conference in San
Francisco, California. Attendance at the conference is encouraged
as the author will be invited to be a guest for a live taping of the Journalism
History podcast during the History Division awards event. The
competition is open to any author of a media history book regardless of
whether they belong to AEJMC or the History Division. Only first editions with
a 2019 copyright date will be accepted. Edited volumes, articles, and monograph-length
works published in academic journals will be excluded because they qualify for
the History Division’s Covert Award. Entries must be received by February 1, 2020. Submit four hard copies
of each book or an electronic copy (must be an e-Book or pdf manuscript in
page-proof format) along with the author’s mailing address, telephone number,
and email address to:
Lisa Burns, AEJMC History Book Award Chair Quinnipiac University 275 Mount Carmel Ave., CE-MCM Hamden, CT, 06518 Lisa.Burns@quinnipiac.edu
