By Perry Parks, Membership Co-Chair, Michigan State University, parksp@msu.edu
Matt Cecil
Where you work:Minnesota State University,
Mankato is a 15,000-student regional comprehensive university about an hour
southwest of the Twin Cities.
Where you got your Ph.D.:I received my Ph.D. from the School
of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa in 2000.
#GoHawks!
Current favorite class: I currently serve as Interim Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs here, so unfortunately, I’m no longer in the classroom. I have been an administrator for the past 11 years, serving in positions ranging from department head to dean to provost. My favorite class was the large lecture survey course I taught every semester from 2000 to 2015, Introduction to Mass Communication.
By Erika Pribanic-Smith, Past Chair, University of Texas-Arlington, epsmith@uta.edu
The AEJMC History Division is starting the second year of its Mentorship Program, intended to provide practical advice to our members by connecting them with more experienced members of the division.
By Rachel Grant, Membership
Co-Chair, University of Florida, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu
Dr. Kevin Lerner, an assistant professor of Communication/Journalism at Marist College, wrote a book titled Provoking the Press: (MORE) Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism.
Q: Describe the focus
of your book.
A: Provoking the Press: (MORE) Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism examines the last real challenge to the ideal of objectivity among the mainstream American press in the 1970s. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, Women’s Liberation, the student free speech movement, and youth culture in general began to erode confidence in the institutions of American life, and the press was among these. Amid this turmoil, a young Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist named Tony Lukas began to question whether or not the institutional pose of objectivity could adequately cover everything that was going on. He founded the journalism review (MORE) with his friend Dick Pollak and William Woodward, who brought the money to support this new magazine. (MORE) covered American journalism from 1971 to 1978, pushing back on many of the assumptions of the hidebound institutional press. (MORE) pushed these institutions to adapt to new cultural and political atmospheres, and at the same time chronicled the rise of the corporate press that would dominate the 1980s. Provoking the Press tells the story of this group of journalists, their often funny, often angry journalism review, and the “Counter-Conventions” they held a half dozen times in the seventies, which drew names such as David Halberstam, Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron, Katharine Graham, Mike Wallace, and Carl Bernstein. It is a book about the power (and limits) of press criticism to change the practices of journalism, and also one about alternatives to the dominant model of journalism in the U.S.
Founded in 1981, the American Journalism Historians Association
seeks to advance education and research in mass communication history. Through
its annual convention, regional conferences, committees, awards, speakers, and publications,
members work to raise historical standards and ensure that all scholars and
students recognize the vast importance of media history and apply this
knowledge to the advancement of society. https://ajha.wildapricot.org/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJHAsocial Journal: http://www.american-journalism.org/
The problem: Journalism schools increasingly do not believe that journalism history classes are relevant or necessary. Students accustomed to social media and cellphones tend to think that history is boring or not applicable to their lives.
By Ashley Walter, Ph.D. student
at the Pennsylvania State University
Ohio University professor, Marilyn Greenwald, began her journalism career in the late 1970s working as an entertainment editor and copy editor in Painesville, Ohio. She went on to report business and news for the Columbus Dispatch before starting an academic career. Her research examines media history, arts criticism, biographical writing, non-fiction book publishing, and women in journalism. She has written several books and academic articles, including A Woman of the Times: Journalism, Feminism, and the Career of Charlotte Curtis.
Dr. Marilyn Greenwald’s dissertation centered on Charlotte Curtin, one of the first women top editors at the New York Times. Greenwald turned her dissertation into a biography; it got a review in the New York Times and was named a Notable Book of the Times in 1999.Continue reading →
By Nathaniel Frederick II, PF&R Chair, frederickn@winthrop.edu
Creating a
news literacy event in your community or on your campus is an ideal opportunity
to promote and justify why journalism history matters.
The PF&R committee for 2019-2020 will emphasize diversity and inclusion, as well as offer assistance to members interested in creating public service events that help celebrate journalism history.
By Rachel Grant,
University of Florida, Membership Co-Chair, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu
Dr. Michael Fuhlhage, an assistant professor at Wayne State University, recently wrote a book titled Yankee Reporters and Southern Secrets: Journalism, Open Source Intelligence, and the Coming of the Civil War.
Q: Describe the focus of your book.
A:Yankee Reporters and Southern Secrets reveals the evidence of secessionist conspiracy that appeared in American newspapers from the end of the 1860 presidential campaign to just before the first major battle of the American Civil War. This book tells the story of the Yankee reporters who risked their lives by going undercover in hostile places that became the Confederate States of America. It shows that by observing the secession movement and sending reports for publication in Northern newspapers, they armed the Union with intelligence about the enemy that civil and military leaders used to inform their decisions in order to contain damage and answer the movement to break the Union apart and establish a separate slavery-based nation in the South.
By Rachel Grant, University of Florida, Membership Co-Chair, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu
Jon Bekken’s (Albright College) co-authored
chapter, “Spanish Firemen and Maritime Syndicalism, 1902-1940,” appears in
Christopher J. Castaneda and Montse Feu, editors, Writing Revolution:
Hispanic Anarchism in the United States. University of Illinois Press,
2019. The chapter explores the weekly newspaper Culture Obrera and its
role in sustaining a union of marine firemen and their immigrant community. He
presented a paper, “Participatory Journalism & Democratic
Communication in the Working-Class Press,” to the Labor and Working Class History
Association’s annual conference in May 2019, and reviewed Mediating
America: Black and Irish Press and the Struggle for Citizenship in the most
recent Journalism History 45:4. His entry on “Unions of
Newsworkers” appears in the International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies, edited byTim Vos and Folker Hanusch (Wiley
Blackwell Publishing, 2019). And a commentary, “Restoring Labor to the
Public Sphere,” is scheduled to appear in the next Journalism &
Communication Monographs.
Jinx Broussard (Louisiana State University) and Sheryl Kennedy Haydel (Louisiana State University) along with Shaniece Bickham (Nicholls State University) will present their research “Framing an Acceptable Image: The Political Campaigns of Four of America’s First Black Mayors” at the 2020 Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference. The study examines the mayoral campaigns of the first black mayors in four major U.S. cities to determine how their images were cultivated on the campaign trail and the extent to which the race of their selected press secretaries influenced their ability to be more palatable to white citizenry. The conference will take place on March 14 at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
Teri Finneman (University of Kansas) is attending Podcast Movement in February in Los Angeles to learn more tricks for marketing the Journalism History podcast. The conference is a major event for the podcasting industry and will include sessions on livestreaming, monetizing podcasts, podcast listeners and transcription.
On Feb. 29, Will Mari (Louisiana State University) will be giving a talk on his book, “A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies: 1960-1990” (Routledge, 2019) which covers the computerization of the American newsroom during the latter Cold War. The talk will take place at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, Washington.
David T. Z. Mindich (Temple University) published his third book, “The Mediated World: A New Approach to Mass Communication and Culture” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). The Mediated World departs from other mass communication textbooks by emphasizing history (including pre-printing press) narrative, diversity issues, and media literacy.
Founder and director Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez’s (University of Texas) Voces Oral History Project is now officially a Center at the University of Texas at Austin. This signals permanence – so that the oral histories will live on (vocesoralhistoryproject.org). Voces celebrated its 20th anniversary in November 2019. It has video recorded over 1,250 interviews and has over 10,000 digitized photographs and other documentation. Its physical archives are held at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the UT-Austin Campus. Collections include the Latina/o WWII, Korean and Vietnam eras; Political and Civic Engagement; Professions. The Voces Oral History Summer Institute will be held June 8-12, 2020, on the University of Texas campus.This workshop is for faculty and graduate students wishing to use oral history in research and teaching. Instructors have created oral history projects, published widely using oral history, and are leaders in oral history publishing and teaching. Applications accepted through March 9, 2020. Visit vocessummerinstitute.org for more information.
Kimberly Wilmot Voss (University of Central Florida) will be participating in Beacon College Salon Series on Jan. 22. Her talk is titled “Politicking Politely: Well-behaved Women Making a Difference in the 1960s and 1970s.”
