Author Archives: rlgrant

In A League of Their Own: AEJMC History Division Mini-Profiles – Shelia Webb

Where you work:  Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington, Department of Journalism.

Where you got your Ph.D.: University of Wisconsin.

Current favorite class: I enjoy all of my classes, which include History of U.S. Journalism, Mass Media Ethics, Senior Seminar, Intro to Visual Journalism, and Publications: from Concept to Design.

This summer, I am teaching 2 classes—the history class, in which students do a blog based on their dream team, and the publications class, in which students create a niche magazine—so they are my favorites at the moment!

Current research project: Cultural importance of the Reiman publications, especially Taste of Home and Country Woman, and what they tell us about the enduring resonance of pastoral values in our partisan climate.

Fun fact about yourself: Friends, also from Wisconsin, Suzanne and Hawkins Pingree, moved to San Juan Island and started a distillery, so I got my taster’s license and help them out on occasional weekends. Covid-19 has presented challenges to that activity, for sure. Especially enjoyable—watching the Orcas make their way through Haro Strait and the sunset over Victoria.

Book Q & A: Promoting Monopoly: AT&T and the Politics of Public Relations, 1876-1941

By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair

Karen Miller Russell

Name: Karen Miller Russell

University Affiliation and Position: University of Georgia, Jim Kennedy Professor of New Media and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor

Book Title: Promoting Monopoly: AT&T and the Politics of Public Relations, 1876-1941

1. Describe the focus of your book. 

AT&T had one of the best known and respected U.S. publicity departments by the mid-20th century, despised by critics but praised and emulated by other corporations. Publicity was integral to the growth of the telephone industry, and AT&T was central to the development of corporate public relations. I wanted to understand why PR was so important to AT&T and how exactly it used PR strategies and tactics to promote its views. I learned that the company’s desire to promote and protect the telephone monopoly propelled the creation of a PR program that in turn shaped the U.S. legal, political, media, and cultural landscape.

2. How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?

Everyone who knows anything about U.S. public relations history knows about Arthur Page, but most scholars have vastly underestimated AT&T’s commitment to public relations before the company hired him in 1927. I started off writing a biography of Page, but gradually realized that publicity started as soon as the telephone was invented, and that a formal system was in place before 1910. I decided that I needed to schedule a second trip to the archives to explore the earlier years and found a lot more than I expected.

3. What archives or research materials did you use?

I conducted research using the Page collections at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Page Society in New York, and most importantly at the AT&T corporate archive in New Jersey, which was not available to many of the previous scholars studying Page. That’s where I found evidence of a previously forgotten corporate publicist, William A. Hovey, whose work included visits to antagonistic newspaper editors in 1886 and publicity for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. I also used databases including Newspapers.com to explore the company’s earliest attempts to influence press coverage. That allowed me to explore AT&T’s influence on local papers.

4. How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

In 1903 AT&T hired the Publicity Bureau to promote both its service and its political perspectives. The AT&T archive included a list of newspapers that printed stories provided by the company, and I used newspaper databases to track them down. AT&T’s representatives used every strategy they could think of, from paying for advertising in hopes of influencing editorial coverage (it worked) to golfing with an editor in hopes that a personal relationship would result in AT&T’s perspective at least being included in the newspaper (it did). It’s a pretty good precursor to discussions about sponsored content and native advertising.

5. What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects

My advice for other historians is twofold: (1) don’t believe received wisdom, and (2) read everything. Received wisdom suggested that James Ellsworth, who started at the Publicity Bureau and moved to AT&T in 1908, was a bit of a huckster, successful though not terribly ethical, and that his importance was simply that he preceded Arthur Page at AT&T. The more research I did, the more my opinion of him changed, and I ended up writing three chapters on Ellsworth and only two on Page. Ellsworth deserves the credit for creating and institutionalizing the publicity function at AT&T and its regional operating companies (the “baby Bells”). He innovated advertising and then film as corporate publicity tools, and he was responsible for the development of the company’s employee benefits program. Page certainly was an important pioneer in corporate PR, but his legacy has unfairly and inaccurately overshadowed Ellsworth’s contributions.

As for reading everything, I discovered William Hovey because a telephone engineer mentioned him on a single page in his memoir about Bell Telephone’s earliest years. I asked the archivist at AT&T’s history center if they had anything on this man – not very optimistically, because the earliest years of the company are not always well documented – and he replied that they had two folders that included his name. When I started reading about Hovey and realized what he had done at AT&T, I gasped so loudly that the archivists asked me what was wrong. Believe me, nothing was wrong! It’s not every day that you find the earliest known U.S. corporate publicist.

September Chair Column: ‘Clio:’ surviving this fall right now with teaching: how to use digital archiving projects in class

By Will Mari

Hi again, folks,

I don’t know about you, but so far, a month into this semester, it feels like it’s been three (or four) months. And so knowing that things are hard out there for a lot of us, I wanted to offer some practical, “off-the-shelf” teaching ideas that you can use in your media-history classes.

If you don’t teach media history right now, these could work in other journalism or mass-comm courses that either feature a history component or even just a section on the use of the college/university library or digital archives. They can be part of a lecture day, an activity-oriented day, either synchronous, asynchronous, or as a standalone out-of-class activity.

I’ll focus on a short list of volunteer public-history projects that are interactive, engaging and rewarding for undergraduate and graduate students alike and that use transcription as their main vehicle. I’ve used these to invite conversation about the role of media history in the ongoing, complex, American story. You might find them helpful, too.

1) Freedom on the Move

A project led by Cornell, it guides volunteers through scanned but-as-yet transcribed ads for enslaved people from before the Civil War, and has them either do the actual transcription or check the work of others. I was a bit hesitant to ask students to do this, but many felt that it was a way to give back and give voice to previously unheard people. I’ll talk a bit more about how I structured this assignment below.

2) Digital Volunteer at the Smithsonian

3) Citizen Archivist with the National Archives

4) By the People with the Library of Congress

5) Papers of the War Department

6) Digital Newberry

7) Various other projects: including this portal, and this list by the American Historical Association.

The Smithsonian, National Archives and Library of Congress’ projects tend to be trickier in that they sometimes require the ability to read cursive, which might be challenging for some students. That same challenge is present with the War Department and Digital Newberry projects, but some later-in-the-20th-century efforts are more straightforward, and just involve tagging images versus transcribing writing. One immensely popular project with the New York Public Library transcribes menus (“What’s on the Menu?”), but it often has more volunteers than it has un-transcribed material!

One alternative is to have students look at finished projects and their curated artifacts, online, and talk about the long journeys these physical things have taken to survive to the present, or what they meant, perhaps, for the people who once used them.

But the initiative I’ve had the most success with this semester is Freedom on the Move, which offers helpful tutorials, videos and other “explainer” material, and is perhaps the most user friendly. I had students take a screenshot of a finished contribution and respond to just two prompts: first, why did they pick their project, and second, what did they learn while working on it? Most of my students choose Freedom on the Move and reported feeling convicted and surprised. They hadn’t realized that slavery was such an embedded part of American society—“even” in the northern part of the country—for so long. At least a few said that doing the transcription drove home that lesson more than reading our textbook.

I would add that it’s good to let students pick, to a certain degree, what project they want to help out on, and to make sure that they have enough time to complete them (I gave my students an extra day). But I highly recommend this as a way to enhance an existing class, and to give yourself some mental space, if you need the support.

A final idea: some university and public libraries are documenting the pandemic and are encouraging students to contribute (this is happening at Louisiana State, where I work). But that might require another conversation to unpack more fully.

If you do have your students use an interactive, volunteer project for an activity, I would invite you to have them tweet about it to our fall media-history awareness campaign, #mediahistorymatters.

Please reach out to me with suggestions or ideas, to wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter. We’ll have more updates later in the fall on our panel line-up for next year’s conference, as well as other initiatives and efforts.

Until then, take care,

Will


Chair column: A thank you, hello, and review of goals for the year ahead

Will Mari

Hi folks—I wanted to first thank everyone for their keen involvement and support of our online conference, particularly our officers and volunteer reviewers, moderators and discussants, as well as our members who showed up to so many sessions and made our presenters feel welcomed and supported.

We also had members who could not make the conference this year due to funding concerns, but who still cheered us on from Facebook and Twitter—thank you, too.

We had high attendance and participation (with 20, 30 or even 40 people engaged in our audiences) on Zoom for our sessions, and we were the only division to actually grow our numbers—up to about 290 people—despite the pandemic. While we might have some fluctuation next year, this is a solid place to be starting from, especially considering the good position we are in financially, as well.

I am honored to be your new chair, but I would be remiss if I did not thank our past chairs, especially Dr. Teri Finneman, for their leadership and example. I have very large boots to fill, but I will do my best.

In terms of what I’d like to do as your chair, I will work to:

1) Support our members during a challenging year

2) Build on/reinforce existing initiatives and programs

3) Increase our outreach/connection(s) to the international media-history community

4) Increase our outreach to related fields and the community of historians of media technology

5) Hold a 2021 AEJMC pre-conference at a HBCU campus

Supporting our people will be my first goal for a reason. We’re living in the midst of an ongoing pandemic the likes of which we haven’t seen in a century. And many of us are at institutions that have curtailed support for conferences and professional development, or at least reduced it, for this next season. I want to make sure that we offer robust resources, including innovative ways to teach online, as well as ideas for digital archives, that will help us get through the tough academic year ahead. Look for these in this newsletter (thank you, Dr. Rachel Grant!) and on our soon-to-be-revamped site, including our #mediahistorymatters campaign and the upcoming Journalism History Student Podcast Competition.

Second, I want to make sure that we build on the great work that Teri and her team accomplished, including progress on our site, our journal, podcast and webinars. She’s left us in great shape, and I want to be a good steward of her work.

Third, this year, I want to reach out to our colleagues around the world, including those involved in the International Communication Association (ICA)’s Communication History division, the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST), and the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA)’s Communication History Section. Some of these scholars want to get their work published in Journalism History, as well as our sister journal, American Journalism, and I will work to reach out to their leaders for future collaborations and exchanges.

Part of that will involve my fourth goal, namely, engagement with groups like the Society for the History of Technology and the Research Society for American Periodicals, among other organizations. It is important for us to break out of our silos and to find other scholars who study media history (and vice versa).

Finally, I would like to host a preconference in association with, or ideally physically at, a historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) campus, depending on the situation in the wider world. This would be right before AEJMC next year, likely on Aug. 3, 2021, in New Orleans. This also might be at Xavier, depending on their interest. This also might be online, if necessary, again depending on how things go with a vaccine in the new year.

There’s a great deal of uncertainty with this idea, but I would like any preconference to focus on race or international-media history-related issues (or both), and perhaps focus, too, on research-in-progress, in order to support our scholars who may not get as much done as they want this fall/winter/spring. I’m thinking of our scholars who are parents or caregivers, in particular, or who have high teaching loads.

While we haven’t done a preconference in quite some time, having a low-cost option for presenting our members’ scholarship, and highlighting the importance of HBCUs in the process, will remain a goal for me this year. If you’re interested in helping with that effort specifically, please reach out. We will need assistance outside of our normal reviewer cycle and likely with some logistics (I won’t be able to carry all those beignets myself!).

I would like to encourage you to attend AJHA’s free virtual conference this October, and to bring a friend in another discipline along, and then point them toward us. Dr. Maddie Liseblad, our incoming (and awesome) new research chair, would like to continue to get graduate students and our peers in related fields involved. That’s a source of strength for our division, and vital to the future of the field of media history.

Please be thinking about panel ideas for next year, as well, and let Dr. Cayce Myers, our wonderful new vice chair, know if you have questions.

I welcome suggestions, connections and ideas, so please don’t hesitate to reach out to me, at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter. Talk to you soon.

Thank you,

Will


Call: 2021 AEJMC conference panel proposals

It’s already time to start submitting 2021 AEJMC conference panel proposals. If you have an idea for a panel, please send me an email with:

1.     The title of the proposal

2.     Whether the panel is teaching, research or PF&R

3.     A brief summary of what the panel is about

4.     The potential co-sponsor (another AEJMC division/interest group/commission)

5.     Whom you propose to be on the panel, including a short bio of each panelist and a short description of what each panelist would discuss.

I would like panel proposals by 11:59 p.m. Eastern on Friday, Sept. 18. The final selection of panels and panelists will be determined after negotiations with the other AEJ divisions/interest groups/commissions. Please let Cayce Myers (mcmyers@vt.edu) know if you have questions.”

Book Q & A: Sports Journalism: A History of Glory, Fame, and Technology

By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair, University of Florida, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu

Pat Washburn, Chris Lamb,

Dr. Patrick Washburn (Ohio University) & Dr. Chris Lamb (Indiana University-Indianapolis)

Sports Journalism: A History of Glory, Fame, and Technology

University of Nebraska Press, release date, July 2020

Book Cover

Q: What is the focus of your book?

A: Sports Journalism: A History of Glory, Fame, and Technology tells the story of the past, the present, and, to a degree, the future of American sports journalism. The book chronicles how and why technology, religion, social movements, immigration, racism, sexism, social media, athletes, and sportswriters and sports broadcasters changed sports as well as how sports have been covered and how news about sports has been presented and disseminated. Sports Journalism also examines how sports coverage has differed from that of non-sports news, and how new media, social media, and the internet have changed the profession of sports journalism and raised ethical issues.

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

A: In 2007, I (Patrick Washburn) received AEJMC’s first annual Tankard Book Award for The African American Newspaper: Voice of Freedom, which was published by the Northwestern University Press. The award was for the best research book by an AEJMC member on journalism and mass communication published in the previous year that broke new ground. The book was part of a series of mass communication histories overseen by David Abrahamson of Northwestern, and he asked me to author another book on a subject of my choice. I had long been interested in sports. I was a high school and college athlete, worked as a sportswriter on newspapers and in sports information at Harvard and Louisville, and then served as an NCAA faculty athletic representative at Ohio University. Thus, I decided to do a history of American sports journalism. Nothing had been written on the entire almost three hundred year history. Instead, books, articles, and documentaries existed on various parts of the history, such as biographies and autobiographies of sports journalists, specific sports media outlets (like ESPN and Sports Illustrated), different sports and the journalists who covered them (like baseball), media technologies and sports (like radio and television), and groups of sports journalists (like women and blacks) and their impact. Joining me as an author of this book was Chris Lamb, who has written widely about sports for newspapers and magazines and is the author or editor of eleven books. His book, Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (University of Nebraska Press), won the award for best book on Journalism and Mass Communication History from the History Division of AEJMC in 2013.

Q: What archives or research materials did you use?

A: Both Chris and I knew some of the information in this book from teaching journalism history classes and from our own research. The major piece of research involved searching diligently for what had been written about the history of American sports journalism. This involved reading an enormous number of books and paying careful attention to notes and bibliographies that led us to further sources, such as newspaper and magazine stories, journal articles, dissertations and theses, archival documents, and the Internet. The value of the latter cannot be overstated. And over the ten years spent in researching and writing this book, new items appearing in the media and on the Internet continually were collected to make this book as update as possible. In addition, both of us had interviews that were useful.

Q: How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

A: Pat and I are both journalism historians who study the issue of racism in journalism and in the news media. We also happen to be sports fans who recognize that sports have been neglected and underappreciated as a subject of scholarship. Anything that plays so heavily upon the sensibilities of so many people as sports and sports journalism deserves far more attention than it has been received from scholars. This book is an attempt to right that wrong. As we reveal in this book, many of the issues that historians examine are not only found in sports but appear there before they show up elsewhere in newspapers and the rest of the news media. This was true three hundred years ago, and it is no less true today. One, for instance, could write a book about the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on sports and sports journalists.

Q: What advice do you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?

A: Both Pat and I like writing—as much as it is possible to like something as arduous and sometimes demoralizing as writing often is. Writing a book provides an opportunity to tell a story in a way that you cannot do in a newspaper, a magazine, or in an academic journal article. It is far more gratifying than writing a journal article. Most books require a helluva lot more work than journal articles. You will be surprised—perhaps even depressed—when you realize how much time a book takes to research and write. You may think your book idea is so important that you are amazed no one has thought of it before. But you must disabuse yourself of the notion that just because you think your subject is undeniably important a book editor will automatically agree. You must convince the editor, and you must know what subjects the publisher publishes and what makes your book so important. Come up with a brief summary that captures the essence of your book, describes its contribution, justifies its publication (in other words, how it breaks new ground), and convinces the acquisitions editor that he or she would be an idiot if you are not offered a contract. A formal written proposal for the editor is the relatively easy part. Researching the book and writing it is the hard part.