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.