Associate professor of journalism, University of Minnesota-Duluth
Where you got your Ph.D.: Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Current favorite class: History of American Media
Current research project: I am very excited about my sabbatical leave during the 2021-2022 school year. I have a couple of projects planned, including a book-length manuscript about a largely forgotten but important newspaper editor.
Fun fact about yourself: During the pandemic, I’ve been volunteering with a local music venue in Duluth to help produce live-streaming performances on YouTube.
Each month, Clio will highlight the latest episode of the Journalism History podcast and recommend a set of episodes from the archives. The podcasts — available on the website and through many podcast players — are excellent teaching tools, easy to add to your syllabi. Transcripts of each episode are available online.
If you want to hear more from this month’s featured book author, check out Episode 59: The History of Food Journalism. Food journalism expert Kimberly Wilmot Voss discusses the significance of food history and the story behind New York Times food writer Jane Nickerson and her food section from 1942-1957.
This month’s recommendations from the archive focus on sports journalism, with episodes that span the 19th and 20th centuries:
Episode 71: Black Ballplayers as Foreign Correspondents Historian Brian Campbell describes the experiences of African American athletes who played baseball and achieved social status in Latin America and the Caribbean from the 1930s to 1950s, and he discusses how journalists used their stories of racial equality abroad to critique the color line in the United States.
Episode 61: A True Newspaper Woman Researcher Carolina Velloso explores the career of sports reporter, photojournalist and national magazine writer Sadie Kneller Miller, a trailblazing journalist at the turn of the 20th century whose story had been lost to history.
Episode58: Jackie Robinson After Baseball Historian Ray McCaffrey describes the activism of baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson after he retired from the game that he integrated, including his newspaper columns in support of Muhammad Ali’s right to refuse military service and a boycott of the 1968 Summer Olympics.
And for something extra spooky for Halloween:
BONUS: Finding Ghosts in Newspapers For a special Halloween bonus episode, we trace American newspapers’ fascination with ghosts back to the 1800s with historian Paulette D. Kilmer.
This book documents the careers of newspaper fashion editors and details what the fashion sections included in the post-World War II years. The analysis covers social, political, and economic aspects of fashion. It also addresses journalism ethics, fashion show reporting, and the decline in fashion journalism editor positions. The content of the newspaper fashion sections and the women who oversaw the sections have not been examined enough by historians.
This book explores the complexity of the sections and the reporting the women did. Fashion editors worked in the women’s pages of newspapers. When the women’s pages turned into lifestyle sections, many fashion editor positions were largely eliminated at metropolitan newspapers. But prior to the loss of the women’s pages, the post-World War II years through the early 1970s were considered the Golden Era.
Fashion editors pulled wire copy, interviewed local women about their fashion choices, and visited local stores to see what was available. They also traveled to national and international fashion shows, interviewed designers, and offered their opinions on trends. Many of them also served as beauty editors – writing about new products, weight loss options, and the popular hairstyles. The editors interacted with each other and were able to network at a time when they were usually excluded from journalism organizations. Most fashion editors stayed in their position at their newspapers for many years and became experts on what their readers were interested in.
How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
Despite the importance of clothing as an industry and in a person’s individual life, scholarship on newspaper fashion reporting is lacking. Even the more recent research on women in journalism has ignored the traditional women’s section reporting, focusing more on women whose work reached the front pages of newspapers. Yet, areas like fashion journalism were where women were making their mark for decades. When it came to fashion journalism beginning in those post-World War II years, fashion editors held dominant positions. They chronicled the fashions worn in professional and personal worlds and in doing so served as social critics. They also promoted the work of American designers at a changing time in the business as designers became household names.
What archives or research materials did you use?
Much of the material for the book came from archives and oral histories. One of the most helpful archives was the National Women and Media Collection (NWMC) in Missouri, especially the Penney-Missouri Award papers. The editors who won the annual fashion award wrote letters back and forth to the director of the awards. These letters revealed how the women covered fashion in their communities and at their newspapers. These papers also included speeches given by several of the fashion editors, which revealed their views on fashion and journalism. Marjorie Paxson, who helped establish the NWMC archive, also donated papers that led to many fashion clips from the Houston Chronicle in the 1950s. Washington Star fashion editor Eleni Epstein also gave her papers to the NWMC. They revealed not only her fashion reporting but correspondence with her editors and her readers. Several other archives provided additional information such as fashion editor Aileen Ryan’s materials at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
My research also led me to the oral histories of Nina Hyde, located at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Marylin Bender, located at Columbia University. Both histories also focused on their law degrees – although neither women practiced law. Two other oral histories examined were of Nadeane Walker Anderson, at the Associated Press archive, and Virginia Pope, at the New York Public Library.
How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
Women’s liberation leaders wanted newspapers to eliminate the women’s pages and put news about women on the front pages. It was an interesting theory but it did not work in practice. Instead, much of the news about women was eliminated. Some women’s page editors wanted to save their sections and raise the standards of the sections. Ultimately, these sections became lifestyle or feature sections. It also meant the loss of many fashion editors’ jobs. This project, like my previous books, documents the significant material in the women’s pages. It leads to a better understanding of soft news and the work of women’s page journalists.
What advice do you have for other historians that are working on or starting book projects?
Find your writing process and honor it. I try to write early in the morning before teaching and service commitments come up. I also make a plan for what I will cover next after each writing session. It helps provide a structure for the next writing moment. Writing groups can be helpful for accountability. Overall, simply finding time to write is the most important thing.
Cayce Myers, associate professor of public relations and director of graduate studies at Virginia Tech’s School of Communication, is the new chair of the History Division.
Thank you to all of the History Division members who helped create a great 2021 virtual conference. Despite the ongoing pandemic, our division maintained its high quality scholarship, while also continuing our division’s continued support for scholars, especially graduate students and newer faculty. As we begin to work toward our 2022 conference in Detroit (hopefully in-person!), there are a few things that I want to mention as the Chair of the History Division.
First, thank you to last year’s leadership team, especially Dr. Will Mari (Louisiana State) who did a fantastic job as Chair for our 2021 conference. Additionally, I want to thank Dr. Maddie Liseblad (California State University, Long Beach) our Second Vice Chair and Research Chair, who managed our paper submission process resulting in a series of high quality papers by both faculty and graduate students. We also welcome Dr. Rachel Grant (Florida), our new addition to the leadership team, who is the Second Vice Chair and Research Chair for the Division.
Our 2020-2021 year in the History Division had many accomplishments including the expansion of outreach and mentorship under the direction of former Chairs Dr. Erika Pribanic-Smith (Texas-Arlington) and Dr. Teri Finneman (Kansas). Dr. Pam Parry (Southeast Missouri State) assumed her role as the editor of our division’s journal, Journalism History, ahead of schedule in June 2021. With the help of Dr. Keith Greenwood (Missouri) the division also launched its new website https://mediahistorydivision.com, which contains a wealth of content about scholarship, teaching, and division news that can be utilized by our members in their research and classes. The website also contains the links to the division’s highly successful Journalism History Podcast, which contains a cross section of interviews about a variety of historical subjects produced by Dr.Teri Finneman.
As we approach the 2021-2022 academic year, we face an evolving situation with the global pandemic that affects our lives, work, and society. What that means for the History Division is that our goals for the next year are aspirational and tempered with the knowledge that things may evolve with the pandemic over the next year. With that said, the 2021-2022 goals for the History Division are:
Support our members in their teaching, scholarship, and service as we transition back toward in-person meetings in 2022.
Continue our division’s mission of recruiting new scholars into the division, and support young and seasoned scholars through our division’s mentorship program.
Continue our support for and presence at our regional AEJMC conferences, which supports younger scholars, especially graduate students.
Continue our outreach and engagement with the broader historical research community, and look for ways to create partnerships between those organizations and our division.
Explore the possibility of holding a pre-conference ahead of next year’s AEJMC conference in Detroit.
All of these goals are only possible with the help of our dedicated History Division members, and I appreciate the willingness over this past year of members’ work on mentorship, research outreach, teaching initiatives, and awards. It is this work that makes our division a great place for scholars at any stage to share their work.
As we begin this new academic year there are a few things to note. Our research panels for the 2022 annual conference are due by September 15th. Please review the call for papers, and submit proposals to our Vice Chair Dr. Maddie Liseblad at madeleine.liseblad@csulb.edu.
I also welcome any suggestions, questions or comments. Feel free to contact me at mcmyers@vt.edu. Once again, thank you all for your work for the division, and best wishes for the upcoming year.
Each month, Clio will highlight the latest episode of the Journalism History podcast and recommend a set of episodes from the archives. The podcasts — available on the website and through many podcast players — are excellent teaching tools, easy to add to your syllabi. Transcripts of each episode are available online.
Episode 50.5: Why Does JournalismHistory Matter? To celebrate the first 50 episodes, the podcast hosts reflect with prior guests on the central question of the show: Why does journalism history matter?
Bonus Episode: The History of American Epidemics Katie Foss discusses her upcoming book, Constructing the Outbreak, which analyzes seven epidemics spanning more than 200 years. She covers how shifts in journalism and medicine influenced the coverage, preservation, and fictionalization of different disease outbreaks
Episode 83: America’s ‘Tory’ Printer Autumn Linford discusses the real story of James Rivington, the most infamous printer of the American Revolution. Her research seeks to broad the historical understanding of Rivington beyond the textbook mentions of his work as a Tory newspaper printer.
Where you work: Muhlenberg College, Department of Media & Communication
Where you got your Ph.D.: Temple University
Current favorite class: Media & Society: Social Media. Introducing students–often freshman–to critical perspectives on social media, something that so many of them are immersed in, has been endlessly rewarding. I aim to give students the space and time to think and write about the media that shape their social lives and the political and cultural contexts they inhabit, so every semester feels different and exciting as the platforms that dominate our conversations change even if the concerns they evoke persist.
Current research project: I’ve begun digging through the Industry Documents Library maintained by UCSF, exploring how industries–in particular tobacco and fossil fuel–have exerted influence on sites and actors producing metajournalistic discourses, like trade publications, professional/press associations, and J-schools. I’m hoping to find ways to explore how Big Tech has done the same more recently.
Fun fact about yourself: My favorite summertime lawn game is slate-board quoits, an adaptation of an English pub game that my mother’s family has played for generations and is only common, as far as I can tell, in Pennsylvania’s Slate Belt region.
Are you looking for help with your career path, research, or teaching? Our division’s experienced scholars have the answers. Whether you’re a grad student, assistant professor, associate professor, or other, our mentorship program is open to you.We also need willing mentors at all levels to provide guidance and support.
We are entering our third year of this successful program. Prior mentors and mentees alike have found their mentoring relationships to be beneficial, and many have chosen to continue informally after their year in the program has ended.
Applications for mentors and mentees close at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time Sept. 3. Apply now at https://historymentor2021.questionpro.com/ Pairings will be notified via email by Sept. 17; the partnerships officially last one year. Contact Erika Pribanic-Smith epsmith@uta.edu if you have questions.
American Journalism Historians’ Association will host its 40th annual conference Oct. 8-9 on the Whova virtual conference platform. Registration is open now at ajhaonline.org. Cost is $25 for all members; additional fees apply for non-members as well as members who would like to bundle membership renewal with conference registration. Access information will be emailed to registered attendees beginning in September.
Lisa Burns, Professor of Media Studies at Quinnipiac University, and her colleague Courtney Marchese have published a chapter on “Political Branding in a Digital Age: The Role of Design and Image-Based Messaging Strategies in the 2020 Presidential Election” inThe 2020 Presidential Campaign: A Communications Perspective(Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), edited by Robert E. Denton.
Kathleen W. Wickham, Professor of Journalism at the University of Mississippi, served as executive producer of the Theatre Oxford play The Heartbreak Henry, written and directed by David Sheffield, a former writer for Saturday Night Live. She chaired the fundraising, publicity, program, and marketing committees for the sold-out show, which was co-sponsored by the School of Journalism & New Media.
Elisabeth Fondren, Assistant Professor of Journalism at St. John’s University, published a chapter, “Media in Western & Northern Europe,” in Global Journalism: Understanding World Media Systems (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), edited by Daniela V. Dimitrova. She traces the historical origins of political reporting across Northern and Western Europe, and discusses media pluralism, technology and law, public service broadcasting, and freedom of speech in EU member states.
Lincoln Mediated: The President and the Press Through Nineteenth-Century Media by Gregory A. Borchard, Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and David W. Bulla, Associate Professor of Communication at Augusta University, was republished by Routledge in December 2020. Bulla and Borchard are also working on the second edition of Journalism in the Civil War Era (Peter Lang, forthcoming).
Kimberly Wilmot Voss, Professor of Journalism at the University of Central Florida, has written a new book, Newspaper Fashion Editors in the 1950s and 60s: Women Writers of the Runway (Palgrave, 2021), which documents the careers of newspaper fashion editors and details fashion sections of the post-World War II years. The analysis covers social, political, and economic aspects of fashion. The book–Voss’s fourth on women’s page journalism–also addresses journalism ethics, fashion show reporting, and the decline in fashion journalism editor positions.
Nicholas Hirshon, Assistant Professor of Communication at William Paterson University, was named the first two-time winner in the 43-year history of the Outstanding Campus Adviser Award presented by the Society of Professional Journalists. The award recognizes an adviser who has made “an exceptional contribution” to their campus chapter. In their nomination, Hirshon’s students cited his organizing nine installments of a Zoom discussion series with reporters during the 2020-2021 academic year and providing a “rich journalism experience” to the campus community.
Jonathan M. Bullinger, a lecturer at SUNY Geneseo and SUNY Oneonta, has begun hosting a new season of Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, which introduces concepts from the disciplines of history and collective memory. This season includes episodes on sports media (NFL Films vs. NFL Media, nostalgia disguised as documentary), cultural figures (Bruce Lee and Chadwick Boseman), resuscitation of old narratives when new archives are found (Belushi documentary), and re-framing popular music with new iconography (Universal Music’s new holiday animated music videos).
The focus of the book is on the lived experiences of rank-and-file news workers in and out of the newsroom spaces of the interwar years and early Cold War. I really wanted to show the development of the idea of “the newsroom” in the generations leading up to the newsrooms observed by Gans and Tuchman in the 1970s, and taking up the work of early journalism-studies scholars and media historians such as A.M. Lee, as well as the more recent work of Bonnie Brennen, Linda Steiner and Ted Curtis Smythe.
How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
I was doing research on journalism textbooks while working with my adviser, Richard Kielbowicz, at the University of Washington. And these texts kept describing these dynamic, slightly crazy, and definitely already mythologized spaces that I knew from reading journalists’ memoirs. But they were also real, often exclusive, sometimes harsh, but ironically beloved spaces. And so I wanted to find out what they were really like, as best as one can, as physical spaces with a corresponding culture. But I couldn’t find a comprehensive history of the newsroom anywhere! There were lots of short, capsule-style histories, and some scholars, like Fred Fedler, but also Julia Guarneri, Michael Stamm and Aurora Wallace, had written these great, materiality-centered histories of news production and buildings. And so I wrote the book I wished I could have used to answer my questions, if that makes sense.
What archives or research materials did you use?
I used Quill, published by the Society of Professional Journalists, Editor & Publisher (now mostly scanned by the Internet Archive, and available online, just not in color), and the American Newspaper Guild’s Reporter. I also used the annual reports of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, the American Society of News Editors, and other trade groups (and their publications), along with memoirs, textbooks and government documents from the National Archives II in College Park, Maryland, and the regional National Archives located in Seattle.
How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
As newsrooms change, getting smaller, more mobile, or even closing altogether (with journalists once again, as they did in the 18th century, working from their homes or coffee shops), I wanted to talk about why these spaces mattered and how they both reflected their temporal, cultural and societal contexts, and how they shaped journalism as we know it. That includes great things — holding governments and corporations to account — but also bad things, like being distinctly unfriendly places for women and people of color for many years. That would change by the end of the century. But their legacy is complex, like all human institutions. They represented a kind of precursor to the information society we live in today.
But to summarize the relevance for the present moment: The industrial journalism of the 20th century and big, metro newsrooms grew up together, influenced by forces such as unionization and early portable technologies (i.e. early mobile tech). While many of the examples of these large newsrooms may go away, I think they’ll always be a role for some kind of physical newsroom space, even if it’s a small one. And so again I wanted to show where that ideal and that idea had come from, to help understand where they may be going.
What advice do you have for other historians that are working on or starting book projects?
I had originally wanted to tell the story of the newsroom right on through the 20th century, the “entire thing,” as it were. That would have been too much (as it is, it took me nearly five years to finish the project). Richard wisely suggested cutting things off in the 1960s, as other scholars had and have done a great job of telling the newsroom’s story since, including folks like Matthew Pressman.
And so I guess my advice would be to be ok with stopping at a certain point. There’s plenty of research to go around. Ultimately, a lot of what I wanted to do in the original longer version turned out to be better in my two books for Routledge, that function as a kind of pair of short sequels; the first being a history of newsroom computerization (A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies, 2019), and a forthcoming book (early next year) on the history of the news industry and the internet (wish me luck!).
