Chair Rachel Grant (Florida) offered a welcome to the 35 members in attendance. Minutes from last year’s division business meeting were approved unanimously.
Leadership presented an overview of the division’s work during the past year: updating the AEJMC Community page for the division, maintaining the website minus a web administrator, continuing to expand international reach and membership, and celebrating 50 years of Journalism History, the division’s journal. There were no questions. Maddie Liseblad voiced the need for a website administrator.
The History Division welcomes panel proposals for the 2025 AEJMC conference in San Francisco, Calif., August 6 – 10. The theme for next year’s event is “Leading in Times of Momentous Change: Individual and Collective Opportunities.” Panel proposals can be submitted via this link.
The History Division is one of the original divisions of AEJMC, having been established in 1966, and supports research into a variety of topics related to the journalism and mass communication industry, including but not limited to:
the newspaper industry (newspapers, editors, publishers, and reporters)
the broadcasting and cable industry (individual networks, stations, anchors, and reporters)
public relations ( agencies, corporations, campaigns, practitioners, techniques and tactics)
media technologies (computerization, emerging digital technologies, and the early Internet)
Some History Division members focus on the history of media relationships with the government and other power-wielding entities, and some members focus on the histories of technologies from the printing press, the telegraph and the typewriter, to the Internet, while others focus issues of culture, power, and longstanding inequities around race.
The History Division generally accepts and hosts or co-hosts three types of panel proposals each year: Professional Freedom & Responsibility (PF&R), Teaching, and Research.
Dr. Gwyneth Mellinger and Dr. Pam Parry are the recipients of the History Division’s 2024 Exceptional Service Award. This important award is given by the division’s chair and vice chair to members who have provided stellar service.
Gwyneth MellingerPam Parry
Mellinger is a professor at James Madison University. Parry is a professor at Southeast Missouri State University.
Both Mellinger and Parry have provided critical services to the History Division.
Mellinger has chaired the division’s Book Award Committee for several years. She is the author of the book Chasing Newsroom Diversity: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action. Mellinger is the winner of the 2019 Ronald T. and Gayla D. Farrar Award in Media and Civil Rights History for her research on Charles S. Johnson, an African American newspaper columnist in the 1940s.
Parry has served as the editor of Journalism History since 2021. Under her leadership, she and her staff produced the commemorative issue celebrating 50 years of the journal. She is the 2020 winner of the Best Podcast Guest Award from Journalism History. Parry is the author or co-editor of eight academic books.
“It is a tremendous task to lead the book award and Dr. Mellinger handles all the behind the scenes work of receiving, distributing and seeking the best books in our field,” said Rachel Grant, chair. “The division appreciates all the work she has done to honor her fellow scholars. Serving beyond her term, Gwyn has stayed on through several transitions and we appreciate her time and commitment. Her kindness and leadership is an inspiration to us all.”
“There is so much unseen work that goes into managing a journal, and Journalism History is the cornerstone and legacy of the History Division’s scholarly community. Dr. Parry has stewarded the journal artfully during her tenure,” said Brian Creech, vice chair. “The journal has grown in scope and prominence during her editorship, but also retains an attention to detail and care for prose that makes publishing in the journal a genuinely meaningful experience for junior and senior scholars alike. From an expanded essay series, to facilitating research microgrants, to a rich, critical engagement with the content of scholarship in the journal over its history, Dr. Parry has led the journal in a way that best reflects the breadth and depth of our subfield and pushes the project of Journalism History and journalism history forward.”
Parry and Mellinger will be honored during the History Division’s annual Awards Gala on Aug. 7 at 7:30 p.m. in Philadelphia.
The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is pleased to announce that Autumn Linford of Auburn University has won this year’s Top Faculty Paper Award.
Autumn Lorimer Linford
She will receive a plaque and a $100 cash prize for her paper, ‘“Is This an Evil Practice?”: Newspapers and Newsgirls.’
The second-place faculty paper award goes to Ashley Walter of Saint Louis University for “After the Gauntlet: Sex Discrimination Lawsuits at The Washington Post, 1972-2003.”
Third place faculty paper goes to Eric Freedman, Michigan State University, Joshua Duchan, Wayne State University , Vladislava Sukhanovskaya, and Finn Hopkins, Michigan State University. This co-authored paper is “Extra! Extra! Sing All About It: Portraying Newsies in 19th and 20th Century Sheet Music.”
In the student paper competition, the top award winner is Hannah LeComte of George Mason University for “Radical or Assimilatory? The Fight for Family Life Education by Virginia’s Gay Press, 1977-1998.” She will receive a plaque and a $100 cash prize.
The second-place student award goes to Joey Mengyuan Chen of University of Maryland for “Dancing with Shackles on: The Consulted New Woman in the Exchange of Letters in Linglong Magazine.”
Third place in the student paper competition was won by Diana Krovvidi of University of Maryland for her paper “How Ethnic Press in the US Urged the Diaspora to Preserve the Ukrainian Language (1893-1914)”
The History Division also awards a top extended abstract award, which will go to the University of Pennsylvania co-authors, Anjali DasSarma and Valentina Proust. Their abstract is titled ““We Want Entire Freedom”: The New Orleans Tribune and the Foundation of Counterpublics Through Affective Discourse.”
The top faculty papers and student papers will be presented together at the division’s top papers panel during AEJMC’s 2024 conference in Philadelphia on Friday, August 9 at 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Rachel Grant is the chair of the Media History Division
We are less than a month away from this year’s conference in Philly. So much work and dedication happened behind the scenes, and I want to thank all the executive members of the History Division leadership. I especially want to thank our vice-chairs Brian Creech (program chair) and Melissa Greene-Blye (research chair) for organizing our panels and research competition. Also, thank you to everyone who submitted and reviewed submissions. Our division has the most dedicated members who continue to help elevate the importance of historical research.
We have an exciting schedule this year and we have an included abbreviated schedule of all our division’s sessions in this issue of Clio. For a full schedule of AEJMC events, check out the program online.
Fordham University associate professor Beth Knobel has won the 2024 Diversity in Journalism History Research Award for her conference submission, “Breaking Barriers: Ed Bradley’s Early Years in Radio.”
Presented by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), the Diversity Award recognizes the outstanding paper in journalism or mass communication history submitted to the annual paper competition that address issues of inclusion and the study of marginalized groups and topics. Knobel will receive a cash prize during the division’s awards gala on August 7 at the AEJMC National Convention in Philadelphia, PA.
The judges for the History Division’s Diversity Award recognized the richness and depth of Knobel’s primary research and her compelling storytelling ability.
“We had a very strong, and very competitive, group of Finalists for this year’s award. ‘Breaking Barriers’ stood out for being richly embedded within this year’s conference theme, connected to its location, and the ways it wove oral history, archival broadcast media, and traditional print journalism sources into a vivid narrative of overcoming structural inequality in the radio industry.”
The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) has selected A.J. Bauer, Erin Coyle, Michael Fuhlhage, and John Vilanova as the winners of this year’s Jinx C. Broussard Award for Excellence in Teaching of Media History.
This sixth annual award recognizes transferable, original, tested, and creative teaching ideas, especially those that engage with diversity, collaboration, community, or justice.
This year’s winners will present their teaching practices this August at AEJMC’s National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and will be honored at the division’s awards gala.
Bauer, an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama, detailed an archival research methods activity aimed at showing students how historians develop narratives from archival materials and encouraging them to engage with archival documents in a tactile way. Bauer’s award submission described “sharing that sense of wonder and uncertainty” of archival work with students, and centered teacher-student collaboration, writing, “we are all trying to make sense of history, together.”
Coyle, an associate professor at the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University, was named a Broussard Award winner for an interactive, candy-based classroom activity that encourages students to question their own perceptions, biases, and their impact on journalistic and historical writing. Coyle’s M&M sorting activity, paired with Wesley Lowery’s “A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists,” engages both students’ present biases and the continued impact of decades of white news leaders’ values in mainstream media.
Fulhage, an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University, shared an activity for students to examine a major daily newspaper’s historical treatment of communities of color and to assess that coverage to determine whether the paper should offer an apology to those groups. Fulhage said the project brings “students of different races into dialogue about the significance and appropriateness of apologies by news organizations for their complicity in systemic racism.”
Vilanova, an assistant professor of Journalism & Communication and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, was awarded for his “critical fabulation” activity. In this teaching idea, Vilanova encourages students to research and construct a new reality from archival silences and violences, which “fuses the creative and the historical, recuperating lives and stories of people unacknowledged by the choices of the archivists.”
The History Division is sponsoring a hands-on preconference workshop exploring the use of computer-based digital humanities tools for media history research and analysis. Attendees will learn how to access digital data sources at scale and use computerized data analysis tools like sentiment analysis, topic analysis and data visualization. The workshop is intended for researchers who do not have access to large number grad students or research budgets and do not have advanced computer skills themselves. The workshop is hands-on. At the end, people should be able to conduct simple research projects using these tools and introduce these methods in their classes. The workshop will be held on August 7 from 1 PM to 5 PM. Cost is $10. Attendance is capped at 25. For more information contact Elliot King at eking@loyola.edu. Registration is available online.
Journalism History, the journal of the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), is celebrating fifty years of continuous publishing with a special commemorative issue. The electronic version was published Feb. 13, and can be viewed at https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ujhi20/50/1?nav=tocList, and the print version should be mailed the first of March.
Anna E. Lindner, Michael Fuhlhage, D. T. Frazier, and Keena S. Neal are the winners of the 2024 Tom Reilly Award. Their article, “’If Ever Saints Wept and Hell Rejoiced, It Must Have Been Over the Passage of That Law’: The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act in Detroit River Borderland Newspapers, 1851-1852” was the most popular research study on the Journalism History website in 2023.
While conducting this research, all four scholars were associated with Wayne State University’s Department of Communication and what is affectionately called “Fuhlhage’s Research Gang.” Dr. Fuhlhage is an associate professor and he has successfully collaborated with his students on several research projects. Lindner, Frazier, and Neal were doctoral candidates at the time.
