Category Archives: Member News

Member News: Jason Lee Guthrie, Jon Marshall, David E. Sumner, Carolina Velloso, Ashley Walter

Jason Lee Guthrie, an assistant professor at Clayton State University, won the Leibner Cooper Grant for Creative Productions on the History of Media from the Broadcast Education Association (BEA). Guthrie was honored for his podcast Recollecting Carter, which explores the life of President Jimmy Carter. The full series will consist of several episodes and will feature oral history interviews with journalists, archivists, and academic experts, as well as archival media from the 1960s to the present day. The podcast is available through Apple podcasts and Spotify.

Jon Marshall of Northwestern University won the Best Podcast Guest Award from Journalism History. He is a guest in “Episode 105: Watergate and the Press,” a top-rated episode of the podcast with over 400 downloads. Marshall was also selected for his support of the show in the past year. Journalism History chooses its top guest from the prior calendar year.

Membership Q&A: Dana Dabek

Where are you currently getting your Ph.D.?

Klein College of Media and Communication, Temple University

*Dana Dabek is a doctoral student at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University*

What brought you to grad school?

Prior to starting my doctorate, I spent about fifteen years working in the non-profit sector. First, I worked as a program director at a historic site (which relates to my current research), and then for several years in fundraising and communications for grassroots community organizations. Over time, I became increasingly disenchanted with the sector. Not the organizations I was working for, but larger structural issues that would have been present no matter where I was working in the field. At the same time, I was craving the space to step back and take a big picture approach to social change, but my day-to-day was bogged down by the nitty gritty. I had gone into the non-profit sector after my master’s program because at that time I wanted to be in the nitty gritty. The circuitous nature of my career aspirations is not lost on me.

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Author Q&A: Matthew C. Ehrlich, Dangerous Ideas on Campus

Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK (University of Illinois Press, 2021)

*Matthew C. Ehrlich is a professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign*

Describe the focus of your book.

The book is a historical case study about explosive ideas and the struggle to spark, spread, contain, or extinguish them on college campuses. The setting is the University of Illinois in the early 1960s: a traditionally conservative Midwestern campus in an era of idealism over civil rights and fear over nuclear annihilation. The protagonists are two Illinois professors: Leo Koch, a biology teacher and humanist who was fired after writing a letter to the editor that condoned premarital sex; and Revilo Oliver, a classics teacher and white supremacist who was not fired after writing an article that accused the recently assassinated President Kennedy of being a loathsome traitor. The book tries to cast fresh light on the meaning of academic freedom, the early 1960s, and the continuing debates over free speech on college campuses.

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

I’ve long been interested in how the news media have historically covered controversial subjects related to higher education. That interest comes from working in journalism and teaching at state universities. I found that premarital sex was a hot news topic in the early 1960s; everyone from Margaret Mead to Gloria Steinem was writing about it. That in turn alerted me to Leo Koch, who made news during that time period for what then seemed like far-out views on sex. After he was fired, the University of Illinois strengthened its academic freedom protections, and one of the beneficiaries was Revilo Oliver. I was reluctant at first to write about Oliver given that he was a racist and anti-Semite. But I decided that addressing the Koch and Oliver cases together would make for a stronger book with broader relevance to what we’re going through these days.

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Member News: Dane Claussen, Cayce Myers

Dane S. Claussen taught on Semester at Sea as it sailed from Germany to Dubai via 11 ports in the Mediterranean, Suez Canal, Kenya, and India. During the Fall 2022 semester, he taught International Mass Communication, Media in Society, and an intermediate-level journalism course. Since March 2022, he has been copyeditor for a new Shanghai International Studies University-based scholarly journal published by De Gruyter, Online Media and Global Communication (Louisa Ha, editor). Since June 2022, Claussen has been leading the effort by the South Asia Communication Association (SACA) to launch its own scholarly journal. In September 2021, he completed his four-year term as Editor of Newspaper Research Journal. In Spring 2021, he was one of two official candidates for AEJMC vice president.

Cayce Myers (Virginia Tech) was elected to the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) National Board of Directors representing the Mid Atlantic District. He will serve a two-year term.

Member News: Brooke Kroeger, Yong Volz

Brooke Kroeger, professor emerita at New York University, has a new book coming out in May 2023 from A.A. Knopf. Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism is a representative history of American women who ignored every impediment put in their way to do journalism’s most valued work and of the collective fight for equity in the profession throughout the 180-plus years since mass media began.

Yong Volz, associate professor and Roger Gafke Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the Missouri School of Journalism, is the 2022 recipient of the School’s O.O. McIntyre Professorship in recognition of teaching excellence. Volz is the 35th recipient of the award, which has been given annually since 1987.

Remembering David Sachsman

David Sachsman, the George R. West, Jr. Chair of Excellence in Communication and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, died on October 4, 2022. He was 77.

Beginning in 1993, Sachsman organized the annual Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression. The Chattanoogan’s obituary discussed Sachsman’s legacy and role in shaping the annual event: “Dr. Sachsman was particularly proud of how the symposium fostered new scholars, with many first attending as graduate students and then continuing to participate in the conference as their career progressed. Since 2000, work from the symposium has been published in eight books edited by Dr. Sachsman, as well as dozens of other publications created by symposium attendees.”

Author Q&A: Will Mari, Newsrooms and the Disruption of the Internet

Newsrooms and the Disruption of the Internet: A Short History of Disruptive Technologies, 1990 – 2010 (Routledge, 2022).

Describe the focus of your book.

It is a (very brief) history of the impact of the internet on the news industry and on news workers. It is a sequel to my earlier book on the history of newsroom computerization, A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies: 1960-1990, which was published in 2019.

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

Toward the end of my research for my first book for Routledge, I read a number of reports in trade publications such as Editor & Publisher, some of them breathlessly optimistic, others more circumspect, on the arrival of the civilian internet in the early 1990s. The promise and peril of that moment inspired me to write a follow-on book to my newsroom-computerization history, and Bob Franklin, my generous editor for the “Disruptions” series, encouraged me to do so.

Membership Q&A: Robin Sundaramoorthy

Where you are currently getting your Ph.D.?
Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland (UMD)

What brought you into grad school?
I’ve always wanted to get my Ph.D. in journalism. I seriously considered getting it immediately after I completed my master’s degree at Michigan State University, but I was offered a job at a local TV station and decided to pursue a career instead. I spent 20 amazing years working in TV news, and when it was time to move on, I didn’t think twice about applying to UMD. I want to teach and conduct research, and my professional experiences have taught me some valuable lessons that I can share with others.

Remembering Owen V. Johnson

Owen V. Johnson, associate professor emeritus at Indiana University and longtime member of the History Division, died on August 6, 2022 at the age of 76. He was an expert on World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle, as well as Russian and East European mass media and Czech and Slovak history.

In 2020, he joined the Journalism History podcast to talk about his edited collection of Pyle’s columns, At Home With Ernie Pyle.

Johnson’s friend and former colleague, professor emeritus Steven Raymer of the Indiana University Media School, delivered the eulogy at Johnson’s funeral. Here is an excerpt.

“With his intellect and humanity, Owen made the bedrock values of journalism — independence, truthfulness, accuracy, fairness to the facts, holding the powerful accountable, and building an informed citizenry — come to life in his classes, his scholarly writing, and his own journalism and broadcasting. And I might add, these same ideals were often the topic of our frequent conversations in the corridors of Ernie Pyle Hall — Owen with his coffee cup and impish smile often one step ahead of me in discussing the day’s news. I am still wresting with what Owen might have said at lunch today on the one-year anniversary of the Fall of Kabul, the Afghan capital. Surely he would have an opinion on America’s longest war, just as surely as he knew the menus from memory at our favorite pubs.

Author Q&A: Debra Reddin van Tuyll, Politics, Culture and the Irish American Press

Politics, Culture and the Irish American Press, 1784- 1963, eds. Debra Reddin van Tuyll, Mark O’Brien, and Marcel Broersma (Syracuse University Press, 2021)

Describe the focus of your book.

This book examines the history of the Irish American press from the Early National period to the Kennedy presidency. We look at individual journalists who created the Irish American press, the journalists that constituted it, and, most importantly, the transnational nature of that particular press genre.

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

Editors Debra Reddin van Tuyll and Mark O’Brien met a decade or more ago at the annual meeting of the Newspapers and Periodicals History Forum of Ireland. During the conference, they began a discussion of how similarly, yet how differently, historians from different parts of the world told the stories of the Irish and the Irish diaspora presses and also how, together, they all seemed to constitute on continuous story. Or maybe a story on a continuum is more accurate. Van Tuyll and O’Brien believed they had an insight into a useful new way to frame journalism history stories, to both deepen and broaden understanding of how a diaspora press is connected to its home and vice versa. They thought this idea might be worth exploring with other historians in a couple of academic gatherings, though they didn’t have a name for it initially.