Andie Tucher, professor at Columbia University, has a new book, Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History (Columbia University Press). Fake news has been part of the American media landscape for as long as there’s been an American media landscape. No history of American journalism is complete without an accounting of the many ways that the information system of democracy—the critical but unsecurable infrastructure of civic life–has been invaded and exploited over the years. But it’s not just the hoaxers, humbuggers, propagandists, puffers, partisans, blusterers, scandal-mongers, and fraudsters who have peddled fake news; it’s also the fake journalists, who appropriate the outward forms of journalism in an explicit effort to lend credibility to their falsehoods. The relationship between journalism and truth has always been more fragile than many of us realize.

Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen, an assistant professor at the University of Idaho, recently published a chapter on the history of high school student newspapers in a new volume on the history of the high school. Drawing on early journalism textbooks, education journals, and student newspapers themselves, this chapter discusses the early structure of these publications—their production process, place within the curriculum, and acceptance within the high school.

Teri Finneman (Kansas), Meg Heckman (Northeastern) and Pamela Walck (Duquesne) recently had the article “Reimagining Journalistic Roles: How Student Journalists Are Taking On the U.S. News Desert Crisis” accepted in Journalism Studies. All three advised online publications created to serve news desert communities. They are also having a webinar at 11 a.m. Eastern Feb. 4 to discuss the opportunities and challenges of running a news desert publication with students. Register here.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism, edited by Gregory A. Borchard of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is set for publication this month. Journalism permeates our lives and shapes our thoughts in ways that we have long taken for granted. Whether it is National Public Radio in the morning or the lead story on the Today show, the morning newspaper headlines, up-to-the-minute Internet news, grocery store tabloids, Time magazine in our mailbox, or the nightly news on television, journalism pervades our lives. The Encyclopedia of Journalism covers all significant dimensions of journalism, such as print, broadcast, and Internet journalism; U.S. and international perspectives; and history, technology, legal issues and court cases, ownership, and economics. The encyclopedia will consist of approximately 500 signed entries from scholars, experts, and journalists.

The first recipient of Journalism History‘s Tom Reilly Award is Raymond McCaffrey of the University of Arkansas. His article, “From Baseball Icon to Crusading Columnist: How Jackie Robinson Used His Column in the African-American Press to Continue His Fight for Civil Rights in Sports,” was the most-read Journalism History article in 2021.

McCaffrey’s study explores how Jackie Robinson continued his fight for civil rights in sports using his newspaper column in the New York Amsterdam News and syndicated in African-American newspapers during the 1960s. A review of those columns reveals a side of Robinson not typically seen in official histories depicting him as too conciliatory and restrained in his approach to race relations. Robinson came to take almost militant stands, challenging oppression by calling for boycotts of sporting events and event sponsors years before such strategies were adopted by a younger generation of athletes.

Maddie Liseblad, an assistant professor at Cal State Long Beach, has been selected as an Alumni Spotlight Award recipient by Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, Calif. The award represents one of the highest honors presented to graduates on behalf of PLNU. Recipients are alumni who make a difference in unique and creative ways, and they are selected through news updates and recommendations from PLNU faculty and staff. Liseblad, the first journalism student to graduate with distinction from PLNU, will be honored at a ceremony during homecoming in February.

Several history division members are featured in the latest online issue of the journal Historiography in Mass Communication, which includes a roundtable discussion entitled “Reconceptualizing Journalism in an Age of Misinformation.” The panel comprises several esteemed journalism historians, raises questions about risks to democracy associated with attacks on the press, and considers brainstorming ideas built around Media Reform legislation.

What brought you into grad school for journalism? 

As a lifelong journalist (I began my career as a cub reporter for my hometown daily as a teenager), I’ve always understood the importance of journalism. After more than a decade on the job, I was inspired to study journalism in hopes of helping improve the field. 

Why media history? 

Everything that journalism is now is related to its past. If we want to understand and challenge the problems of today, we must first understand just how deeply the root of those problems run. 

Current research project? 

I am currently working on my dissertation, which focuses on girl newsies between 1865-1920 and argues that newsgirls were essential newsworkers with gender-specific experiences. They are a forgotten but fascinating topic! 

Fun fact about yourself? 

I like to make subversive cross-stitches.

Matthew C. Ehrlich, an emeritus professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has a new book, Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK (University of Illinois Press). The book focuses on two academic freedom cases at the University of Illinois: a biology professor fired in 1960 after he condoned premarital sex, and a classics professor not fired in 1964 after he claimed that the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy was a loathsome traitor. The book places those two cases in the context of the culture wars of the time and shows how the cases continue to resonate in today’s polarized political climate. The book also highlights the distinction between academic freedom and free speech, as well as the important role of student news media in promoting the open exchange of ideas.

Will Mari, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, has a forthcoming book, Newsrooms and the Disruption of the Internet: A Short History of Disruptive Technologies, 1990-2010 (Routledge, February 2022). It explores how the internet impacted the journalism industry in the 1990s and 2000s and is a sequel to A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies, 1960-1990 (Routledge, 2019), which explored the computerization of the newsroom during the Cold War. (Contact Will for a digital copy of the latter.)

Elisabeth Fondren, an assistant professor at St. John’s University, published “Fighting an Armed Doctrine: The Struggle to Modernize German Propaganda during World War I (1914-1918)” in Journalism & Communication Monographs. Her article chronicles the ideas and methods of early German propagandists, including their secret attempts to copy ideas from their enemies, and how World War I conspiracy theories and publicity lessons carried over to World War II and informed Nazi propaganda. Michael S. Sweeney, Ross F. Collins, and Sarah Oates wrote expert commentaries. In October, Elisabeth was invited to speak at Yale University about her research on archiving media, memory, and propaganda history.

A class lecture by Joe Campbell, a professor at American University, about the media myths of the Washington Post and Watergate was taped by C-SPAN in November and is to be shown in 2022 on the cable network’s “Lectures in History” series. C-SPAN previously has aired Joe’s lectures about the myths of yellow journalism and the Spanish-American War and of the “Cronkite Moment” of 1968. Joe, a former History Division chair, is in his 25th year at American.

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).

Mike Conway and Josh Bennett (Indiana University Media School) have been awarded a university Public Humanities Project grant to create the Indiana Broadcast History Archive. Conway and Bennett are working with broadcasters around the state to collect archives related to the history of Indiana radio and television history.

Maddie Liseblad will be starting as an assistant professor of journalism at Cal-State Long Beach this fall. Dr. Liseblad is the current research chair for the History Division and will be its vice chair beginning this fall. 

Sheryl Kennedy Haydel has been chosen as the new Director of the School of Communication and Design at Loyola University in New Orleans. Dr. Kennedy Haydel has been an assistant professor at the Manship School at Louisiana State University. 

David E. Sumner (Ball State University emeritus) has been invited by Prof. Patrick Rössler at the University of Erfurt, Germany, to contribute a chapter on American magazines for The Magazine Press in the Twentieth Century: A Global History, tentatively scheduled for publication in 2022 by the German publisher Wallstein Verlag.

Kevin Grieves (Whitworth University) is pleased to announce the publication of his new book, Cold War Journalism: Between Cold Reception and Common Ground (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). The book explores journalism and journalists of the Cold War era as they were perceived as threats, but also attempts at forging transnational journalistic connections across the Iron Curtain. The book also illuminates efforts to find common journalistic ground within the East and West blocs. The research draws on a range of archival sources, including historical radio and television content.

Vincent DiGirolamo (Baruch College) has been awarded the 2021 Vincent P. DeSantis Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era for Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford University Press, 2019). The prestigious prize honors the best first book written on the period 1865 to 1920 published in the previous two years. Crying the News, said the award jury, “sensitively brings to light the experiences, struggles, and influence of a massive group of child laborers who walked the streets of our cities and towns, often unseen if rarely unheard, for more than a century.”

Amber Roessner (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) has won the History Division’s annual Covert Award for her article, “The Voices of Public Opinion: Lingering Structures of Feeling about Women’s Suffrage in 1917 U.S. Newspaper Letters to the Editor.” Her article “offers insight into the production of letters to the editor as an act of strategic communication by suffragists and anti-suffragists, the regulation of letters to the editor by news gatekeepers and agenda-setters, and the consumption of letters to the editor by newspaper readers in 1917, a pivotal year in the decades-long cultural struggle over women’s suffrage.”

Earnest Perry (University of Missouri) has won the AEJMC’s Lionel C. Barrow Jr. Award for Distinguished Achievement in Diversity and Research Education. His work includes co-editing Cross-Cultural Journalism and Strategic Communication: Storytelling and Diversity (Routledge, 2020, second edition), with Maria E. Len-Rios.

Jinx Coleman Broussard (Louisiana State University) has won the History Division’s annual Donald L. Shaw Senior Scholar Award for her ground-breaking contributions in the history of journalism and mass communication scholarship, as well as her years of excellence in teaching and mentorship. Her work includes Public Relations and Journalism in Times of Crisis: A Symbiotic Partnership (Peter Lang, 2019), with Andrea Miller;African American Foreign Correspondents: A History (LSU Press, 2013); and Giving a Voice to the Voiceless: Four Pioneering Black Women Journalists (Routledge, 2004).

John Maxwell Hamilton (Louisiana State University) has won the History Division’s annual book award for Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda (LSU Press, 2020). The judges described the book, which examines the Creel Committee’s establishment of a propaganda system and the threat it posed to democracy, as “a magisterial work, comprehensive and highly readable.” 

Kathy Roberts Forde (University of Massachusetts Amherst) has collaborated on “Truth, Dissent & the Legacy of Daniel Ellsberg,” a free, online 50^th anniversary conference commemorating the release of the Pentagon Papers, April 30-May, 2021. The website also features information about the Ellsberg Archive Project and a five-part podcast series, The Whistleblower.

Marilyn Greenwald (Ohio University) had an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal. “Dr. Seuss, Meet the Sanitized Sleuths Known as the Hardy Boys” deals with literary “cancel culture” and the updating and changing of series juvenile fiction in 1959 and 1960, including the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift books.

Three History Division members have been elected to 2021 AEJMC leadership positions. Katherine Foss (Middle Tennessee State University) and Kimberly Voss (University of Central Florida) will serve on the Research Committee. Shearon Roberts (Xavier University of LA) will serve on the Teaching Committee.

Teri Finneman (University of Kansas) hosted History Division members on Zoom for the recording of her interview with White House Reporter Jonathan Karl of ABC, author of Front Row at the Trump Show. The event is now available as a Journal History Podcast here.

Wendy Melillo (American University) has won this year’s Michael S. Sweeney award for her article “Democracy’s Adventure Hero on a New Frontier: Bridging Language in the Ad Council’s Peace Corps Campaign, 1961-1970.”

Rachel Grant (University of Florida) won the top paper in the International Communication Association’s Ethnicity and Race in Communication Division, with co-authors Raegan Burden and Spenser Cheek. Their paper, “I Am Speaking:” 2020 VP Nominee Kamala Harris’s Impact of Black Feminism as Social Influencers on Twitter,” will be presented at ICA’s conference in May. ica21-printprogram.pdf (ymaws.com)

Cayce Myers’ (Virgina Tech University) essay, “The Legal Legacy of 9/11,” was published online in February with Journalism History, as part of its series of essays on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Cayce is vice chair of the AEJMC History Division. Myers Essay: The Legal Legacy of 9/11 – Journalism History journal (journalism-history.org)

Elisabeth Fondren (St. John’s University) appeared as a guest on the Journalism History Podcast, in the episode, “The Great War Through the Lens,” with host Teri Finneman. Fondren talked about the work of World War 1-era photographer Percy Brown.  Fondren Podcast: The Great War Through the Lens – Journalism History journal (journalism-history.org)

Teri Finneman (University of Kansas) and Will Mari’s (Louisiana State University) pandemic oral-history project was featured on Poynter.org, as written up and presented by Kristen Hare, “The Essential Workers.” Oral history: How journalists in mid-America became essential workers during the pandemic – Poynter

Owen V. Johnson’s (Indiana University) essay “The Press of Change: Mass Communications in Late Communist and Post-Communist Societies,” originally published in 1992 in Adaptation and Transformation in Communist and Post-Communist Systems, edited by Sabrina P. Ramet (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), has recently been republished in a Routledge edition of the book. His study was funded by a research grant from the National Council for Soviet and East European Research.

Joe Saltzman (University of Southern California) chaired a panel on the Image of the Public Relations Practitioner in Popular Culture at the AEJMC Public Relations Division virtual conference on Friday, February 26. He produced a special video showing excerpts from films and TV shows from 1901 to 2019. He also recently delivered three lectures to 40 Chinese students in China on the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture.