Chris Lamb, chair of the journalism and public relations department at Indiana University-Indianapolis, will have his book, Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War, published on April 1 by the University of Nebraska Press. The book examines racial discrimination, the press, and youth baseball in South Carolina in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Contact Chris with any inquiries.

Joe Saltzman, professor of journalism and communications at the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, University of Southern California, published “A 21st-Century Method of Teaching Media Ethics” in Media Ethics, The Magazine Serving Mass Communication Ethics, Fall 2021, Vol. 33, No. 1. In the article, he argues that our practices of teaching media ethics must change with the times. He explains how he uses film in new ways to teach journalism ethics. Saltzman also just published “The 20th-Century Image of the Journalist in Hallmark Films, 2000-2020,” in the IJPC Journal, a study of 360 films showing that there are more positive Black, Asian-American and female journalists in Hallmark films contradicting many of the stereotypes its conservative audience has of the news media.

UNC Press, partnered with Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, has published O.N. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Photographing Trouble and Resilience in the American South by Berkley Hudson, associate professor emeritus of the Missouri School of Journalism. With explanatory essays, the book contains more than 190 photographs. Pruitt, a white photographer in the Jim Crow era of Mississippi, photographed a stunning range of Black and white community life, documenting the sublime and horrific. The book serves as a companion for a NEH-sponsored traveling exhibit. The New York Times Sunday Book Review has featured a full-page on the book. Smithsonian.com, and Garden and Gun likewise have run stories.

Will Mari, associate professor at Louisiana State University, has a new article out in Digital Journalism, “(Electronic) Mailing the Editor: Emails, Message Boards and Early Interactive Web Design in the 1990s.” The article explores how design practices, including integrated forums, tabs, indexes and other early site design conventions—sometimes intentional, sometimes not— led to the first generation of online interactions between readers and news workers in the United States, and, to some degree, in the United Kingdom and Canada. Contact Will if you’d like him to send you the PDF.

Kathryn McGarr, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a new article in Journalism: “‘The Right to Voice Your Opinions’: A Historical Case Study in Audience Members’ Emotional Hostility to Radio Journalists.” The article uses listener hate mail to radio reporters during a divisive moment—President Harry Truman’s removal of General Douglas MacArthur from his command in the Korean War in April 1951—to identify a politically rancorous discourse, aimed at the press. This period of high emotion for Americans provides a case study in audience members’ sometimes hostile relationship with journalists and does so at an early moment in the creation of a truly mass national news audience.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism, to which so many of our AEJMC History Division Members have contributed, has now been published! The volumes were edited by Gregory A. Borchard, professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Rob Wells joined the faculty at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism this spring as a visiting associate professor. He will be teaching a variety of reporting classes and is continuing work on data journalism and the history of business journalism. His second book, The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street, is due out in the Fall and will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Owen V. Johnson has published an essay in The Hill proposing that Fort Benning be renamed Fort Ernie Pyle to honor all the war correspondents who have covered US troops.

Teri Finneman, Pam Walck and Meg Heckman are hosting a News Desert University conference in October. The conference will have both in-person and Zoom components the evening of Friday, Oct. 21, and during the day Saturday, Oct. 22. Topics will include a deans panel, creating a syllabus for a news desert classroom, raising funds to start these ventures, building trust in communities, lessons from students, the logistics of running a news desert operation and a brainstorming hour. The University of Kansas J-School is sponsoring and hosting the event in Lawrence. Registration will be free. Anyone interested should join our Facebook group for further announcements as we continue planning the conference and getting our registration site up.

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.”