Elisabeth Fondren (St. John’s University) recently participated in a global panel on civility in political communication organized by the University of Vienna, Austria. She spoke about American efforts to promote propaganda literacy through public education and the press before and during World War II. 

The Society of Professional Journalists chapter that Nick Hirshon (William Paterson University) founded and advises was recognized in November as the National Campus Chapter of the Year, out of almost 100 chapters across the United States. SPJ cited eighteen programs and projects that Hirshon coordinated during the 2019-2020 academic year, including a discussion series with professional journalists on campus as well as trips to shadow a theater critic and a professional basketball announcer.

Vincent DiGirolamo (Baruch College) has received the American Historical Association’s 2020 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the History of Journalism for his book Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford). The book explores the newspaper industry’s relationship with paid and unpaid labor from the era of colonial slavery to the end of the “American Century.” Crying the News previously won the Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award, the Philip Taft Labor History Prize, and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.

Stephen Banning (Bradley University) has published Journalism Standards of Work Today: Using History to Create a New Code of Journalism Ethics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). The book’s premise is that the same concerns that gave rise to journalistic standards of work after the Industrial Revolution still apply in the Digital Age. Banning notes that the book is a culmination of 25 years of research into the origins of journalistic professionalization and the roots of the “Canons of Journalism.”

Debbie van Tuyll (Augusta University) has won the Donald L. Shaw Lifetime Award for Outstanding Service to Journalism History at the 2020 Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression.

Stephen Bates (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) delivered the annual State of the First Amendment Address at the University of Kentucky on November 12, sponsored by the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center in the School of Journalism and Media. Bates is the author of the new book An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press (Yale).

Maddie Liseblad (Middle Tennessee State University) has written American Consultants and the Marketization of Television News in the United Kingdom, part of Peter Lang’s “Mediating American History” series. Liseblad combined previously inaccessible Frank N. Magid archives with interviews with Magid staff and British journalists to examine how television news evolved in the U.K. in the 1990s. American consultants spread the U.S. model—the origin of today’s on-air style—and changed television news globally by working with indigenous media.

Nicholas Hirshon (William Paterson University), Amber Roessner (University of Tennessee), and Kristin L. Gustafson (University of Washington, Bothell) have written “Reporting Today, With Yesterday’s Context” for the Columbia Journalism Review. They address the role of historical reporting in covering today’s news. The article emerged in part from Roessner and Gustafson’s work while serving as the History Division’s teaching standards co-chairs. In 2019, they set a goal to advocate nationally and internationally for the importance of history in journalism and mass communication curricula and established a teaching salon to support public scholarship that focuses on that advocacy.

Flora Khoo (Regent University) has written “The Ideological Influence of Political Cartoons on the 1884 U.S. Presidential Race” for American Journalism. Khoo analyzes the influence of political cartoons in Harper’s Weekly and Puck magazine, looking at their persuasive power as well as the public’s role in reinforcing the agenda in the 1884 U.S. presidential campaign (Grover Cleveland vs. James G. Blaine), a significant moment in political history.

Andrew E. Stoner (California State University, Sacramento) has written his tenth book, Courthouse Chaos: Famous and Infamous Trials, Mob Violence and Justice (Blue River Press), which details notable instances of mob violence at famous and infamous trials. In 2019, he released The Journalist of Castro Street: The Life of Randy Shilts (University of Illinois Press).

George Garrigues, a journalist and author, has written Marguerite Martyn: America’s Forgotten Journalist, which drills down to the newsroom level of Joseph Pulitzer’s 1905-1941 St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This illustrated book for general audiences highlights and interprets Martyn’s articles and drawings on child labor, the fight for women’s suffrage, and some of the earliest female politicians. A companion book, Liberty Bonds and Bayonets, offers keen observations on the Great War by Martyn, on the home front, and her husband, the foreign correspondent Clair Kenamore, with the troops on the Western Front. 

Will Mari’s (Louisiana State University) new book, The American Newsroom: A Social History, 1920-1960, is now available for pre-order with the University of Missouri Press. The book covers a time of great change and controversy in the field, one in which journalism was produced in “news factories” by news workers with dozens of different roles, and not just once a day, but hourly, using the latest technology and setting the stage for the emergence later in the century of the information economy. Mari uses memoirs, trade journals, textbooks, and archival material to show how the newsroom expanded our ideas of what journalism could and should be.

Owen Johnson’s (Indiana University) book, At Home with Ernie Pyle, originally published in 2016, is now available in paperback. The biography of the legendary World War II reporter celebrates Pyle’s Indiana roots, gathering for the first time his writings about the state and its people. In them, readers will discover the Ernie Pyle who was able to find a piece of home wherever he wandered.

By Kathryn J. McGarr, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Membership Co-Chair

Elizabeth Atwood (Hood College) has written a biography of Baltimore Sun reporter Marguerite Harrison, who was a spy for the Military Intelligence Division in the early 1920s. The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison, America’s First Female Foreign Intelligence Agent is published by Naval Institute Press and is available on Amazon and at other major booksellers.

Michael Schudson (Columbia University) has written Journalism: Why It Matters (116pp plus notes). The book, published in spring 2020, is part of Polity’s “Why It Matters” series of short books directed to undergraduates. It is focused on U.S. journalism, especially over the past 50 years, and also offers some international comparisons.

Jon Marshall (Northwestern University) was promoted to associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism. He was interviewed in August on WBAI radio on presidents and elections.

Pam Parry (Southeast Missouri State University) and Teri Finneman (Kansas University) recently spoke at an online event, “‘19 & ’52: Ike, Women and Equality,” sponsored by the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum.

Owen V. Johnson (Indiana University)  has written “Ernie Pyle & Harriett Davidson:  Two Red-Headed Travelers,” published in Traces of Indiana & Midwestern History 32:3 (Summer 2020), pp. 46-55. The article tells the story of Ernie Pyle’s college girlfriend, both before she met him, and then after.  Although she died in 1994 at age 91, Johnson was able to locate her family, and also talk to some people who knew her well.

Dane S. Claussen was appointed Lecturer of Strategic Communications at the University of Idaho in August. Over the summer, the national nonprofit news organization he launched in March 2020, Nonprofit Sector News (also on LinkedIn and Facebook), had eight journalism interns and two IT interns from nine universities. He continues to edit Newspaper Research Journal, which he has done since November 2017.

Will Mari (Louisiana State University) will have an article published this fall in First Monday. “A Short History of Pandemic Coverage on the Internet” examines how previous pandemics, namely, SARS, H1N1 and MERS, were reported online in the early 2000s through the early 2010s.

By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair, University of Florida, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu

Matt Cecil (Minnesota State University, Mankato) was named Interim Provost and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs on Jan. 13, 2020.

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By Perry Parks, Membership Co-Chair, Michigan State University, parksp@msu.edu

Sid Bedingfield

Where you work: I’m an Associate Professor in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

Where you got your Ph.D.: I earned my Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communications in 2014.

Current favorite class: We have a wonderful “case studies” course at the Hubbard School that allows instructors to focus on journalism and mass media during a particular historical period or event. I use it to teach a course on mass media and the African American struggle for equality, from the antebellum period to the present. The Fall 2020 version could not be timelier.

Current research project: Fellow History Division member Kathy Roberts Forde and I are co-editing and contributing chapters to a book called Journalism and Jim Crow: The Making of White Supremacy in the New South. We have a strong lineup of historians from a range of subfields working with us on the project, which is under contract at the University of Illinois Press. With a little luck, it should be out in 2021.

Fun fact about yourself: As a failed jock, I tried out for my college baseball team just for fun. I was a pitcher, and during one practice, I struck out a star player who was later drafted by a major league team (he swung at a ball over this head). For the next few years, I tracked his progress through the minor leagues, eagerly awaiting the big day when he made it to “the show” and I could say, “I struck out an actual major league batter.” Unfortunately, he only got to Double AA. Saying I struck out a guy who made it to the high minors just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

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By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair, University of Florida, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu

Gregory Borchard (University of Nevada Las Vegas) is editing the second edition of SAGE’s Encyclopedia of Journalism.

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By Perry Parks, Membership Co-Chair, Michigan State University, parksp@msu.edu

Elizabeth Atwood

Where you work: Hood College, Frederick, MD (associate professor)

Where you got your Ph.D.: University of Maryland

Current favorite class: Introduction to Media Writing (I enjoy seeing students learn a new form of writing and gain appreciation for how journalists work.)

Current research project: I have just completed work on the biography of Marguerite Harrison, a Baltimore Sun reporter who was a spy for the Military Intelligence Division in the early 1920s. The book, The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison, America’s First Female Foreign Intelligence Agent, will be published by Naval Institute Press in September.

Fun fact about yourself: I met my husband in Moscow when the Baltimore Sun sent its co-ed softball team to Russia in 1990 to teach Russian journalists how to play softball. That anecdote shows how much money newspapers used to have and how naive we were as we watched the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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