Category Archives: Officers

Check in from the chair, May 2021

By Will Mari

Hi folks,

This is just a brief check-in note as we finish up spring semester (and soon, spring quarter, for those on that system!)—good luck to everyone. It’s been an exceptionally trying, tiring year, but the continuing vaccine news is helping make things brighter, and we’re looking forward to our summer conference. It is online, and will last from Aug. 4-7 (with our awards gala on the night before, on Aug. 3!).

If you haven’t had a chance to, check out the conference site and make sure to register: http://aejmc.org/events/virtual21/. Registration is very affordable this year, at $69 for regular members and $39 for student members, before July 23. If you haven’t renewed your membership, please do so soon—Cayce, Maddie and I are working hard to make sure the conference provides a great mix of scholarship and support for our community. The division’s annual business meeting will take place during the conference, as well—standby for more info on our programming this summer as we finish the paper competition and set the rest of our schedule.

Speaking of which, thank you to all those who have served on a committee, who have worked as a judge or reviewer, or have otherwise supported the division over this past academic year. We literally could not have done this work without you. As we finish the paper-selection process, I should spotlight once more the great work that Maddie Liseblad has done for us, with organizing that part of the conference in her role as research chair.

As I look to pass the baton to Cayce, and finishing my time as chair in August, I’ll be working on my remaining chair goals. Those include outreach to our international partners, including at ICA’s Communication History division. I’ll hope to see some of you at their conference later in May.

Please be thinking ahead to our sibling organization, the American Journalism Historians’ Association, and their call for papers, panels, and research-in-progress abstracts, due on June 15: https://ajha.wildapricot.org/2021_Paper_Call. Especially if you could not submit something to our conference, they are a really fine group of friends and colleagues, so please check them out.

Finally, a huge shout-out is due to Keith Greenwood, for his work on getting our new site up and running: http://mediahistorydivision.com/. We’ll be working on transferring more content over, and the old site should still work for a while, but the new one, as approved by the division last year, is much more secure (definitely something that’s been an issue lately with other nonprofit pages), easier to update and will allow for more continuity, between leadership teams. 

Please keep an eye out for more award announcements on our @AEJHistory Twitter and History Division Facebook page, as well as to that revamped site.

#Mediahistorymatters and so does your work. Please check in with me at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, if you need anything or have any questions or suggestions.


Check in from the chair

Hi everyone,

My social-media feeds are filled with hope, for once, as friends and family not only start to get their vaccines, but finish their second doses, and more folks become eligible every day. Even though our 2021 conference is virtual, I am also feeling increasingly confident that we’ll be in Detroit next year and back to a new kind of normal by the end of this fall.

But there have been some really ugly events over the past couple of months that we as media historians need to meditate on and respond to. The first is the racist attack in Atlanta that killed eight people, include six Asian Americans. Your division leadership denounces this senseless violence and we affirm the life and dignity of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), many of whom we count as valued colleagues and friends. For more on how to help proactively, check out groups like Stop AAPI Hate and AAPI Women Lead.

The past year has been full of violence, from the murder of George Floyd last summer to the Jan. 6 attach on the U.S. Capitol and the shooting (last week as I write this) in Boulder, Colorado. It can be hard to know what to do, as scholars. We can and should roundly condemn these acts of violence and repression, but we should then use our classrooms and our scholarship to confront the endemic issues that cause them.

I had an opportunity to talk briefly about this with Dr. Rachel Grant, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, and our Clio newsletter editor, who does vital research on race, social movements, social justice, and Black feminism, often through a media-historian’s lens. She encouraged me to call on the allies of Black and Indigenous people, along with other historically underrepresented groups, to stand with and support them.

Having courageous conversations with students in the classroom, whether it be via Zoom, a hybrid format, or in person, is a lot easier to write about than to do. While I try to foster a dynamic, healthy space for hard topics, like the baked-in history of racism in American institutions like journalism or the military, I of course fall short. I don’t always know what to say, how to create a safe space for conversation, or how to help students discuss these topics when confronting institutional racism makes me uncomfortable as well.  

But just because it’s hard or awkward doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I encourage our members to engage head on with current events, using the crucial context of history. We have some good resources on our division page (and that will migrate to our new site), but other sites and organizations that might help with teaching the media history of systematic racism include Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, the Organization for American Historians, and Blackpast.org. 

Finally, I would also urge you to read, cite and teach the work of our own members – especially members from historically underrepresented groups – who study these issues.

With our conference, I am hoping for a good showing of research on issues and representation, and want to thank our reviewers for their help, in advance. This column may not appear before the deadline, but I also want to thank those who submitted their work this year amidst really trying circumstances. I also wanted to encourage you, too, that if you just did not have the bandwidth to do so, to please continue your membership and to submit next year.

Please reach out to our research chair, Dr. Maddie Liseblad, at maddie madeleine.liseblad@mtsu.edu, if you have a question about the paper competition (or just to thank her for all she does!).

We will have more information on our conference programming once we get through the judging process, but Cayce and I are excited about we already have in store. We’ll be in touch with further details as we get them.

Don’t forget to join our more secure, revamped Facebook group, “History Division,” if you haven’t had the chance to do so.

Please reach out to me at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter, if you need anything or have any questions or suggestions.

#mediahistorymatters and so do you—please continue to stay safe, and we’ll be in touch again soon.

Check in from the chair, March 2021

By Will Mari

Hi again, folks!

Now that we know our conference format—online—for the summer, I wanted to check in briefly.

Please look at our paper call (which also has info on abstracts), and let Maddie know if you have questions—please also consider being a reviewer. You can learn more and sign up via our site, here. We need a good group of folks this year, especially with those abstracts.

We’ll be getting more updates from big AEJMC about the platform used to host the presentations, as well as on pricing, soon. Cayce, Maddie and I have continued planning for a variety of aspects of the conference, and we’re getting excited about the range of panels, papers and activities that we have in store. We’ll be reaching out to some of you in the next few weeks and months as we head into the spring soon, too.

Speaking of the conference, we had to make the hard decision to not have a preconference this year—I want us to conserve our resources and to focus on making the primary conference great. As I told our executive committee, Dr. Shearon Roberts was incredibly generous to have organized permission to use the physical space at Xavier for free. Thank you! But with things now virtual, and since we did not get much interest, but also in the interest of reducing burdens on our members, we’ll save that idea for another time, perhaps under Cayce and Maddie. 

I wanted to share some good news about our site: thanks to the hard work of Keith Greenwood, our webmaster, we’ve secured mediahistorydivision.com and .org. He’s hard at work at starting the transfer of material from our old site, and that should be done sometime later next month, before our next issue of ‘Clio.’ We’ll not lose our archives or content from the old page, but the new one will be a lot easier to update, navigate and use—stay tuned for more update there. This is something we voted on last year, but have been working on behind the scenes since.


Please let me know if you have any questions, and don’t hesitate to contact me at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter. Take care!

Check in from the chair

By Will Mari

Hi folks!

I hope you’re surviving everything—with the new year, and vaccines, it seems like things are, hopefully, finally, slowly … turning a corner. At least, I’ve crossed all my fingers, toes and dog-eared all my pages, to that effect.

I just wanted to give you a brief update on how we’re doing as a division.

First, we’ll find out soon from big AEJMC (probably not long after this goes to print, so to speak), what kind of conference we’ll have this summer. Regardless of whether it’s hybrid in New Orleans or fully virtual, please rest assured that Cayce, Maddie and I have already been planning on several eventualities, and we will be in touch with more information as we get it.

Next, if you haven’t yet, please check out our paper call, and let Maddie or I know if you have questions. Note that we have extended abstracts again as an option this year, with some expanded guidance from the Council of Divisions.

Also, don’t forget the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Master’s Thesis Award, the Covert Award for best mass comm history article or essay, our Donald Shaw Senior Scholar Award, and our teaching award, named in honor of Dr. Jinx Broussard. Please let Amber Roessner, our teaching chair, know if you have questions about the latter. We’d really love to have some great submissions this year, including any and all Zoom/remote-teaching survival ideas. More information about these awards and other calls can be found on our site.

Speaking of our site, we’re working with Keith Greenwood, our webmaster, on updating that this spring, as discussed during our business meeting last year. He’s working on securing our new URL, and we’ll update you as we get more info.

Also, we’ll make a final-final decision soon about a preconference, once we know about the primary conference, but I’d still love your input on that idea. Even if it’s something we do next year, or later, I really believe that it can offer value to our membership and foster our community of scholars and teachers in healthy ways.

Speaking of chair goals, I can report that I’ve been increasing our connections with our international media-history sibling organizations, including the Comm History Division of the International Communication Association, the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) and the Communication History Section of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA).

I recently attended a very early morning meeting (at least for me!) of the ECREA, and they’re particularly excited to join us in future initiatives. A number of our members, including Susan Keith, Elisabeth Fondren and Carole O’Reilly, are already involved in this and other groups. Internalization of media history, especially from the U.S. side outwards, will continue to be one of my primary goals as chair and something I hope to work on as a past chair.

We had a good group of submissions into the SE Colloquium, and I should thank Denise Hill and Anthony Hatcher, along with our reviewers, for their help there.

Finally, I know things continue to be uncertain out there, and so I also wanted to thank you, our members, for holding the line and working hard to continue both the teaching of, and research into, the media history that’s so important for understanding this fraught moment.

Please let me know if there’s anything concrete I can do for you. You can reach me at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter.

#mediahistorymatters and so do you—stay safe and we’ll be in touch.

Minutes of AEJMC History Division 2020, Virtual Conference

2020 History Division Business Meeting

Friday, Aug. 7: Virtual

6:45 p.m. PT/7:45 p.m. MT/8:45 p.m. CT/9:45 p.m. ET

Minutes of AEJMC History Division 2020, Virtual Conference

Chair Teri Finneman called the meeting to order. 

Finneman gave an overview of the year’s accomplishments, which can be found in the annual report. She gave special recognition to Brian Creech for his fast turnaround from an in-person to virtual conference in March for the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference and noted the success of a summer Zoom graduate student social.

Throughout 2019-20, she noted that 48 people were involved in some kind of division position and 110 people were featured in Clio. The division membership sits at 291, with 29 of them students.

Finneman reported the History Division was the only AEJMC division to gain members this year, which is a huge accomplishment for history, and shared the annual DIG report indicating other major divisions saw significant membership declines.

Taking into consideration divisions, commissions and interest groups, only Sports Comm (interest group) gained more members (28) compared to History (24). Participatory Journalism gained 13 and small programs gained 1. All other commissions and interest groups saw membership losses.

Finneman noted the division is positioned extremely well in case there are drop-offs due to the pandemic.

Finneman also gave service recognition to the following members moving out of positions: Kristin Gustafson, Melita Garza, Robby Byrd, Terry Lueck, Sheila Webb, Kate Edenborg, Earnest Perry.

Finneman also provided a financial report, noting that the numbers are approximates due to waiting on several billings. The division’s balance is about $38,000 while the journal should end 2020 with around $15,000. Conference expenses this year were $2,282: $520 for plaques, $37 for certificates (designed by Erika Pribanic-Smith and mailed by Finneman) and $1,725 for award checks. She noted that the division is sitting extremely well financially ahead of the pandemic.

Discussing action items, Finneman noted that she and webmaster Keith Greenwood wanted to propose establishing a new website for the division. The current site is tied to AEJMC, which has a dated system that doesn’t allow us to make basic modern improvements like adding in our podcast feed or uploading our experts list. With the move to electronic communication and the updates that Finneman and Greenwood made in the past year, the website also has seen a substantial increase in traffic from 269 monthly visitors in August 2018 to 836 visitors in May 2020.

In a submitted report, Greenwood proposed the division pay a small fee each year to launch a new website that better services the division.

  • Terry Lueck made a motion, Dale Cressman seconded, to create new domain name for the AEJMC History Division

Members then discussed the domain name change. Finneman noted there is also a potential issue since AEJMC may change its name, so the division does not want a site that is tied to old name just in case. Greenwood and the board will discuss potential names for the site to communicate to the membership. 43 members voted in favor of the change, with no opposition.

Finneman gave a journal report from Taylor and Francis.

  • 2900 article downloads 2020 YTD
  • Texas A&M, Toronto, Penn State top download institutions
  • Submissions 26 in 2019, 27 to date July 2020
  • Journal has a 40 percent acceptance rate
  • Refereed decisions in 90 days or less
  • It was noted that Journalism History has U.S. heavy submissions.  Readership is more international from Canada, Hong Kong, Greece, India Cyprus.
  • International media is important since we have high European readership, but low submissions from Europe.

Finneman discussed signing up for journal alerts so that members can receive emails when new content is available.

Journalism History Update:  Greg Borchard and Pam Parry

Greg Borchard thanked everyone for their contribution. He noted that a lot has changed since last year’s business meeting. Much of the plans fell into place for the journal and many of the people helped within the division. Diverse submissions outside of pure “journalism history.” He also noted there was a smooth transition from him to Pam Parry.

Pam Parry: Parry thanked the Publication Committee. Parry noted that she has a philosophy coming in as an outside person to first “do no harm.” She wants to to recruit heavily from the conference and create buzz about the journal. She noted that she invited 500 people to like the journal’s Facebook page, and 100 people did. She also noted that the board of the Stars and Stripes Museum provided a notice about the journal. She said she is very honored take on the journal. 

Website Update: Pribanic-Smith

Pribanic-Smith noted that there is content related to the journal and books reviewed in the journal. There is new content including podcasts going forward. Views have come from 109 countries, with the following top 5: U.S., UK, Canada, Germany and Spain. She noted there is a paper call for the upcoming essay series about the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

Finneman: Podcast. Finneman noted there were 1,800 downloads of the podcast in the last 30 days, with about 11,000 downloads to date. Great worldwide downloads. She again encouraged members to use the podcast in their classrooms

Book reviews: Finneman noted that she and Garza had discussed the backlog in getting book reviews into the journal. There are so many that it’s taking many months to get them published, which is problematic for both the book author and the reviewer for tenure packet purposes.

Finneman discussed the various scenarios of how to handle this problem, ranging from leave it as is to moving all of the book reviews online to our own Journalism History website where they can be published much more quickly. There was also discussion of having short abstracts of the reviews in the printed journal that then refer to the website to read the whole review.

After discussion, there is now a new plan to pull book reviews from the printed journal and place them on our own Journalism History website managed by Pribanic-Smith, with Parry able to use a few journal pages to refer to them online. This will allow for publishing in real time and open public access. Members also discussed having a more formal look to the reviews, and Pribanic-Smith mentioned the possibility of having a PDF version of the review on the website that has a more formal look. Members agreed to move forward, and a committee will meet to work out the details of moving forward with publishing our own book reviews on our own website.

AEJMC 2020 Conference Update:  Finneman

The division conference statistics were as follows:

47 papers submitted total

19 of which submitted by students

49 judges

Accepted 23 papers overall, or 49 percent, which broke down as:

— 14 of 28 faculty papers (50 percent)

— 9 of 19 student papers (47 percent)

Conference Feedback Provided by Members: 

A member noted programming has been good and timely. Commendation for Finneman and Mari.

A member noted engagement session has been fantastic, and attendance and chats have been fantastic. 

A member noted that they missed the one on one.  Gotten more out of the session because it’s about the research. 

A member noted they liked the idea and listen[ed] to the sessions. 

Amber Roessner noted frustration over research and support for abstract submissions.

The division did not need to vote on a new city for a future conference since San Francisco will automatically be the host site in 2025.

Research Awards:

First-Place Faculty Paper: Natascha Roelsgaard and Mike Sweeney

First-Place Student Paper (and Diversity Award winner): Carolina Velloso

Second-Place Faculty Paper: Ali Mohamed

Second-Place Student Paper: Christopher T. Assaf

Third-Place Faculty Paper: Michael Fuhlhage, Wayne State

Third-Place Student Paper: Kate Yanchulis, University of Maryland

The Top Extended Abstract Award went to Meghan McCune and John Maxwell Hamilton, (Louisiana State)

Finneman noted that Maddie Liseblad of Middle Tennessee State University was placed in nomination for second vice chair.

Other nominations from the floor: None

Motion to Close Nominations:  Jon Marshall

Second:  Dave Davies

Voting link given. Unanimous vote for Liseblad.

Auction

The division also auctioned a Mike Sweeney typewriter painting to raise money for the podcast. The painting was sold for $380 to Dale Cressman.

Incoming Chair Statement:  Will Mari

Mari’s goals for the year:

1) Support our members during a challenging year

2) Build on/reinforce existing initiatives and programs

3) Increase our outreach/connection(s) to the international media-history community

4) Increase our outreach to related fields and the community of historians of media technology

5) Hold a 2021 AEJMC pre-conference at a HBCU campus

2020 leadership team announced. 

Will Mari-Chair

Cayce Myers-Vice Chair and Programing Chair

Maddie Liseblad-Research Chair

Announcements: 

AJHA promoted for September. 

Motion to Close Meeting: Paulette Kilmer

Dale Cressman seconded.

Motion Passed, Meeting Adjourned 8 p.m. PT

Appendix:

Award winners recognized during the division’s earlier awards gala were:

Jinx Brossard for the establishment of the Jinx Coleman Broussard Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Media History. This year’s winners were:

Lisa Burns, Quinnipiac

Elisabeth Fondren, St. John’s

Andrew Offenburger, Miami University

Joe Saltzman, USC Annenberg

Pamela Walck, Duquesne

Donald Shaw for the establishment of the Donald Shaw Senior Scholar Award. This year’s winners was Maurine Beasley, Maryland

The Dicken-Garcia Award went to Mark Mayfield (Alabama) with advisers Chris Roberts and Dianne Bragg.

The Covert Award went to Katie Day Good (Miami).

The Sweeney Award went to Ronald Zboray and Mary Zboray (Pittsburgh).

The Best Podcast Guest Award went to Pam Parry (Southeast Missouri State)

Exceptional Service to the History Division: Madeleine Liseblad (Middle Tennessee) and

Perry Parks (Michigan State).

The Book Award went to Will Slauter (Universite de Paris). The runner-up was Aimee Edmondson (Ohio).

Submitted by Cayce Myers and Teri Finneman

AEJMC-AJHA statement on cancellation of Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference (JJCHC)

From AJHA President Donna Lampkin Stephens and AEJMC History Division Chair Will Mari:

The American Journalism Historians Association and the AEJMC History Division have decided to cancel the 2021 Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference (JJCHC).   

The leadership of AJHA and the History Division have discussed the matter, and we all believe that we need to wait until a vaccine is fully available before holding another JJCHC. 

This is for two reasons: first, as the draw of the conference is the physical place of New York City, and its archives, museums and libraries, we want to focus on providing that experience for our scholars for when going in person is as safe as possible again. And second, by deferring the conference now, and planning ahead to the future, we can better preserve our resources and do a great job when the time comes. To that end, we are still planning on holding the conference in 2022. 

We realize this decision is less than ideal—especially to those who opted to defer last year—which is why we are reaching to those individuals with some options, and they will hear from us shortly.

An alternative mid-year conference for those interested is the SE Colloquium in March, which will be via Zoom or a similar platform.  

Thank you for your understanding, and please let us know if you have questions. 

Will Mari, wmari1@lsu.edu  

Donna Lampkin Stephens, donnals@uca.edu 

Oct./Nov., 2020, ‘Clio:’ Check in from the chair

By Will Mari

Hi, everyone,

I hope you’re all hanging in there. I don’t have a full column for this month, just some quick updates.

Cayce has done a great job with our panel process—we hope to announce our selections this month (we are waiting on some programming decisions). There was a great deal of negotiation on his part, and working with our sibling divisions, to make things happen, and it was not easy in a year in which folks are feeling understandably crunched. Thank you to all those who sent the division their panel pitches.

If folks are up for it (and as always I am sensitive to limited bandwidth), I’d like to continue Teri’s tradition of hosting a webinar or two, so that we still see and benefit from a virtual panel or two during the academic year. But more on that soon.

As I told our executive board, and as you saw via email and to social media, we had to cancel this year’s Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference. You can read that announcement separately in this newsletter, but basically, Maddie, Cayce and I, after talking with our colleagues and fellow leaders at AJHA, Donna Lampkin Stephens, Aimee Edmondson, and Mike Conway, all came to the agreement that it will be safer and smarter to wait another year, and until after we have an effective vaccine and other treatments for coronavirus, to meet in person (with the place of New York being such a critical part of that conference). While disappointed, I appreciate the help of Matt Pressman, our AEJMC co-chair for the conference, and Elisabeth Fondren, our departing co-chair, with facilitating that decision from our end. Scholars who deferred last year are being given some options in the meantime.

For an alternative that will be online in March, I would encourage you to look at the SE Colloquium, and for a hybrid conference option in May, don’t forget our friends at the International Communication Association’s Comm History division. You can read their call for papers and abstracts (as they do have that option) on ICA’s page, here. They pushed their deadline back to Nov. 6, but that’s very soon.

Maddie will have more info on our own paper call closer to the start of the new year. I should also have some updates on pre-conference possibilities, either for next year or beyond.

Finally, I wanted to end with a shout out to our newsletter team, Rachel Grant, Brian Creech and Kathryn McGarr—thank you, for keeping us informed! I am proud of them and the rest of our volunteers, and membership, during a tough time. Congratulations, too, to AJHA, for their successful conference last month.

As we head into the last month or so of the quarter/semester, don’t forget our media-history campaign, #mediahistorymatters—I’m having my students tweet out their observations for their various projects. Think about the podcast competition for your students, as well. As always, you can reach me at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter.

Take care,

Will

September Chair Column: ‘Clio:’ surviving this fall right now with teaching: how to use digital archiving projects in class

By Will Mari

Hi again, folks,

I don’t know about you, but so far, a month into this semester, it feels like it’s been three (or four) months. And so knowing that things are hard out there for a lot of us, I wanted to offer some practical, “off-the-shelf” teaching ideas that you can use in your media-history classes.

If you don’t teach media history right now, these could work in other journalism or mass-comm courses that either feature a history component or even just a section on the use of the college/university library or digital archives. They can be part of a lecture day, an activity-oriented day, either synchronous, asynchronous, or as a standalone out-of-class activity.

I’ll focus on a short list of volunteer public-history projects that are interactive, engaging and rewarding for undergraduate and graduate students alike and that use transcription as their main vehicle. I’ve used these to invite conversation about the role of media history in the ongoing, complex, American story. You might find them helpful, too.

1) Freedom on the Move

A project led by Cornell, it guides volunteers through scanned but-as-yet transcribed ads for enslaved people from before the Civil War, and has them either do the actual transcription or check the work of others. I was a bit hesitant to ask students to do this, but many felt that it was a way to give back and give voice to previously unheard people. I’ll talk a bit more about how I structured this assignment below.

2) Digital Volunteer at the Smithsonian

3) Citizen Archivist with the National Archives

4) By the People with the Library of Congress

5) Papers of the War Department

6) Digital Newberry

7) Various other projects: including this portal, and this list by the American Historical Association.

The Smithsonian, National Archives and Library of Congress’ projects tend to be trickier in that they sometimes require the ability to read cursive, which might be challenging for some students. That same challenge is present with the War Department and Digital Newberry projects, but some later-in-the-20th-century efforts are more straightforward, and just involve tagging images versus transcribing writing. One immensely popular project with the New York Public Library transcribes menus (“What’s on the Menu?”), but it often has more volunteers than it has un-transcribed material!

One alternative is to have students look at finished projects and their curated artifacts, online, and talk about the long journeys these physical things have taken to survive to the present, or what they meant, perhaps, for the people who once used them.

But the initiative I’ve had the most success with this semester is Freedom on the Move, which offers helpful tutorials, videos and other “explainer” material, and is perhaps the most user friendly. I had students take a screenshot of a finished contribution and respond to just two prompts: first, why did they pick their project, and second, what did they learn while working on it? Most of my students choose Freedom on the Move and reported feeling convicted and surprised. They hadn’t realized that slavery was such an embedded part of American society—“even” in the northern part of the country—for so long. At least a few said that doing the transcription drove home that lesson more than reading our textbook.

I would add that it’s good to let students pick, to a certain degree, what project they want to help out on, and to make sure that they have enough time to complete them (I gave my students an extra day). But I highly recommend this as a way to enhance an existing class, and to give yourself some mental space, if you need the support.

A final idea: some university and public libraries are documenting the pandemic and are encouraging students to contribute (this is happening at Louisiana State, where I work). But that might require another conversation to unpack more fully.

If you do have your students use an interactive, volunteer project for an activity, I would invite you to have them tweet about it to our fall media-history awareness campaign, #mediahistorymatters.

Please reach out to me with suggestions or ideas, to wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter. We’ll have more updates later in the fall on our panel line-up for next year’s conference, as well as other initiatives and efforts.

Until then, take care,

Will


Chair column: A thank you, hello, and review of goals for the year ahead

Will Mari

Hi folks—I wanted to first thank everyone for their keen involvement and support of our online conference, particularly our officers and volunteer reviewers, moderators and discussants, as well as our members who showed up to so many sessions and made our presenters feel welcomed and supported.

We also had members who could not make the conference this year due to funding concerns, but who still cheered us on from Facebook and Twitter—thank you, too.

We had high attendance and participation (with 20, 30 or even 40 people engaged in our audiences) on Zoom for our sessions, and we were the only division to actually grow our numbers—up to about 290 people—despite the pandemic. While we might have some fluctuation next year, this is a solid place to be starting from, especially considering the good position we are in financially, as well.

I am honored to be your new chair, but I would be remiss if I did not thank our past chairs, especially Dr. Teri Finneman, for their leadership and example. I have very large boots to fill, but I will do my best.

In terms of what I’d like to do as your chair, I will work to:

1) Support our members during a challenging year

2) Build on/reinforce existing initiatives and programs

3) Increase our outreach/connection(s) to the international media-history community

4) Increase our outreach to related fields and the community of historians of media technology

5) Hold a 2021 AEJMC pre-conference at a HBCU campus

Supporting our people will be my first goal for a reason. We’re living in the midst of an ongoing pandemic the likes of which we haven’t seen in a century. And many of us are at institutions that have curtailed support for conferences and professional development, or at least reduced it, for this next season. I want to make sure that we offer robust resources, including innovative ways to teach online, as well as ideas for digital archives, that will help us get through the tough academic year ahead. Look for these in this newsletter (thank you, Dr. Rachel Grant!) and on our soon-to-be-revamped site, including our #mediahistorymatters campaign and the upcoming Journalism History Student Podcast Competition.

Second, I want to make sure that we build on the great work that Teri and her team accomplished, including progress on our site, our journal, podcast and webinars. She’s left us in great shape, and I want to be a good steward of her work.

Third, this year, I want to reach out to our colleagues around the world, including those involved in the International Communication Association (ICA)’s Communication History division, the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST), and the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA)’s Communication History Section. Some of these scholars want to get their work published in Journalism History, as well as our sister journal, American Journalism, and I will work to reach out to their leaders for future collaborations and exchanges.

Part of that will involve my fourth goal, namely, engagement with groups like the Society for the History of Technology and the Research Society for American Periodicals, among other organizations. It is important for us to break out of our silos and to find other scholars who study media history (and vice versa).

Finally, I would like to host a preconference in association with, or ideally physically at, a historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) campus, depending on the situation in the wider world. This would be right before AEJMC next year, likely on Aug. 3, 2021, in New Orleans. This also might be at Xavier, depending on their interest. This also might be online, if necessary, again depending on how things go with a vaccine in the new year.

There’s a great deal of uncertainty with this idea, but I would like any preconference to focus on race or international-media history-related issues (or both), and perhaps focus, too, on research-in-progress, in order to support our scholars who may not get as much done as they want this fall/winter/spring. I’m thinking of our scholars who are parents or caregivers, in particular, or who have high teaching loads.

While we haven’t done a preconference in quite some time, having a low-cost option for presenting our members’ scholarship, and highlighting the importance of HBCUs in the process, will remain a goal for me this year. If you’re interested in helping with that effort specifically, please reach out. We will need assistance outside of our normal reviewer cycle and likely with some logistics (I won’t be able to carry all those beignets myself!).

I would like to encourage you to attend AJHA’s free virtual conference this October, and to bring a friend in another discipline along, and then point them toward us. Dr. Maddie Liseblad, our incoming (and awesome) new research chair, would like to continue to get graduate students and our peers in related fields involved. That’s a source of strength for our division, and vital to the future of the field of media history.

Please be thinking about panel ideas for next year, as well, and let Dr. Cayce Myers, our wonderful new vice chair, know if you have questions.

I welcome suggestions, connections and ideas, so please don’t hesitate to reach out to me, at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter. Talk to you soon.

Thank you,

Will