By Teri Finneman, Chair, University of Kansas, teri.finneman@ku.edu

It’s officially halftime in my time as your chair, so I wanted to recap the division initiatives that have occurred in the past six months.

Our primary goal has been to vastly improve our outreach to key target audiences this year. Here is a breakdown of what we’ve been working on:

By Nathaniel Frederick II, PF&R Chair, frederickn@winthrop.edu

Creating a news literacy event in your community or on your campus is an ideal opportunity to promote and justify why journalism history matters.

The PF&R committee for 2019-2020 will emphasize diversity and inclusion, as well as offer assistance to members interested in creating public service events that help celebrate journalism history.

By Membership Co-Chairs Maddie Liseblad, Middle Tennessee State University, madeleine.liseblad@mtsu.edu, Rachel Grant, University of Florida, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu, and Perry Parks, Michigan State University, parksp@msu.edu

As your 2019-2020 committee, we’d like to share our primary goals for this year. First and foremost, our overall goal is to grow our membership. We will continue our outreach work as opportunities arise. For example, when nonmembers present media history research at conferences, we reach out and invite them to join our division.

By Teaching Standards Co-Chairs Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, aroessne@utk.edu, and Kristin L. Gustafson, University of Washington Bothell, gustaf13@u.washington.edu

As AEJMC’s History Division teaching standard co-chairs, we would like to share our two primary goals for the year ahead. First, we want to highlight the best practices in history pedagogy with a special focus on pedagogies of diversity, collaboration, community and justice. And second, we hope to advocate nationally and internationally for the importance of historically informed students across journalism and mass communication curricula. To that end, we will focus on orchestrating the second-annual Transformative Teaching of Media and Journalism History contest and on implementing a new salon venture focused on spreading the word about the importance of historically informed students across journalism and mass communication curricula.