The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s History Division is soliciting entries for its annual award for the best journalism and mass communication history book. The winning author will receive a plaque and a $500 prize at the August 2025 AEJMC conference in San Francisco. Attendance at the conference is encouraged as the winner will be honored at a History Division awards event. The author also will be invited to discuss the winning book during a live taping of the Journalism History podcast, which traditionally takes place during the reception.
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AEJMC History Division Honors Gwyneth Mellinger and Pam Parry for Exceptional Service
Dr. Gwyneth Mellinger and Dr. Pam Parry are the recipients of the History Division’s 2024 Exceptional Service Award. This important award is given by the division’s chair and vice chair to members who have provided stellar service.
Mellinger is a professor at James Madison University. Parry is a professor at Southeast Missouri State University.
Both Mellinger and Parry have provided critical services to the History Division.
Mellinger has chaired the division’s Book Award Committee for several years. She is the author of the book Chasing Newsroom Diversity: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action. Mellinger is the winner of the 2019 Ronald T. and Gayla D. Farrar Award in Media and Civil Rights History for her research on Charles S. Johnson, an African American newspaper columnist in the 1940s.
Parry has served as the editor of Journalism History since 2021. Under her leadership, she and her staff produced the commemorative issue celebrating 50 years of the journal. She is the 2020 winner of the Best Podcast Guest Award from Journalism History. Parry is the author or co-editor of eight academic books.
“It is a tremendous task to lead the book award and Dr. Mellinger handles all the behind the scenes work of receiving, distributing and seeking the best books in our field,” said Rachel Grant, chair. “The division appreciates all the work she has done to honor her fellow scholars. Serving beyond her term, Gwyn has stayed on through several transitions and we appreciate her time and commitment. Her kindness and leadership is an inspiration to us all.”
“There is so much unseen work that goes into managing a journal, and Journalism History is the cornerstone and legacy of the History Division’s scholarly community. Dr. Parry has stewarded the journal artfully during her tenure,” said Brian Creech, vice chair. “The journal has grown in scope and prominence during her editorship, but also retains an attention to detail and care for prose that makes publishing in the journal a genuinely meaningful experience for junior and senior scholars alike. From an expanded essay series, to facilitating research microgrants, to a rich, critical engagement with the content of scholarship in the journal over its history, Dr. Parry has led the journal in a way that best reflects the breadth and depth of our subfield and pushes the project of Journalism History and journalism history forward.”
Parry and Mellinger will be honored during the History Division’s annual Awards Gala on Aug. 7 at 7:30 p.m. in Philadelphia.
Daniel DeFraia (Emerson College) Wins 2024 Covert Award
The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) congratulates Dr. Daniel DeFraia (Emerson College) as winner of the annual Covert Award for best mass communication history article, essay, or book chapter published in the previous year.
The award memorializes Dr. Catherine L. Covert (right), professor of journalism at Syracuse University, the first woman professor in Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Journalism and the first woman to head the AEJMC History Division, in 1975.
Dr. Covert died in 1983. The award has been presented annually since 1985. (https://mediahistorydivision.com/awards/covert-award/)
DeFraia’s winning piece is “Into the State: How American Reporters Came to Work For the US Government,” published in American Journalism 40, no. 4 (2023): 468-499. The article uses unpublished archival sources to recount the rise of U.S. press-state collaboration and the evolution of the concept of reporter-agents from the 1890s to 1920s.
The article was a very strong contender throughout the competition judging phases and received the top marks and praise by judges. “DeFraia’s article stands out because of its significant contributions to both history and historiography. There is terrific archival research that brings new narratives and perspectives into the historical record,” one judge commented. “Scovel and Hale are not widely considered in the literature, and DeFraia uses archival research to tell fascinating stories about them. The article also makes an important contribution to the historiography, as DeFraia contributes a novel perspective on how professional norms developed during a particularly crucial period in the journalism profession. In addition to these strengths, the article is also very well written.”
“I am thrilled and honored to receive the Catherine L. Covert Award,” said DeFraia (right). “I hope my article contributes to the rigorous and exciting new scholarship of our field – a field that can and should continue telling the complicated history journalism and mass communications in U.S. democracy. There is much more to say.”
Covert Award Committee chair Dr. Elisabeth Fondren thanked the four judges for grappling with a particularly rich field of entries. “This year’s submissions covered an impressive range of mass communication and journalism history topics,” Fondren said, “including media ethics and accountability, press freedom, coverage of women in sports, several analyses about international (war) correspondents, photojournalism, Black radio, as well as political, social, and global histories. Judges worked very hard and named the winning article after thoughtful deliberation. They served the History Division and Catherine Covert’s memory with distinction.”
DeFraia is an adjunct lecturer and investigative journalist at Emerson College, where he teaches courses on the digital humanities, journalism history, media law and ethics, and reporting. He received his PhD in American Studies from Boston University in 2022. His first book, Shadow Press: Journalism for the American State, which excavates the history of an idea – journalistic independence – is under review at Harvard University Press. Previously, he was a Steiger Fellow at the Committee to Protect Journalists and worked in their journalist assistance program. Before that he reported for GlobalPost and other news outlets. He lives in Boston.
The History Division will honor DeFraia as part of the annual AEJMC convention in August 2024.
An abstract for the winning essay follows:
DeFraia, “Into the State: How American Reporters Came to Work For the US Government” (American Journalism, 2023)
What a reporter is and does and does not do and the integrity of that idea has always been an unsettled question interrogated on the blurred unregulated borders between journalism and the state. In embattled liminal spaces reporters—negotiating a nebulous terrain of high-stakes reporting that teste dand revised their emerging unstable journalistic norms—fought in war collaborated with US intelligence and engaged in secret diplomacy. This article focusing on the careers of two reporters Sylvester Scovel in Cuba and William Bayard Hale in Mexico explains how and why reporters came to work for the state a neglected tradition conceptualized here as “state work” from the 1890s to 1920s. That history is an argument for scholars of journalism and political history to study what reporters did not just what they published to better understand the role of journalism in US democracy.
For additional references on Dr. Covert, see:
AEJMC History Division announces Dr. Linda Lumsden as winner of 2024 Donald L. Shaw Senior Scholar Award
The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication will honor Dr. Linda Lumsden as the Donald L. Shaw Senior Scholar during the Division’s Awards Gala. The longtime journalist, editor, public scholar, and author of five books, including Social Justice Journalism: Social Movement Media from Abolition to #womensmarch (New York: Peter Lang, 2019), retired in 2021 after teaching for more than two decades at the Western Kentucky School of Journalism & Broadcasting and University of Arizona School of Journalism.
Established in 2020, the award honors a scholar who has a record of excellence in media history that has spanned a minimum of 15 years, including division membership. It is named in honor of the pioneering journalism theoretician, distinguished journalism historian and former head of the History Division, who taught for almost half of a century at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
“We were gratified by the quality of the nominees for this prestigious award, which is now in its fifth year,” one judge said. “Linda Lumsden is an incredibly accomplished scholar and richly deserving of this award. She has produced outstanding work in multiple areas of journalism history—the radical press, women’s-rights journalism, and social-justice journalism—and in doing so has shown the interconnectedness of these important areas. Her years of service to the profession and mentorship of junior colleagues have contributed greatly to the continuing robustness of the History Division.”
Over the course of her 12-year journalistic career, Dr. Lumsden served as a reporter and editor on newspapers in New York and Connecticut.
Dr. Lumsden, who received her Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995, is the author of five books and countless journal articles. During her illustrious career, Dr. Lumsden served as the J. William Fulbright Core Scholar at National University of Malaysia in 2012- 2013 and was honored with numerous awards, including AEJMC’s 2017 Best Faculty Paper and a three-time winner of the American Journalism Historian Association’s Maurine Beasley Award for Outstanding Paper in Women’s History in 2005, 2006, 2007, respectively, and was a runner-up in 2008.
“So much of what we know about the radical press and the suffrage press we owe to Linda Lumsden,” another judge added. “Her seminal work in both areas is cited and taught widely. She continues to blaze new paths with her more recent work on social justice journalism. What’s more, she has been a high-impact member of AEJMC and its History Division since the 1990s, sharing her expertise and big heart through mentoring junior scholars and robust service to our associational life. I’m thrilled that this year’s winner of the Shaw Award is Linda Lumsden.”
Added Professor Carol B. Schwalbe, the Director of the University of Arizona’s School of Journalism, who nominated Lumsden for the prestigious award: “The thread through Linda’s scholarship has been an exploration of how disempowered groups find voice through journalism in their struggles for social justice. Her work has significantly contributed to the history of social justice journalism, the radical press, the black press, the suffrage press, and women reporters since she first won top AEJMC paper prizes as a part-time, nondegree-seeking graduate student in 1991 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”
Despite her record of tremendous accomplishments and honors, Dr. Lumsden noted that news of the award was “a true gift to learn from out of the blue that my work meant something, and that I contributed in some small way to journalism history.”
“I am surprised and thrilled to have my name associated with these heroes of journalism history,” Dr. Lumsden noted. “Don Shaw taught me historical research methods at UNC-Chapel Hill back in 1991, and I have revered the inspirational Maurine Beasley, the first recipient of this award, as the founding mother of women’s journalism history since my graduate school days.
It is also rewarding for me to see the tremendous growth in recent years in research on the alternative press and social justice journalism, as reflected in History Division papers, journal articles and awards. No one could ask for a finer end to their career than this recognition that I have played a small role in that progress.”
Along the way, Dr. Lumsden mentored countless undergraduate and graduate students and peer scholars, who have gone on to illustrious careers of their own, and they regularly cite the influence of her contributions on their lives.
“Linda’s work has affected both my scholarship and my teaching. At an AJHA convention in Birmingham, Alabama, she gave a presentation on political cartoons in radical periodicals. Her analysis was brilliant and I was enthralled,” University of Louisville Professor John P. Ferré recalled. “In fact, I began to connect the dots between her research on visual rhetoric in the radical press and my study of religious media. That inspiration led to a chapter I published a few years later: “Evangelical Television Criticism through a Half Century of Christianity Today Cartoons.” Fast forward to 2020. I was searching for reading material for my 500-level communication ethics course that would satisfy my students’ growing interest in issues of social justice, which burgeoned after Louisville police shot and killed Breonna Taylor just seven miles from campus, as well as my desire for media analysis that takes history seriously to compensate for the fact that our majors and graduate students have no required media history course. Linda’s latest book, Social Justice Journalism: Social Movement Media from Abolition to #womensmarch, fit the bill perfectly.”
Dr. Lumsden will receive a plaque and monetary award during the division’s Awards Gala in conjunction with the AEJMC annual meeting.
The History Division Needs a Website Administrator
We’re looking for applicants for our Website Administrator position. The administrator is responsible for updating the AEJMC History Division’s website – https://mediahistorydivision.com – on an as-needed basis. The site is built using WordPress so it is user-friendly and easy; knowledge of HTML is not needed. The Website Administrator is a part of the division’s executive committee so the person must be a member. Training will be provided by our current Website Administrator, Keith Greenwood. If interested, please contact current Vice Chair Maddie Liseblad (Madeleine.Liseblad@csulb.edu).
A Word From the Chair
Happy New Year! The year 2022 has started off with many initiatives by the History Division. Our members are doing extraordinary work, and it’s time for them to be recognized. There are several deadlines approaching for History Division awards. Please consider nominating someone, including yourself, for the following awards: the Jinx Broussard Award for Excellence in Teaching Media History (February 15); the History Division Book Award (February 15); the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Award for Best Master’s Thesis (March 1); the Donald Shaw Senior Scholar Award (March 15), and the Covert Award for best article, essay, or book chapter (March 31). Similarly, AEJMC has a call for the 17th Annual Best Practices Teaching Competition.
The History Division is also proud that we will continue the Joint Journalism Communication History Conference in 2022 in a virtual format. History Division member Dr. Matthew Pressman (Seton Hall) is the AEJMC History Division representative, and is working with the American Journalism Historians Association, our cosponsor, with facilitating the conference on May 13, 2022. Submissions for papers, abstracts, research in progress, and panels are open until March 1, 2022.
This issue, CLIO shows that our members are hard at work with research and teaching. Please look at our member updates, the book Q&A, and our featured member profile on Autumn Linford. The chair of our division’s teaching committee, Ken Ward, has the first in a series of articles on teaching, this one about rethinking textbooks. With the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, there is also a special edition of American Journalism that focuses on investigative journalism history. Abstract proposals for the edition are due March 1 and should be submitted to americanjournalismeditor@gmail.com
Sadly, as many of you are aware, longtime history division member, former chair, and former editor of Journalism History Dr. Michael “Mike” Sweeney (Ohio University) passed away on January 15, 2022. His beautifully written obituary can be found here. Mike was a person who was a mentor, colleague, teacher, collaborator, and, most importantly, friend to many people in our division. Many of our members, myself included, have stories about how Mike inspired them and made them better historians. Because of that, this edition of CLIO contains several remembrances of Mike by his former students, colleagues and friends within the division. Reading these thoughtful remembrances demonstrates that Mike’s impact on the division, and more importantly its members, was significant. -Cayce Myers
Join the Podcast Team
The Journalism History podcast is looking for a strat comm faculty member to join our team and help with marketing. Interested? Email Teri Finneman at finnemte@gmail.com.
Q&A with author Will Mari about The American Newsroom
The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960 (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2021)
Describe the focus of your book.
The focus of the book is on the lived experiences of rank-and-file news workers in and out of the newsroom spaces of the interwar years and early Cold War. I really wanted to show the development of the idea of “the newsroom” in the generations leading up to the newsrooms observed by Gans and Tuchman in the 1970s, and taking up the work of early journalism-studies scholars and media historians such as A.M. Lee, as well as the more recent work of Bonnie Brennen, Linda Steiner and Ted Curtis Smythe.
How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
I was doing research on journalism textbooks while working with my adviser, Richard Kielbowicz, at the University of Washington. And these texts kept describing these dynamic, slightly crazy, and definitely already mythologized spaces that I knew from reading journalists’ memoirs. But they were also real, often exclusive, sometimes harsh, but ironically beloved spaces. And so I wanted to find out what they were really like, as best as one can, as physical spaces with a corresponding culture. But I couldn’t find a comprehensive history of the newsroom anywhere! There were lots of short, capsule-style histories, and some scholars, like Fred Fedler, but also Julia Guarneri, Michael Stamm and Aurora Wallace, had written these great, materiality-centered histories of news production and buildings. And so I wrote the book I wished I could have used to answer my questions, if that makes sense.
What archives or research materials did you use?
I used Quill, published by the Society of Professional Journalists, Editor & Publisher (now mostly scanned by the Internet Archive, and available online, just not in color), and the American Newspaper Guild’s Reporter. I also used the annual reports of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, the American Society of News Editors, and other trade groups (and their publications), along with memoirs, textbooks and government documents from the National Archives II in College Park, Maryland, and the regional National Archives located in Seattle.
How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
As newsrooms change, getting smaller, more mobile, or even closing altogether (with journalists once again, as they did in the 18th century, working from their homes or coffee shops), I wanted to talk about why these spaces mattered and how they both reflected their temporal, cultural and societal contexts, and how they shaped journalism as we know it. That includes great things — holding governments and corporations to account — but also bad things, like being distinctly unfriendly places for women and people of color for many years. That would change by the end of the century. But their legacy is complex, like all human institutions. They represented a kind of precursor to the information society we live in today.
But to summarize the relevance for the present moment: The industrial journalism of the 20th century and big, metro newsrooms grew up together, influenced by forces such as unionization and early portable technologies (i.e. early mobile tech). While many of the examples of these large newsrooms may go away, I think they’ll always be a role for some kind of physical newsroom space, even if it’s a small one. And so again I wanted to show where that ideal and that idea had come from, to help understand where they may be going.
What advice do you have for other historians that are working on or starting book projects?
I had originally wanted to tell the story of the newsroom right on through the 20th century, the “entire thing,” as it were. That would have been too much (as it is, it took me nearly five years to finish the project). Richard wisely suggested cutting things off in the 1960s, as other scholars had and have done a great job of telling the newsroom’s story since, including folks like Matthew Pressman.
And so I guess my advice would be to be ok with stopping at a certain point. There’s plenty of research to go around. Ultimately, a lot of what I wanted to do in the original longer version turned out to be better in my two books for Routledge, that function as a kind of pair of short sequels; the first being a history of newsroom computerization (A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies, 2019), and a forthcoming book (early next year) on the history of the news industry and the internet (wish me luck!).
Summary of the 2021 AEJMC History Division Business Meeting
Thursday, Aug. 5, virtual meeting
6:45 p.m. PT/7:45 p.m. MT/8:45 p.m. CT/9:45 p.m. ET
The virtual AEJMC history division meeting in early August included a summary of the division’s activities during 2020-21, leadership voting, transitions and information, and a presentation of the success of Journalism History and its affiliated activities. More details, including a review of the meeting minutes, follows below.
Brief end-of-year status report
The outgoing chair, Dr. Will Mari (Louisiana), called the meeting to order at 8:49 p.m., CST. Last year’s meeting minutes were approved (following a second by Dr. Cayce Myers, verbally) and Dr. Mari gave a brief 2020-21 year-in-review report. For research initiatives, he mentioned our journal having a new editor and book reviews moving online. He also discussed conferences being virtual and JJCHC being postponed. For PF&R/research, the division had a 9/11 panel, a NAJA panel, and a webinar with Jonathan Karl (ABC’s Washington correspondent). For research/teaching, we held a student podcast contest and our podcast downloads have tripled. For teaching/PF&R, highlights included a 9/11 essay series and increased media coverage. Other division activities included a new website and Facebook page. Outside of convention activities, 47 members were involved in a division role and there have been 69 Clio/website posts with new content since last August.
Continue readingCheck out our 2021 conference guide!
Thanks to the creative, hard work or Dr. Erika Pribanic-Smith, our awesome former chair, our super-snazzy History Division conference guide is up and ready to be perused, ahead of the AEJMC virtual conference next month. Please see the attached PDF, and we hope to see you there!
