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