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!