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 The article uses unpublished archival sources to recount the rise of U.S. press-state collaboration and the evolution of the concept of reporter-agents from the 1890s to 1920s.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: