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

The officers have been working mission control with 500 cups of coffee like you wouldn’t believe for days now, and I just feel a need to tell you all how absolutely amazing our division is.

In a pandemic, we had 47…..47….paper submissions. And all of our reviewers had their content back in within 24 hours of our deadline.

We’re down to a few people to confirm yet, but otherwise, every single person on a paper, panel, moderator, award, whatever, is showing up for History this year.

We had an astounding 19 student paper submissions this year, most of which were non-members. Right now, we have 21 grad student members. We’re determined to get to 30 by the end of the summer with Maddie Liseblad and her team tasked with throwing a Zoom Summer Social for grad students. Journalism history is not dead, my friends.

Especially as evidenced that this is now the second year in a row that a Ph.D. student has won our Diversity Award. What an amazing future our division has.

Cayce Myers and Will Mari have been in the trenches with me all week making sure that we have everything set for all of you in August. You have a great incoming leadership team.

And to top it off, we’re releasing Episode 50 of the Journalism History podcast on Monday as we approach 8,000 downloads of the show.

We are clearly, by far, the top division of AEJMC. I’m so proud to be the leader of this division.