By Teri Finneman, Chair, University of Kansas, teri.finneman@ku.edu
It’s officially halftime in my time as your chair, so I wanted to recap the division initiatives that have occurred in the past six months.
Our primary goal has been to vastly improve our outreach to key target audiences this year. Here is a breakdown of what we’ve been working on:
Outreach to members
When people ask why they should join the History Division, we need to have concrete examples that set us apart from other divisions. We have embarked on several recent initiatives to improve the perks of membership.
One of these is the establishment of our senior scholar award. It’s a fact that the majority of our membership consists of tenured faculty. Therefore, we felt it was important to create an award that recognizes a senior member each year for contributions to research. Our deadline for submissions is March 15, and we encourage eligible members to apply. See the call here: https://aejmc.us/history/nominations-are-now-open-for-the-donald-l-shaw-senior-scholar-award/. We also increased the prestige of our teaching awards by naming them after Jinx Broussard and continue to host our annual teaching competition.
In addition, we started our pilot year of our webinar series with five sessions, which have been great, casual 45-minute chats to learn something new with History friends. Budget cuts/issues with conference travel are not going to end any time soon, and I see virtual conferences only growing in popularity in the future. There is great potential to expand our webinar series into offering both these informal chats and a more formal conference structure, of which the Public Relations Division is already reaping the benefits. We look forward to partnering with them on a panel about virtual conferences and podcasting during AEJMC.
Working in partnership with AJHA, we solicited a media expert database to collect your information to proactively email to media outlets around the country to remind them/let them know we are here and available as sources for stories. We received 90 member responses to this initiative and are pleased that members found it useful. We hope the media outlets will as well.
We also continue to prioritize our members as guests on the Journalism History podcast, which now has more than 6,000 downloads and 2,100 transcript clicks in 49 states and 64 countries. It’s critical to get the word out about the work that our members do, and the podcast team continues to work on new marketing strategies to promote the show and members’ research.
We will also continue our mentoring program open to members at all levels of academia and will make new matches soon.
We will again host an Awards Gala at AEJMC to provide a time for catching up, networking and recognizing our many award winners of the year. We hope to see you there after the business meeting. Registration is $5 and will be part of regular AEJMC registration.
Keith Greenwood and I have worked to make substantial updates to our division website since some sections had not been updated in a few years. We believe this updated site provides a much more accurate picture of all that we do and is better organized for visitors. We continue to make tweaks. If you think there is any other information we should add on the site, please let us know.
We continue to have bumps in the road in our transition with Journalism History, which editor Greg Borchard and I continue to work on with our contacts at Taylor and Francis. We hope these will be resolved soon to have more streamlined processes of communication. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for our members to submit their research and navigate this new system.
We also look forward to soon announcing the next editor of Journalism History and continuing to serve our membership with this critical journal.
Our JJCHC conference, with our reps Brian Creech and Elisabeth Fondren, continues to thrive with 50 accepted submissions, while the Southeast Colloquium accepted seven History papers, on par with last year, notes our conference chair Robby Byrd.
Outreach to undergraduate students
Due to increasing concerns among the membership about universities not recognizing the importance of journalism history, we felt it was important to do direct outreach to undergraduates themselves.
Our fall initiative was an essay contest asking students why journalism history matters. We thank the members who incorporated this assignment into their classes. The top 12 undergraduate essays will run on the Journalism History website and social media throughout 2020 and is a great way to introduce undergrads to who we are. Find the first essay here: https://journalism-history.org/2020/01/28/student-essay-celia-hammond/.
Our spring initiative is a marketing video contest asking students to show why journalism history matters. We will award first- and second-place awards and share the winning video with members to use as promotional tools within their own universities. We want to see students creating marketing aimed at their own peers to help increase interest in our field. We hope that you will use this video by showing it to colleagues and students. More on that later this spring.
This fall, I also sent out updated podcast teaching materials to all members to better reach undergraduate students with journalism history on a platform that is native to them.
We encourage you to include a podcast episode in your teaching sometime this semester.
Outreach to graduate students
We’ve had our graduate student reps, Bailey Dick and Brandon Storlie, conduct the judging for our undergraduate initiatives this year to get them more involved in leadership activities. In addition, we’ve gotten more graduate students involved by having a handful of them serve as micro-influencers for the podcast. If you have Ph.D. students looking to add a small service line to their CVs, please let me know as we would welcome more micro-influencers.
We also have made a point to occasionally invite graduate students to be guests on the podcast so that they have an opportunity to gain more experience discussing their research. We also encourage use of the podcast in graduate classes since they are great not only for learning content but for learning research presentation skills.
We continue our thesis award competition and will be making a slight change in 2020 in that we will begin soliciting entries in both May and December in hopes of increasing the number of submissions we get going forward.
We look to the next six months to explore how we can expand our graduate student outreach.
Outreach to AJHA
We have increased our communication with AJHA by having the top officers for each organization meet every few months to discuss how to work together. From this has come the student video contest, the media expert database, and a new marketing campaign for both of our journals. We had a flyer created that promotes both Journalism History and American Journalism. Journal and organization leaders are personally handing these out to regional conference presenters during the 2019-20 school year in hopes of increasing our journal submission numbers.
We will continue to meet in the coming months to discuss other ways we can promote journalism history.
Outreach to journalists/the public
Our outreach to journalists and members of the public has come primarily through the media expert database, the reach of the podcast, and our social media team. Our Journalism History Facebook page, for example, receives significantly more engagement from nonmembers than members. We encourage you to share and promote the content on these platforms.
In his latest PF&R column, Nathaniel Frederick encouraged creating a news literacy event in your community or on your campus as an ideal opportunity to promote and justify why journalism history matters.
Furthermore, our teaching co-chairs Kristin Gustafson and Amber Roessner are exploring drafting essays that emphasize the importance of journalism history that they hope to see published in various major venues.
It’s been a busy six months. We hope to see you in August with a complete recap of the year.