By Will Mari, vice chair and incoming chair, and Teri Finneman, chair, AEJMC History Division

Throughout the fall, we’re inviting you to involve your students in #MediaHistoryMatters, a Twitter campaign to get students talking about journalism history together.

Echoing past efforts with Media History Engagement Week and National News Engagement Day, the idea is to get our students engaged in a larger national conversation about the importance of perspective and context when it comes to media systems. 

Using the #MediaHistoryMatters hashtag, students can tweet images, videos and/or text from ongoing research projects, assignments, readings and classroom activities — it’s up to you and how you want to incorporate it into your syllabus.

Here are some teaching ideas you may also want to consider:

• Ask your students to research the archives of their campus or local newspapers, and then post/share images of front pages or something visual (cartoons or ads are especially fun).
• Have students search for family history in newspaper archives
• Have your students watch a journalism history-related movie and “live tweet” it. Here’s a good list.
• Engage your students in a digitally curated project, like the one developed by Dr. Noah Arceneaux.
• Work with your campus library on a “guided” Zoom tour of a special collection, via an archivist or librarian allowed to be on site with a physical collection, or through a digital collection, with a worksheet that asks students about historical methods and sources.
• Have students contribute to the various COVID-19 memory projects happening right now around the country.
• Use the online resources at the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture Project to get students interested in how reporters worked in the past.
•  Get History Division members on board to do a live Q&A with your students.
• Engage with your comm studies, history, or English department colleagues to see if they are up for an interdisciplinary media-history project

Media history matters, now more than ever—let’s help each other out.

Will and Teri