Member News Round-Up

By Rachel Grant, University of Florida, Membership Co-Chair, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu

Lillie Fears (Arkansas State) was named coordinator of the Multimedia Journalism Program in the School of Media and Journalism at Arkansas State University.

Teri Finneman (Kansas), Candi Carter Olson (Utah State) and Jinx Broussard (Louisiana State) discussed suffrage history at the Bob Dole Institute of Politics in September during the launch event for KU’s celebration of the 19th Amendment.

Nick Hirshon (William Paterson) learned that the campus chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists that he founded and advises was named the Outstanding Campus Chapter in the northeastern United States, placing above every other student chapter in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, central and eastern Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The distinction placed the William Paterson Society of Professional Journalists among ten finalists under contention for the most Outstanding Campus Chapter in the nation.

Julie Lane (Boise State) published a book chapter titled, “”Cultivating Distrust of Mainstream Media: Propagandists for a Liberal Machine and the American Establishment.” The chapter is featured in Oxford University Press’ News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures, edited by Anthony Nadler and A.J. Bauer. 

Jon Marshall (Northwestern) had an op-ed, “Like Watergate All Over Again? In Some Ways, Yes, but There Are Stark Differences,” published Sept. 25 in the Chicago Tribune.

Historians and scholars who presented research at the symposium included (l-r in picture): Kathy Roberts Forde, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Kristin Gustafson, University of Washington-Bothell; Razvan Sibii, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, University of North Carolina; Blair L.M. Kelley, North Carolina State University; Sid Bedingfield, University of Minnesota; and Brian Bowman, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Symposium participants not pictured: Alex Lichtenstein, Indiana University; Douglas A. Blackmon, Georgia State University; and Robert Greene II, Claflin University.

The Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota hosted a symposium in September for scholars contributing to an edited collection on journalism and the rise of Jim Crow in the New South. The book project, co-edited by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield, examines the various ways newspaper editors and publishers exerted influence and shaped outcomes in the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Forde says the book will “document the substantive role of the white press in actively building, nurturing, and protecting the white supremacist political economies and social orders that emerged in the region.” The book will also highlight the struggle by black leaders who used the tools of mass media to fight these oppressive new regimes. “We envision this collection as part of the growing effort among historians to reconsider the political role of news media during times of change,” Bedingfield said. “Historians rely on news outlets as sources of information about political change, but they frequently ignore the specific and substantive roles that journalists and other media figures played in fostering that change.”