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

Pam Parry (Southeast Missouri State University) was promoted to professor in Fall 2019.

Phillip J.Hutchison (University of Kentucky) published an article titled “Gay Talese and Floyd Patterson: Constructing a Liminal Hero for an Ambivalent Age” in  Journal of Sports Media Spring-Fall 2019.

Linda Steiner (University of Maryland-College Park), Carolyn Kitch (Temple University), and Brooke Kroger (New York University) edited book titled Front Pages, Front Lines: Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage will be published in March 2020.

This collection offers new research on media issues related to the women’s suffrage movement. Contributors incorporate innovative approaches to social movement, media theory, and historiography while discussing the vexed relationship between the media and debates over suffrage. Aiming to correct past oversights, the editors curate essays on overlooked topics like the participation of African American and Mormon-oriented media, coverage of black women in the movement, suffrage-related historiography, suffragist rhetorical strategies, elites within the movement, suffrage as part of broader campaigns for social transformation, and how views of white masculinity influenced press coverage.

Contributors: Maurine H. Beasley, Sherilyn Cox Bennion, Jinx C. Broussard, Teri Finneman, Kathy Roberts Forde, Linda M. Grasso, Carolyn Kitch, Brooke Kroeger, Linda J. Lumsden, Jane Marcellus, Jane Rhodes, Linda Steiner, and Robin Sundaramoorthy.

Patrick File (University of Nevada-Reno) received a $1,000 grant from Kappa Tau Alpha to study how photographers resolved legal concerns a century ago. The KTA grant will support File’s travel to review archives in New York City and at the University of Utah.

Kappa Tau Alpha, the national college honor society for journalism and mass communication, conducts the grant program to provide research assistance to chapter advisers and to recognize their efforts to promote excellence in scholarship.  The society has chapters at 97 universities. File has served as adviser of the University of Nevada chapter for two years.

Berkley Hudson (University of Missouri) is launching a Go-Fund-Me style $250,000 campaign to supplement his efforts for a nationally traveling photography exhibition and symposia based on historical Mississippi photographs from the Jim Crow era. The National Endowment for Humanities already has contributed two grants to the project, most recently in April for $150,000.

Hudson is reaching out to potential supporters of all kinds: those who can give perhaps $10, $25, $50 or $100 as well as those who can give much more. Here’s a link to the Missouri School of Journalismwebsite that allows donations of any amount, whether via the internet or via snail mail: GiveDirectMizzou link.

The project will incorporate vintage film and newsreels, oral history audio, an interactive mobile app, and a curriculum guide for secondary students and their teachers. In addition, an illuminated exhibition entry tunnel will be made of scores of facsimile large format, glass plate negatives of photographer O.N.Pruitt (1891-1967). Pruitt worked mainly in northeast Mississippi from 1915-1960.

Kevin Curran’s (Arizona State University) study of the 2006 iHeartMedia leveraged buyout has been accepted for presentation at the biannual World Media Economics and Management Conference to be held in Rome in May 2020. 

Poynter recently covered the newspaper launched by Teri Finneman (University of Kansas) and her reporting students. The town lost its newspaper during the Recession. Finneman’s KU students partnered with her alma mater, the University of Missouri, to tackle this news desert.

Dante Mozie (South Carolina State University) presented his paper “‘This, Too, Is Segregation: A Framing Analysis of the 1960 Sit-Ins in Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, N.C., Through the Eyes of Student Journalists” Oct. 3 at the 38th American Journalism Historians Association National Convention in Dallas, Texas.

Students at Temple University tune in to the 1619 Project for Students and Educators session hosted by the New York Times. Photo submitted by Karen Turner.