Elisabeth Fondren (St. John’s University) recently participated in a global panel on civility in political communication organized by the University of Vienna, Austria. She spoke about American efforts to promote propaganda literacy through public education and the press before and during World War II. 

The Society of Professional Journalists chapter that Nick Hirshon (William Paterson University) founded and advises was recognized in November as the National Campus Chapter of the Year, out of almost 100 chapters across the United States. SPJ cited eighteen programs and projects that Hirshon coordinated during the 2019-2020 academic year, including a discussion series with professional journalists on campus as well as trips to shadow a theater critic and a professional basketball announcer.

Vincent DiGirolamo (Baruch College) has received the American Historical Association’s 2020 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the History of Journalism for his book Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford). The book explores the newspaper industry’s relationship with paid and unpaid labor from the era of colonial slavery to the end of the “American Century.” Crying the News previously won the Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award, the Philip Taft Labor History Prize, and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.

Stephen Banning (Bradley University) has published Journalism Standards of Work Today: Using History to Create a New Code of Journalism Ethics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). The book’s premise is that the same concerns that gave rise to journalistic standards of work after the Industrial Revolution still apply in the Digital Age. Banning notes that the book is a culmination of 25 years of research into the origins of journalistic professionalization and the roots of the “Canons of Journalism.”

Debbie van Tuyll (Augusta University) has won the Donald L. Shaw Lifetime Award for Outstanding Service to Journalism History at the 2020 Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression.

Stephen Bates (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) delivered the annual State of the First Amendment Address at the University of Kentucky on November 12, sponsored by the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center in the School of Journalism and Media. Bates is the author of the new book An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press (Yale).