By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair, University of Florida, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu
Mike Conway’s (Indiana University) book, Contested Ground: The Tunnel and the Struggle Over Television News in Cold War America has won the 2020 Library of American Broadcasting Foundation Broadcast Historian Award. Conway will be receiving the award and talking about the book at the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) annual conference in Las Vegas in April.
Chris Daly (Boston University) is co-teaching a course titled “Drafts of History” with a professor from the History Dept., Bruce Schulman. Each week, they examine an incident or period from American history (late 18th Century to late 20th Century). Daly leads the first half, focusing on the journalism that was done in the first place. Then they ask about the journalists’ methods and motives, then try to evaluate how well they did. Then, Prof. Schulman guides a discussion of how the same event was handled by historians in subsequent decades or centuries.
In January, Elisabeth Fondren (St. John’s University) participated in the IAMHIST 2020 master class, which was organized by the International Association for Media and History at University College Cork (Ireland). She presented her ongoing research on World War I propaganda ideas and institutions.
Melita M. Garza (Texas Christian University) will serve a three-year term as an American Historical Association (AHA) Council judge of the Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the History of Journalism beginning in 2020.
Julien Gorbach (University of Hawaii at Manoa) was selected as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Biography for his book, The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Zionist Militant, which was published by Purdue University Press in March 2019.
In late May, Will Mari (Louisiana State University) will be presenting research with Dr. Erin Coyle (Louisiana State University), entitled, “Protecting a Jordanian Man Accused of Murder Against Prejudicial Media Coverage: Exploring How to Balance Free Press and Fair Trial Rights,” at the Communication History division of the International Communication Association in Gold Coast, Australia. Also in late May at ICA, Mari will be presenting some of his research-in-progress, “Online Journalism Before Social Media: The Formative Role of 1990s-era Listserves and Message Boards in Analog-to-Digital News Transitions,” as part of a panel organized by Muira McCammon (UPenn), “Dead and Dying Platforms: The Poetics, Politics, and Perils of Internet History.”
Jon Marshall (Northwestern University) has been interviewed about the media and impeachment by Univision Noticias, WGN-TV Chicago News, and WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight.” An article Marshall co-wrote with Matthew Connor, “Divided Loyalties: The Chicago Defender and Harold Washington’s Campaign for Mayor of Chicago,” was published in American Journalism.
Joe Saltzman (University of Southern California) published the second part of his landmark study “The Image of the Journalist in Silent Film, 1890 to 1929” in the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture Journal. This final installment analyzes more than 1,500 films from the 1920s and completes the first comprehensive examination of cinema’s earliest depictions of journalism. It also refutes the misconception that the popular image of the journalist emerged only with the coming of sound in movies. As Saltzman shows, stereotypes concerning newspaper reporters, editors, female journalists, and so forth were firmly established by the end of the silent era. His study also includes multiple appendices that contain reviews of the movies, promotional materials, and stills from the films themselves—most of which have long since been lost. The landmark study contains 3,462 silent films with 21 appendices totaling more than 10,900 pages and has been published in Volumes Seven and Eight of The IJPC Journal and is now available free to scholars, researchers, faculty and students around the world. The extensive research report took more than five years to complete.
To read Part One, 1890-1919:
http://ijpc.uscannenberg.org/journal/index.php/ijpcjournal/issue/current
To read Part two, 1920-1929:
http://ijpc.uscannenberg.org/journal/index.php/ijpcjournal/issue/current
The 21 appendices encoding the 3,462 silent films featuring journalism total 10,900 pages.