The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) congratulates Dr. Michael Stamm, Professor in the Department of History at Michigan State University (MSU), and Dr. Gerry Lanosga, Associate Professor in The Media School at Indiana University Bloomington (IU), as co-winners of the annual Covert Award for best mass communication history article, essay, or book chapter published in the previous year.
The award memorializes Dr. Catherine L. Covert, professor of journalism at Syracuse University, the first woman professor in Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Journalism and the first woman to head the AEJMC History Division, in 1975. Dr. Covert died in 1983. The award has been presented annually since 1985 (see https://mediahistorydivision.com/history-division-awards/covert-award/).
Covert Award Committee chair Dr. Tom Mascaro thanked the four judges for grappling with a particularly rich field of entrants. “This year’s submissions covered a wide range of journalism history topics,” Mascaro said, “including Civil War memories, coverage of Black health, several analyses about women in journalism, early interactive web design, press coverage of scandals, as well as international histories. Judges worked very hard, wrote detailed analyses, and arrived at the co-winners after thoughtful deliberation. They served the History Division and Catherine Covert’s memory with distinction, and they own my appreciation.” Mascaro also noted co-winners were selected in 2005 and 2006 and remarked on the interdisciplinary nature of this year’s winners, which included how the production of newsprint affected military and Cold War history, by Stamm from MSU’s Department of History, and the deep roots of investigative journalism history back to the abolitionist era, by Lanosga from IU’s Media School.
Michael Stamm’s winning entry is “The International Materiality of Domestic Information: The Geopolitics of Newsprint During World War II and the Cold War,” published in The International History Review. The article recounts how Canada and the United States partnered to distribute newsprint to “friendly” papers around the world during the war and to strategically disburse newsprint to promote democratization during the early Cold War. (See abstract below)
“I am honored and grateful to be receiving this award,” said Stamm (right). “AEJMC is one of the premier organizations devoted to the study of mass communications, and the scholarship produced by this community has been deeply important for me and shaped my work and thinking about journalism history. This award is even more humbling and gratifying because of its connection to Catherine Covert, whose essay, “We May Hear Too Much,” in her Mass Media Between the Wars edited collection, was very important and influential for me some years ago when I was starting what became my dissertation.”
Gerry Lanosga won for his piece in American Journalism, “‘Behold the Wicked Abominations That They Do’: The Nineteenth-Century Roots of the Evidentiary Approach in American Investigative Journalism.” Lanosga’s history places the idea of investigative reporting, so commonly associated with coverage of the Watergate scandal, to abolitionists in the 1800s. Their writings provided documentary evidence of the abuses of slavery. (See abstract below)
“This is a surprise and a real thrill,” said Lanosga (right). “I’m grateful to the History Division judges for this honor and humbled to receive an award that has such an amazing history—named for an inspiring scholar in our field and given to so many wonderful historians over the years, including my mentor David Paul Nord, who introduced me to Theodore Weld’s American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. That was what first set my mind to percolating on abolition journalism as a form of proto-investigative reporting. And I must thank Dave also for interrupting his retirement last year to read and comment on a draft of this article.
“A look back to the early 19th century perhaps wasn’t an obvious choice for a special issue marking the 50th anniversary of Watergate,” Lanosga continued, “so I greatly appreciate American Journalism Editor Pamela Walck and special issue Editor Nicholas Hirshon for seeing the potential in the idea and giving me the impetus to finally write this article.”
The History Division will honor Drs. Stamm and Lanosga as part of the annual AEJMC convention in August 2023 in Washington, D.C. Abstracts for the winning essays follow:
Stamm, “The International Materiality of Domestic Information”
In the first half of the twentieth century, as newspapers were the most important means of communicating information about current events, Canada became the world’s leading producer of newsprint. Its neighbor, the United States, was its leading consumer and the top global news- print consumer. European countries depended substantially on Scandinavian newsprint production, and many countries around the world lacked domestic resources to make paper. By 1940, some 60% of the newsprint used around the world crossed an international border as it moved from paper manufacturer to newspaper publisher, and more than 90% of that came from Canada. Even in peacetime, printing a newspaper in the mid-twentieth century was a geopolitical challenge. Once World War II broke out, outside of North America paper supplies were significantly constrained as import flows were disrupted. The US and the Canadians partnered to distribute newsprint around the world to papers deemed “friendly” to Allied interests in Latin America, and this practice of strategically disbursing newsprint continued into the early Cold War period and extended to Europe. At the same time, the United Nations understood global newsprint shortages to be one of the primary impediments to promoting postwar democratization and development efforts, and the organization sought ways of encouraging both a more equitable global distribution of newsprint and projects that would enable countries in the Global South to manufacture paper from raw materials that were domestically available. In the World War II and Cold War era, newsprint was the material precondition for press freedom, and the US and Canada held tremendous sway over regional and local public spheres as their policymakers decided where and to whom that newsprint was to be distributed.
Lanosga, “‘Behold the Wicked Abominations That They Do’”
The idea of investigative reporting is inextricably intertwined with Watergate in the popular and journalistic imagination. But this article traces the long history of the exposé tradition in American journalism, particularly arguing that the evidentiary mindset of investigative reporters first took root in the ferment of 1830s abolitionism. In myriad pamphlets and newspapers, abolitionists began unearthing and laying before the public documentary proof of the abuses of slavery. The apotheosis of this work came in 1839 with the publication of the book-length American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. It was a tour de force of systematic, evidence-based journalism more than a century before the phrase “investigative reporting” came into use. By connecting the idea of exposing hidden wrongdoing with the documentary method, abolition writers established an early legacy of verification as justification for moral outrage in the act of reporting.
For additional references on Dr. Covert, see:
https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1063&context=sumagazine
https://roghiemstra.com/covert-bio.html