Member News: Lisa Lenoir, Tom Mascaro

Lisa is an assistant professor at Indiana University

Lisa D. Lenoir (Indiana) received Indiana University’s Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellows Program award to advance her research on the life and career of The Chicago Defender’s Mattie Smith Colin. The fellows program supports IU faculty with promise to be national and international leaders in their discipline. Lenoir’s research focuses on media discourses surrounding journalism, activism, and identity, and consumer culture.

The 2024-2025 fellowship features a $50,000 grant, which allows her to host scholars and to conduct archival and oral history work to bring Colin’s work to the forefront, focusing on the journalist’s career from 1950-2002. Colin is known for covering the return of Emmett Till’s body from Money, Mississippi to Chicago, a critical moment in the long Black civil rights struggle. In addition, the journalist worked as a food and fashion editor. Lenoir knew Colin during her tenure in Chicago, while working as a fashion editor for the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Mattie Smith Colin Project has been generously supported by grants from AEJMC’s Commission on the Status of Women and the American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA).

Tom is a professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University

Tom Mascaro (Bowling Green) has co-authored a revised edition of William Porter’s 1976 classic, Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years, Updated with Analysis of 21st Century Threats to Democracy (University of Michigan Press). The expanded version includes several new chapters, additional Documents of Significance, several key analyses of First Amendment issues, and a critique of the role of academe in the pursuit of rampant authoritarianism.

Do you have member news to share? Send your updates for the next Clio to Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen at caitlinc@uidaho.edu.

A Word From the Chair: See you in Philadelphia!

Rachel Grant is the chair of the Media History Division

We are less than a month away from this year’s conference in Philly. So much work and dedication happened behind the scenes, and I want to thank all the executive members of the History Division leadership. I especially want to thank our vice-chairs Brian Creech (program chair) and Melissa Greene-Blye (research chair) for organizing our panels and research competition. Also, thank you to everyone who submitted and reviewed submissions. Our division has the most dedicated members who continue to help elevate the importance of historical research.

We have an exciting schedule this year and we have an included abbreviated schedule of all our division’s sessions in this issue of Clio. For a full schedule of AEJMC events, check out the program online.

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Research Q&A: Ford Risley and Ashley Walter

Ford is a distinguished professor in the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University. Ashley is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Saint Louis University. The two recently published the book How America Gets the News: A History of US Journalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024).

1. What is the primary focus or central question (s) of your history research? Explain. 

Ford is a distinguished professor journalism at Penn State University

    While our individual research is focused on two separate subjects—Ford examines Civil War era journalism and Ashley researches women’s media history—we are both broadly concerned with questions surrounding media production and media consumption.  

    Our coauthored book, How America Get the News: A History of U.S. Journalism, is a concise history of American journalism—including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and digital—and introduces readers to the news media from the first colonial newspapers to today’s news conglomerates and the rise of the digital media. 

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    Member Q&A: Claire Rounkles

    Where are you currently getting your Ph.D. and/or what is your current position?

    I am finishing up my dissertation at the University of Missouri, which I will defend in the Fall. In addition to finishing up my dissertation, I will start as an assistant professor at in the Department of Journalism and Strategic Media at the University of Memphis this Fall. 

    What brought you to grad school?

    As a young undergrad student, I grew a love of research through the McNair Scholars program. Engaging with my mentors in the program showed me what I wanted to do with my career. Entering grad school, my goals were reaffirmed by learning from the faculty at Ohio University. From there, I decided to return to my undergraduate alma mater to finish my PhD and once again learn from the faculty that first encouraged me in my journey. 

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    Beth Knobel Winner of the Diversity in Journalism History Research Award

    Fordham University associate professor Beth Knobel has won the 2024 Diversity in Journalism History Research Award for her conference submission, “Breaking Barriers: Ed Bradley’s Early Years in Radio.”

    Presented by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), the Diversity Award recognizes the outstanding paper in journalism or mass communication history submitted to the annual paper competition that address issues of inclusion and the study of marginalized groups and topics. Knobel will receive a cash prize during the division’s awards gala on August 7 at the AEJMC National Convention in Philadelphia, PA.

    The judges for the History Division’s Diversity Award recognized the richness and depth of Knobel’s primary research and her compelling storytelling ability.

    “We had a very strong, and very competitive, group of Finalists for this year’s award. ‘Breaking Barriers’ stood out for being richly embedded within this year’s conference theme, connected to its location, and the ways it wove oral history, archival broadcast media, and traditional print journalism sources into a vivid narrative of overcoming structural inequality in the radio industry.”

    2024 Winners of the Jinx C. Broussard Award for Excellence in Teaching of Media History Named by AEJMC History Division

    The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) has selected A.J. Bauer, Erin Coyle, Michael Fuhlhage, and John Vilanova as the winners of this year’s Jinx C. Broussard Award for Excellence in Teaching of Media History.

     This sixth annual award recognizes transferable, original, tested, and creative teaching ideas, especially those that engage with diversity, collaboration, community, or justice.

    This year’s winners will present their teaching practices this August at AEJMC’s National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and will be honored at the division’s awards gala.

    Bauer, an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama, detailed an archival research methods activity aimed at showing students how historians develop narratives from archival materials and encouraging them to engage with archival documents in a tactile way. Bauer’s award submission described “sharing that sense of wonder and uncertainty” of archival work with students, and centered teacher-student collaboration, writing, “we are all trying to make sense of history, together.”

    Coyle, an associate professor at the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University, was named a Broussard Award winner for an interactive, candy-based classroom activity that encourages students to question their own perceptions, biases, and their impact on journalistic and historical writing. Coyle’s M&M sorting activity, paired with Wesley Lowery’s “A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists,” engages both students’ present biases and the continued impact of decades of white news leaders’ values in mainstream media.

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    Fulhage, an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University, shared an activity for students to examine a major daily newspaper’s historical treatment of communities of color and to assess that coverage to determine whether the paper should offer an apology to those groups. Fulhage said the project brings “students of different races into dialogue about the significance and appropriateness of apologies by news organizations for their complicity in systemic racism.”

    Vilanova, an assistant professor of Journalism & Communication and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, was awarded for his “critical fabulation” activity. In this teaching idea, Vilanova encourages students to research and construct a new reality from archival silences and violences, which “fuses the creative and the historical, recuperating lives and stories of people unacknowledged by the choices of the archivists.”

    The winners’ teaching ideas will be shared on the division’s website after the convention. Past winners’ teaching ideas can be found at https://mediahistorydivision.com/teaching-ideas/.

    Digital Humanities Pre-Conference Workshop at AEJMC

    The History Division is sponsoring a hands-on preconference workshop exploring the use of computer-based digital humanities tools for media history research and analysis. Attendees will learn how to access digital data sources at scale and use computerized data analysis tools like sentiment analysis, topic analysis and data visualization. The workshop is intended for researchers who do not have access to large number grad students or research budgets and do not have advanced computer skills themselves. The workshop is hands-on. At the end, people should be able to conduct simple research projects using these tools and introduce these methods in their classes. The workshop will be held on August 7 from 1 PM to 5 PM. Cost is $10. Attendance is capped at 25. For more information contact Elliot King at eking@loyola.edu. Registration is available online.

    Member Q&A: Christoph Mergerson

    What is your current position(s): I’m a tenure-track assistant professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. My interests include journalism history, race and news media, and journalism and democracy. This is my second year as a tenure-track professor at Merrill College. For a year before that, I was a visiting assistant professor while I finished my dissertation. I earned my doctorate from the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers.

    What is your favorite class to teach: My freshman Journalism History class. We talk about the social, economic, and technological trends that have influenced the production of journalism in the United States. We also talk very candidly about the many ways in which news organizations have either fulfilled their responsibilities to everyone in society or epically failed, because I want students to enter the industry with an understanding of the challenges they may face and the historical roots of those challenges.

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    Research Q&A: Seven Questions with A.J. Bauer

    A.J. is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama. His research focuses on conservative news and right-wing media. He is currently working on a book for Columbia University Press titled Making the Liberal Media.

    1. What is the primary focus or central question (s) of your history research?

    How did right-wing media come to exert such an outsized influence over U.S. politics and culture? How has conservative news challenged professional journalism over the cultural authority to narrate and interpret public life? These questions are at the heart of my work and are key to understanding how contemporary U.S. politics have become so contentious and intractable.

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