The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) congratulates Dr. Daniel DeFraia (Emerson College) as winner 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 (right), 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. (https://mediahistorydivision.com/awards/covert-award/)

DeFraia’s winning piece is “Into the State: How American Reporters Came to Work For the US Government,” published in American Journalism 40, no. 4 (2023): 468-499. The article uses unpublished archival sources to recount the rise of U.S. press-state collaboration and the evolution of the concept of reporter-agents from the 1890s to 1920s.

The article was a very strong contender throughout the competition judging phases and received the top marks and praise by judges. “DeFraia’s article stands out because of its significant contributions to both history and historiography. There is terrific archival research that brings new narratives and perspectives into the historical record,” one judge commented. “Scovel and Hale are not widely considered in the literature, and DeFraia uses archival research to tell fascinating stories about them. The article also makes an important contribution to the historiography, as DeFraia contributes a novel perspective on how professional norms developed during a particularly crucial period in the journalism profession. In addition to these strengths, the article is also very well written.”

“I am thrilled and honored to receive the Catherine L. Covert Award,” said DeFraia (right). “I hope my article contributes to the rigorous and exciting new scholarship of our field – a field that can and should continue telling the complicated history journalism and mass communications in U.S. democracy. There is much more to say.”

Covert Award Committee chair Dr. Elisabeth Fondren thanked the four judges for grappling with a particularly rich field of entries. “This year’s submissions covered an impressive range of mass communication and journalism history topics,” Fondren said, “including media ethics and accountability, press freedom, coverage of women in sports, several analyses about international (war) correspondents, photojournalism, Black radio, as well as political, social, and global histories. Judges worked very hard and named the winning article after thoughtful deliberation. They served the History Division and Catherine Covert’s memory with distinction.”

DeFraia is an adjunct lecturer and investigative journalist at Emerson College, where he teaches courses on the digital humanities, journalism history, media law and ethics, and reporting. He received his PhD in American Studies from Boston University in 2022. His first book, Shadow Press: Journalism for the American State, which excavates the history of an idea – journalistic independence – is under review at Harvard University Press. Previously, he was a Steiger Fellow at the Committee to Protect Journalists and worked in their journalist assistance program. Before that he reported for GlobalPost and other news outlets. He lives in Boston.

The History Division will honor DeFraia as part of the annual AEJMC convention in August 2024.

An abstract for the winning essay follows:
DeFraia, “Into the State: How American Reporters Came to Work For the US Government” (American Journalism, 2023)

What a reporter is and does and does not do and the integrity of that idea has always been an unsettled question interrogated on the blurred unregulated borders between journalism and the state. In embattled liminal spaces reporters—negotiating a nebulous terrain of high-stakes reporting that teste dand revised their emerging unstable journalistic norms—fought in war collaborated with US intelligence and engaged in secret diplomacy. This article focusing on the careers of two reporters Sylvester Scovel in Cuba and William Bayard Hale in Mexico explains how and why reporters came to work for the state a neglected tradition conceptualized here as “state work” from the 1890s to 1920s. That history is an argument for scholars of journalism and political history to study what reporters did not just what they published to better understand the role of journalism in US democracy.

For additional references on Dr. Covert, see:

The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication will honor Dr. Linda Lumsden as the Donald L. Shaw Senior Scholar during the Division’s Awards Gala. The longtime journalist, editor, public scholar, and author of five books, including Social Justice Journalism: Social Movement Media from Abolition to #womensmarch (New York: Peter Lang, 2019), retired in 2021 after teaching for more than two decades at the Western Kentucky School of Journalism & Broadcasting and University of Arizona School of Journalism.

Established in 2020, the award honors a scholar who has a record of excellence in media history that has spanned a minimum of 15 years, including division membership. It is named in honor of the pioneering journalism theoretician, distinguished journalism historian and former head of the History Division, who taught for almost half of a century at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media. 

“We were gratified by the quality of the nominees for this prestigious award, which is now in its fifth year,” one judge said. “Linda Lumsden is an incredibly accomplished scholar and richly deserving of this award. She has produced outstanding work in multiple areas of journalism history—the radical press, women’s-rights journalism, and social-justice journalism—and in doing so has shown the interconnectedness of these important areas. Her years of service to the profession and mentorship of junior colleagues have contributed greatly to the continuing robustness of the History Division.”

Over the course of her 12-year journalistic career, Dr. Lumsden served as a reporter and editor on newspapers in New York and Connecticut.

Dr. Lumsden, who received her Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995, is the author of five books and countless journal articles. During her illustrious career, Dr. Lumsden served as the J. William Fulbright Core Scholar at National University of Malaysia in 2012- 2013 and was honored with numerous awards, including AEJMC’s 2017 Best Faculty Paper and a three-time winner of the American Journalism Historian Association’s Maurine Beasley Award for Outstanding Paper in Women’s History in 2005, 2006, 2007, respectively, and was a runner-up in 2008.

“So much of what we know about the radical press and the suffrage press we owe to Linda Lumsden,” another judge added. “Her seminal work in both areas is cited and taught widely. She continues to blaze new paths with her more recent work on social justice journalism. What’s more, she has been a high-impact member of AEJMC and its History Division since the 1990s, sharing her expertise and big heart through mentoring junior scholars and robust service to our associational life. I’m thrilled that this year’s winner of the Shaw Award is Linda Lumsden.”

Added Professor Carol B. Schwalbe, the Director of the University of Arizona’s School of Journalism, who nominated Lumsden for the prestigious award: “The thread through Linda’s scholarship has been an exploration of how disempowered groups find voice through journalism in their struggles for social justice. Her work has significantly contributed to the history of social justice journalism, the radical press, the black press, the suffrage press, and women reporters since she first won top AEJMC paper prizes as a part-time, nondegree-seeking graduate student in 1991 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”

Despite her record of tremendous accomplishments and honors, Dr. Lumsden noted that news of the award was “a true gift to learn from out of the blue that my work meant something, and that I contributed in some small way to journalism history.”

“I am surprised and thrilled to have my name associated with these heroes of journalism history,” Dr. Lumsden noted. “Don Shaw taught me historical research methods at UNC-Chapel Hill back in 1991, and I have revered the inspirational Maurine Beasley, the first recipient of this award, as the founding mother of women’s journalism history since my graduate school days.

It is also rewarding for me to see the tremendous growth in recent years in research on the alternative press and social justice journalism, as reflected in History Division papers, journal articles and awards. No one could ask for a finer end to their career than this recognition that I have played a small role in that progress.”

Along the way, Dr. Lumsden mentored countless undergraduate and graduate students and peer scholars, who have gone on to illustrious careers of their own, and they regularly cite the influence of her contributions on their lives.

“Linda’s work has affected both my scholarship and my teaching. At an AJHA convention in Birmingham, Alabama, she gave a presentation on political cartoons in radical periodicals. Her analysis was brilliant and I was enthralled,” University of Louisville Professor John P. Ferré recalled. “In fact, I began to connect the dots between her research on visual rhetoric in the radical press and my study of religious media. That inspiration led to a chapter I published a few years later: “Evangelical Television Criticism through a Half Century of Christianity Today Cartoons.” Fast forward to 2020. I was searching for reading material for my 500-level communication ethics course that would satisfy my students’ growing interest in issues of social justice, which burgeoned after Louisville police shot and killed Breonna Taylor just seven miles from campus, as well as my desire for media analysis that takes history seriously to compensate for the fact that our majors and graduate students have no required media history course. Linda’s latest book, Social Justice Journalism: Social Movement Media from Abolition to #womensmarch, fit the bill perfectly.”

Dr. Lumsden will receive a plaque and monetary award during the division’s Awards Gala in conjunction with the AEJMC annual meeting.