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.
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.”
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.
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 Broadcast Education Association (BEA) announced Noah Arceneaux (San Diego State University) will become the new editor of the Journal of Radio & Audio Media. The journal publishes research on radio’s contemporary and historical subject matter, and the audio media that have challenged radio’s traditional use.
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.
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.
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.
Rachel Grant is the chair of the Media History Division
The end of a school year always comes with a mix of emotions. As educators, some of us have faithfully entering grades throughout the semester and others are scrambling to catching up on grading. Fortunately, I think two emotions we all tend to experience is the proud feeling of watching our students graduate or land that job. Then, there the moment of relief knowing that the chaos is over.
As the conference inches closer, I want to be the first to congratulate the many award winners in the history division:
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.
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.
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.
The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) has selected Ken J. Ward as winner of its award honoring the best journalism and mass communication history book published in 2023. Ward is the author of Last Paper Standing: A Century of Competition Between the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News (University of Colorado Press).
A panel of three distinguished media historians chose Last Paper Standing from a diverse field of entries. Judges cited Ward’s engaging narrative, the depth of his scholarship, and the book’s relevance for contemporary media issues.
One judge praised Ward’s book as an example of “long-form historical writing deeply grounded in primary sources.” The book tells the story of the fierce competition between the two Denver newspapers, which paralleled the trajectory of the American newspaper industry and culminated in the closure of the Rocky Mountain News in 2009.
The judge added that Ward’s book “is significant to both media historians and contemporary journalism critics. His exploration of the state of the Denver newspapers from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries explains so many of the economic factors that led to the ills of the news industry today.”
Judges also praised Shepperd’s Shadow of the New Deal for its effective use of primary sources and its contribution to the media history literature. Reading this scholarship, one judge said, brought “a sense of discovery.”
“Shepperd’s book is a fresh, deeply researched entry to the canon,” the judge added. “It is rich in archival sources and nuanced in its interpretation of the birth and evolution of public broadcasting.” Another judge said the book will serve as a valuable resource for scholars studying the history of broadcasting in this country.”
Wardis assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas, and a former reporter for the McPherson Sentinel. His research has appeared in Journalism History, the Journal of Media Law and Ethics, and the Journal of Media Ethics, and he has received the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Warren Price Award and the American Journalism Historians Association’s Robert Lance Memorial Award.
Shepperd is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and director of the Sound Submissions Project at the Library of Congress.
Ward will receive a plaque and cash prize. Both honorees will be recognized during the division’s awards gala, Aug. 7, at the 2024 AEJMC National Convention in Philadelphia. Ward’s book will be discussed in future episodes of the Journalism History podcast.
