(in alphabetical order)

Ross F. Collins (North Dakota State University, Fargo) has been elected president of the American Journalism Historians Association for 2018-19. His research specialties are World War I journalism history, U.S. frontier journalism history and French journalism history. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Donna L. Halper (Lesley University, Cambridge) won the 9th Annual Collectors Award from Historic New England for her work preserving memorabilia related to the history of broadcasting.

Janice Hume, Department Head and Carolyn McKenzie and Don E. Carter Chair at the University of Georgia, has grounded her research in public memory and how individuals are remembered through obituaries. Uncovering the stories of the past through the people who lived it has also provided numerous opportunities for her students and future historians to “play detective” and uncover stories untold. We talked over the phone on November 13, 2018, chronicling Hume’s path to discovering media history and how she has complemented her research and scholarship in the classroom 

How did you come to your area of scholarship?

I took a seminar in media history at the University of Missouri. It was almost an instant connection for me that this is what I wanted to study. The final paper out of this course would become my Master’s Thesis. I examined what qualities defined a heroic woman in the nineteenth century. My dissertation was a cultural studies of obituaries, comparing over 8,000 obituaries in the 1800s and 1900s. In the nineteenth century, I discovered that people were remembered for attributes of character. After the industrial revolution, however, obituaries showed that individuals were remembered for wealth or associations or for wealthy marriages.

What history-based courses have you taught and how does your research inform your teaching?

I currently teach a course in the history of American Mass Media. I have also taught historical methods. In my history of American Mass Media course, every year the class completes a project grounded in primary documents in materials. I ask them to find a primary inspiration document and build a paper around that document.

I also find opportunities to allow my students to connect journalism history with current events. WSB, the local ABC affiliate in Atlanta, recently celebrated their fiftieth anniversary, and my students were tasked to identify the top news stories of a particular decade. Many of their choices were actually selected by the station and were part of their hour-long retrospective!

What advice do you have for junior faculty?

There are lots of grad students interested in media history. It is most important to find topics that you are passionate about. It can take a long amount of time and not knowing what your primary sources are. It’s like a detective story.

Interviewed by Colin Kearney

Name: David Davies
Where you work: University of Southern Mississippi
Where you got/are getting your Ph.D.: University of Alabama, 1997
Current favorite class: Introduction to Social Media
Current research project: Anti-Communism Crusaders in Mississippi in the 1940s
Fun fact about yourself: I was a French major as an undergraduate and have enjoyed refreshing my knowledge of the language over the last few years. Who’s up for Paris?

Name: Flora Khoo
Where you work: School of Communication and the Arts, Regent University
Where you got/are getting your Ph.D.: Regent University (where she’s the current vice chair of BEA’s History Division).
Current favorite class: Theories and Effects of Mediated Terrorism
Current research project: Colin Kapernick Nike Ad: Strategic Use of Twitter in the Role of Public Debate of Sensitive Social Justice Issues
Fun fact about yourself: I love canoeing!

Name: Wendy Melillo
Where you work: School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C.
Where you got your degrees: I am AU born and bred. I hold the following degrees:

• A. in International Relations and Print Journalism from American University
• A. in International Communication from American University
• A. in the History of Ideas from Johns Hopkins University

Thinking about getting a Ph.D in American History to improve my historical research methods. Anyone out there willing to discuss the wisdom or folly of earning a Ph.D post tenure?
Current favorite class: Ethics in Strategic Communication, which is a course I developed and teach online in our Master’s in Strategic Communication program. Students are taught how to use classical theories of ethics and professional codes of ethics to make justifiable decisions in response to thorny ethical scenarios. Since no course is ever complete without some history, we trace the rise of the Protestant work ethic and the role it played in the birth of modern capitalism. We also explore the roots of propaganda.
Current research project: I am juggling two book projects. One involves women in political communication. The second focuses on the chief lobbying organization for liquor manufacturers and the legacy of prohibition.
Fun fact about yourself: I hold a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. The training gave me great confidence when I covered night cops for the Washington Post.

Name: Andrew Stoner
Where you work: California State University, Sacramento
Where you got/are getting your Ph.D.: Colorado State University
Current favorite class: Writing Public Information
Current research project: I’m completing final edits on a new book, The Journalist of Castro Street: The Life of Randy Shilts, the first-ever biography on America’s AIDS chronicler. It will be released in 2019 by University of Illinois Press.  I’m also completing a manuscript examining the Presidential campaigns of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace between 1964-1976 in states outside of the Deep South.
Fun fact about yourself: I occasionally appear on true-crime TV programs such as “Snapped: Killer Couples” and “Crime Watch Daily” based on my writing about infamous crime cases across America. I also sold the rights to my book Cobra Killer for a 2016 feature film, “King Cobra.”

By Kristin L. Gustafson, Teaching Standards Chair, University of Washington-Bothell
gustaf13@uw.edu

Just hours before the memorial service for Hazel Dicken-Garcia in June, I sat with four of her graduate students eating one of her favorite treats: a chocolate croissant from St. Paul’s Bread and Chocolate. As the sugar revved my body, I also felt a different rush. It was as if Dicken-Garcia—Hazel to all of us—was with us during a moment that would make her proud. Somewhat effortlessly, our conversation moved to scholarship. Soon we each jumped into a conversation to argue separately the merits and rigor of qualitative research and encourage one of my former classmates with her current research project. Sitting there with the warm sun on all of us, I could see Dicken-Garcia’s handiwork. It was not just our clarity about methodology that struck me. It was also the bond that stretched across geography and time and held us fast.

I’d come back to my home state of Minnesota for the service, a lunch with graduate school friends, and, as it turned out, a chocolate croissant. Dicken-Garcia changed my life in three important ways. She showed me how to be both fallible and excellent in teaching. She fed my insatiable appetite for questions that could be answered and honed with clarity and rigor. She taught me how to integrate family and career.

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The History Division leadership has finalized the panel selections for the 2019 AEJMC conference in Toronto.

This year was competitive, with 13 panel proposals submitted by our division members, two suggested by outside divisions/groups, and seven open slots. Furthermore, as discussed at our division business meeting in August, we needed to put more emphasis on PF&R and Teaching this year after being so Research heavy lately.

All of the selected panels were ones submitted by our own members and selected after negotiations with other divisions/groups.

We had so many good proposals, and the podcast team will look into doing episodes on many of them, including those not selected for the conference.

Here are brief details of the seven panel deals we made:

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Several members of the AEJMC History Division participated in the American Journalism Historians Association conference that met Oct. 4-6 in Salt Lake City. The conference took place in the downtown Hotel RL, surrounded by picturesque mountains. The following photos depict some of the conference happenings (click each photo to enlarge; photos by Erika Pribanic-Smith, unless otherwise noted). For the full program and a listing of award winners, visit the AJHA Salt Lake City conference microsite.

Many academics spent the summer poring over manuscripts or rustling up new source documents at archives. But not Ellen Gerl.

Gerl spent a richly-deserved several months traveling across the United States, stopping to mountain bike along the way. And she’s headed back out on the road soon, this time to New Mexico, where she’ll spend several weeks prepping for her daughter’s wedding at a ranch that served as inspiration for painter Georgia O’Keeffe.

Following decades of teaching, Gerl retired as an associate professor at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University this May. While at OU, Gerl taught public relations writing and magazine feature writing courses. Prior to joining the academic world, Gerl spent more than fifteen years in public relations positions in healthcare and higher-education settings.

We sat down over coffee to look back on Gerl’s historical research, the ways she integrated her work and teaching, and advice she had for budding historians.

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Name: John S. Armstrong
Where you work: Department of Communication Studies, Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina
Where you received/are receiving your Ph.D.: Ph.D. received at the University of Utah in 2002
Current favorite class: Media History
Current research project: History of South Carolina Broadcasting

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Stephen Bates (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) is one of the three petitioners who are trying to dislodge what may be Watergate’s last secret: the special prosecutor’s report to the House as it considered impeachment of President Nixon. The judge put the report under seal in 1974, and it has stayed that way ever since. Bates filed the petition on Sept. 14 in collaboration with Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and the editor in chief of Lawfare, an online publication that specializes in national security legal policy issues, and Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush Administration. Bates is a law professor who, as a federal prosecutor working for Ken Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton, co-wrote the report to Congress recommending that Mr. Clinton be impeached. The three are represented by Protect Democracy, a government watchdog group.

Nicholas Hirshon (William Paterson University) will celebrate the publication of his book, We Want Fish Sticks: The Bizarre and Infamous Rebranding of the New York Islanders, by the University of Nebraska Press on December 1. The book, which is based on his doctoral dissertation at Ohio University, chronicles the wacky story of the National Hockey League team in the mid-1990s, when the franchise abandoned its original logo—a map of Long Island with the bold letters “NY”—in favor of a cartoon fisherman similar to the mascot for Gorton’s frozen seafood. The book’s title alludes to a chant that fans of opposing teams used to taunt the Islanders.

Berkley Hudson (University of Missouri-Columbia) has published a book chapter with two recent Mizzou doctoral graduates in journalism — Carlos A. Cortés-Martínez of the Universidad de La Sabana in Colombia, and Joy Jenkins of the Reuters Institute for Journalism Studies at the University of Oxford in England. They analyzed stories in SoHo, a Colombian men’s publication that’s been compared to Esquire, GQ and Playboy. The authors investigated the place of female reporters in South America in the sphere of Gonzo — a field traditionally studied through the works of Western, male journalists. The chapter, titled “La Revista Prohibida Para las Mujeres: Gonzo By Women in SoHo Magazine of Colombia, South America,” appears in Fear and Loathing Worldwide: Gonzo Journalism Beyond Hunter S. Thompson, edited by Robert Alexander and Christine Isager and published by Bloomsbury.

Tom Mascaro (Bowling Green State University) has been awarded American Journalism’s “Article of the Year” for his study that appeared in the spring issue of the journal. “The Blood of Others: Television Documentary Journalism as Literary Engagement” argues documentary journalists have been too narrowly defined as strictly journalists. Mascaro posits documentarians, like their counterparts in literature, intimately engage with and immerse themselves in the topics they research, which warrants examining documentaries as both acts of journalism and engaged literature. Mascaro was recognized for his work at the American Journalism Historians Association’s National Convention in Salt Lake City.

Victor Pickard (University of Pennsylvania) has a new article in the International Journal of Communication titled “The Strange Life and Death of the Fairness Doctrine: Tracing the Decline of Positive Freedoms in American Policy Discourse.” One of the most famous and controversial media policies ever enacted, the Fairness Doctrine suffered a final deathblow in August 2011 when the Federal Communications Commission permanently struck it from the books. However, the Doctrine continues to be invoked by proponents and detractors alike. Using mixed methods, Pickard’s study historically contextualizes the Fairness Doctrine while drawing attention to how it figures within contemporary regulatory debates.

Kimberly Wilmot Voss, Re-Evaluating Women’s Page Journalism in the Post-World War II Era: Celebrating Soft News (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Women are most likely to be included in journalism history if they make it to the front pages of newspapers, cover sports or become wartime correspondents – when they dared to take on men’s turf.[i] Only during wartime did women leave the women’s section, other than a token few. They were rarely part of newsrooms at most metropolitan newspapers. Yet, in the years between World War II and the beginnings of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s, many women’s page journalists were also redefining women’s roles.

For much of the scholarship on journalism history, the story of women’s pages has been consistently defined with a broad stroke, described as the four Fs of family, fashion, food and furnishings. The women’s pages were also the place to find high society news, advice columns, and wedding information. More often, the term fluff was applied to women’s page material. Yet, the sections were rarely examined to see if there was more to it. Recent scholarship has begun to shine a light on the women who covered soft news.[ii] The truth is more complicated as many women’s pages had long been refining roles for women as recent scholarship has shown.[iii]

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