Hazel Dicken-Garcia Dies at 79

By Bill Huntzicker

Professor Hazel Dicken-Garcia, 79, who was among the first to explore the evolution of ethics in journalism and whose students populate newsrooms and universities around the nation, died May 30 at Our Lady of Peace hospice in St. Paul, Minn., two miles from the home in which she lived since the 1980s.

Dr. Dicken-Garcia taught in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for 30 years.

Her second and best-known book, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America, won the Frank Luther Mott Kappa Tau Alpha research award in 1989. She received the American Journalism Historians Association’s Kobre Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2006.

Born in a log house in rural Clinton County, Kentucky, near the town of Albany on March 4, 1939, she recalled hitching a mule to a harrow plow to break up clods on the family farm. As a child, she walked more than two miles to a one-room school that had no library. An avid reader, she said she had read all the books in the school before she reached the eighth grade.

To attend Clinton County High School, she had to move to town, because there was no road suitable for a bus to reach her rural home. After graduation in 1957, she attended Berea College, founded in 1855 (before the abolition of slavery) to provide an integrated education for poor black and white students. The college required work in lieu of tuition, so she worked her way through school.

After graduating in 1961, she worked for two years with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in India. Returning to the United States, she worked with AFSC for three years as a youth program director in four states, organizing programs and conferences on social issues, including poverty, racism, and mental illness.

She worked at part-time jobs and as a reporter in Ann Arbor while she earned her master’s degree from the University of Michigan, completing it in 1969. Three years later, she moved to Madison to work on her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, where she studied mass communication history, finishing the degree in 1977.

She taught at the University of Wisconsin, Waukesha County; the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of Iowa, Iowa City; the University of Maryland, College Park; American University in D.C.; the University of Michigan;and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.  She settled at the University of Minnesota, where she designed a variety of mass media history, law, theory, and ethics courses.

In addition to Journalistic Standards, Dr. Dicken-Garcia wrote To Western Woods: The Breckinridge Family Moves to Kentucky in 1793 (2008), which is about early communication on the frontier. Earlier, she coauthored Communication History (1980) and Hated Ideas and the American Civil War Press (2007). She wrote many academic articles on media history.

She also wrote an autobiographical introduction to Beyond the Ivory Tower: A Symposium Honoring Mass Media Historian Hazel Dicken-Garcia, which was published by Minnesota’s journalism school in 2010.

Dr. Dicken-Garcia was deeply involved in the annual Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, where she served as president of the steering committee for more than a decade. The symposium honors a journalism historian each year with the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Award for Distinguished Scholarship. (Dr. Dicken-Garcia was the first winner of the award, which subsequently was named in her honor.) She and her students have presented numerous papers that have become chapters in the books published from the symposium.

Friends and colleagues of Dr. Hazel Dicken-Garcia will gather for a memorial at 2 p.m. on June 22 at Unity Church-Unitarian, 733 Portland Ave., St. Paul, Minn. 55104

The Rev. Janne Eller-Isaacs has asked friends to send her stories or anecdotes to be read at the ceremony. She will pass the unabridged versions of notes on to the family. She can be reached at janne@unityunitarian.org and 651-228-1456 x106.

Memorials in lieu of flowers can be sent to her favorite causes, including the Symposium. Send contributions to: the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Fund for the Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression, c/o David B. Sachsman, 212 Frist Hall, Dept. 3003, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 615 McCallie Ave., Chattanooga, TN 37403.

Questions can be directed to David-Sachsman@utc.edu.

Another fund in her honor is the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Graduate Fellowship, which supports graduate students in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Minnesota. Contributions can be sent to University of Minnesota Foundation; P.O. Box 860266; Minneapolis, MN 55486-0266; The link: https://makingagift.umn.edu/give/fund.html?id=5003

She also supported Berea College, CPO 2216, Berea, KY 40404. Questions answered at edwardse@berea.edu. Another of her favorite causes is her church at the address above.

Her remains will be buried near her parents at the Cedar Hill Cemetery in Clinton County, Ky.

Borchard Outlines His Vision for Journalism History

The following is the vision statement submitted by new Journalism History editor Gregory Borchard in his application for the position.

The new affiliation between Journalism History and AEJMC’s History Division provides an extraordinary opportunity for two time-honored groups of scholars to grow.

With Journalism History’s tradition as a well-respected peer reviewed journal promoting high standards for publishing, AEJMC can provide journalism historians the institutional support necessary to reach audiences of unprecedented scope. At the same time, the content produced by Journalism History can now more effectively provide scholarship rooted in strong narratives and provide the depth and context necessary for the body of literature in media studies as a whole.

With continuous publication since 1974 — including under my former colleague Barbara Cloud’s editorship at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) — I see Journalism History’s transition as poised for both innovation and a reliance on the discipline’s best practices.

I believe a Steering Committee composed of authors who have published in Journalism History — and complementing the existing pool of corresponding editors — can help develop working groups, while at the same time, it can develop a network to grow readers and AEJMC members.

In forming these groups, I would also like to tap the expertise of History Division members in particular by delegating charges to them in groups that can help in the following areas.

  • A working group tasked with social media development, which would help create a more sophisticated online presence with multi-media content that features and promotes our work, all geared toward outreach and attracting interest from scholars who might otherwise consider submitting work elsewhere. (For our field to remain healthy and relevant, we can — and must — utilize contemporary social media to boost our visibility and increase citations of our scholarship in literature as a whole.)
  • A working group focused on media literacy, providing interpretive tools for understanding the primary sources featured in Journalism History articles — these materials can go online, and they can supplement particular articles in print upon publication.
  • A working group focused on visual communication to help expand the contents of the journal into areas beyond its traditionally print-oriented focus — this group can expand scholarship into underrepresented areas such as photojournalism and documentaries, especially web-friendly content.
  • A working group dedicated to developing cross-disciplinary and global collaboration, so that the journal, in particular, and the History Division, in general, might attract interest from beyond our usual target audiences in media studies alone, and so that the content of journal increasingly reflects media history outside U.S. borders. (Of course, these areas can also work well when integrated with working groups using featuring online content.)
  • And a student engagement working group, which can more fully integrate the work of doctoral and master’s students into the journal; first, by tapping into their work presented at AEJMC conferences as potential content for the journal (even if not as fully developed articles); and second, by facilitating roles for students in working groups to recruit longterm interest in general. (Grad students can contribute invaluable skills for all of the above groups in helping with online content.)

In sum, my vision as a potential editor for Journalism History would not only maintain its level of excellence, it would bring its contents to new readers and expand the scope of both the journal and AEJMC’s History Division.

As you will see in my other application materials, I have experience as an administrator and publisher. My work has featured skills in the use of a variety of communication tools for multiple platforms, including print, web, and social media, and I can think strategically to achieve goals. I look forward to putting my skills as editor to work for the journal.

New Editor Will Lead Journalism History 

By DOUG CUMMING / CHAIR

A new editor has been named for Journalism History, the peer-reviewed quarterly that the History Division is adopting later this year.

The executive committee is excited to announce our selection of Gregory Borchard, Ph.D., a highly productive media historian at the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“What a thrilling and humbling opportunity!” Greg emailed back as soon as he got the news. “I gratefully accept the appointment and look very much forward to working with the History Division and Michael Sweeney on transition details.”

Borchard is praised for his organizational skills, his clear writing, his work with editors, and as an editor, for example helping with the editing of the forthcoming The Antebellum Press: Setting the Stage for Civil War.

Mike Sweeney, the editor of Journalism History at Ohio University since August 2012, got the ball rolling two years ago as incoming head of the History Division. At the business meeting in 2016, he announced that he was dealing with terminal cancer and wanted to put this important publication on firm ground for the future. He appointed an ad hoc committee, chaired by Frank Fee, to look into having the division adopt the journal (surprise: it has been self-published since it launched in 1974) and to find a new editor.

Last year, the membership voted overwhelmingly to adopt the journal and raise dues by $20 to cover the cost of every member getting a subscription. Last December, the AEJMC board accepted our proposal to adopt the journal and raise our dues from $10 to $30 to cover members getting the journal. The next step was inviting applications for editor.

Greg Borchard won unanimous approval from Vice Chair Erika Pribanic-Smith, Second Vice Chair Teri Finneman and me. He was also given full support after careful vetting by an editor-selection committee chaired by Frank Fee and including Jean Folkerts, David Nord, Gwyn Mellinger, David Mindich, and Cristina Mislan. (In contrast, editors in the past were selected by their predecessors, according to Sweeney.)

We are thrilled to have such a highly qualified and energized editor at a time when Journalism History still faces a number of challenges: the transition from individual subscribers to membership, financing, the continuing search for a possible academic publisher, and the need to establish copyright of archives that such a publisher would want.

It would take too much space to describe Greg’s qualifications for these challenges and his vision for growing the journal with social media, adding more viz comm history, and engaging graduate-student research (he’s a former graduate director at the school at UNLV). This is the first issue of the new e-newsletter Clio, so I’ll end with a few brief points of why Greg Borchard seems a perfect fit for JH.

  • The journal is returning to a former home, UNLV, where it was edited by Barbara Cloud until Patrick Washburn became the editor at Ohio University in the late 1990s. (Cloud passed away in 2009.)
  • The new director at UNLV’s school of journalism and media studies, Kevin Stoker, is a media historian from Texas Tech, and a colleague there is media historian Stephen Bates, winner of our division’s top faculty paper two years ago.
  • He majored in history at Minnesota, earned a master’s there in mass comm with a thesis on the Southern Press and the 15th Amendment, and wrote his dissertation at Florida on “New York Partisanship and the Press, 1840-1860.”
  • Now a full professor, Borchard has led graduate and undergraduate journalism history classes since he came to UNLV in 2003. His lectures in these classes, transcribed, have evolved into a textbook of some 400 pages, A Narrative History of the American Press, forthcoming from Routledge.

 

Excerpt from The Struggle for the Soul of Journalism: The Pulpit versus the Press 1833–1923

by Ronald R. Rodgers   

This study’s terrain of analysis is the decades of pastoral press criticism that arose around the rise of journalism as a force that helped to upend and reconstitute society and that shouldered aside religion and long-held traditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It seeks to trace religion’s struggle to hinge the notion of social responsibility and all that entailed to the news ethic of daily journalism. Within the ambit of that criticism was censure, but also discussion, analysis, judgment, proffered solutions, and even approbation.

This historical analysis attempts to isolate as much as is possible one stream of influential discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It does so by thematically analyzing hundreds of intellectual discussions and debates that appeared in books, the newspaper trade journals, religious and popular periodicals, sermons, speeches, tracts, secular and religious press accounts, autobiographies and memoirs, and reports of religious associations.

All of these media were the source of considerable critical discourse about the newspaper, which in their totality foster an ethos of proper journalistic conduct.[i]

The year 1923 is roughly the end point of the time frame of this book. It is that year the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ adopted the Canons of Journalism, the first nationwide code of ethics for the profession and the first formal call for press responsibility in the United States long before the Hutchins Commission report in 1947.

While it is difficult to signpost any particular year, given the slow and haphazard pace of change, this book begins with the antebellum rise of the penny press in 1833 and accounts for the influence on the pulpit and the press of the postbellum rise of modernity, the growth of Gilded Age industrialism and powerful corporations, the political and corporate corruption of the age, the changing face of the United States with hundreds of thousands of immigrants arriving to feed the industrial machine, the population shift from rural to urban areas, and the subsequent surge of the reactionary agrarian Populist and, later, more middle-class Progressive movement, which was entwined with the religiously oriented and influential Social Gospel movement – each of which were voluminous in their critique of the daily press.

Enmeshed in all this change and reaction was the growing and transforming newspaper, which, at its core, had substituted “the market for the mission,” as one scholar has asserted.[ii] Indeed, the long conversation about the newspaper’s mission in society correlated with the growth of newspapers. And it was this conversation, I have argued elsewhere, that informed an ethos that helped codify journalistic norms for the twentieth century – seen at its earliest and most pronounced in the Canons of Journalism.

One argument I make in this study is that today, many journalists – whether at newspapers or at the panoply of digital venues captured under the rubric of “news media” – are as equally unmoored as their brethren decades ago. The advertising budgets of newspapers have been gutted. The Internet, social platforms, and mobile devices have transformed how news is consumed and shared.

The industry is struggling to find new ways of supporting journalism. And in the process, journalists are struggling to keep their footing as they attempt to redefine their news ethic for a new era. This, then, is a struggle to define the mission of journalism not unlike that of the past. But one thing the journalists of the past had that those of the present do not is a recent history from which they could draw to redefine that news ethic – the exemplars of an old ideal of newspapering from an era that one writer has described as the “Golden Age of the Newspaper,” when “editors and reporters labored to make newspapers for sensible people, never for fools.”[iii]

[i] Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America, (Madison, Wisc.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 7.

[ii] Helen MacGill Hughes, News and the Human Interest Story (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1981), 7.

[iii] George F. Spinney, “Newspaper Methods Yesterday and To-Day,” Pearson Magazine 23, no. 5 (May 1910): 600.

Spring brings thoughts of Clio

Spring has sprung! And with spring comes a new edition of Clio!

This issue features an update on the History Division’s plans to adopt Journalism History as the divisions’s journal. PF&R Chair Melita Garza details work a graduate student has begun to explore the history of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Co-graduate Student Liason Chistopher Frear explores possibilities with transnational history and there’s an excerpt from Kathleen Wickham’s book We Believed We Were Immortal: 12 Reporters Who Covered the 1962 Integration Crisis at Ole Miss.

The spring Clio also has some previews of activities at the annual convention and the annual paper call.

And much more!

You can find the Spring 2018 edition on the Clio page, or you can go directly to the Spring 2018 edition.

Take a break with the Winter edition of Clio

Just in time for post-grading reading (or maybe a break from grading), the Winter 2018 edition of Clio is now available.

In this issue:

  • With the 2017 annual convention still fresh, history division chair Doug Cumming has a look ahead to programming for the 2018 convention in Washington, DC. There also are details about a proposed off-site convention workshop at the Library of Congress.
  • An update on the efforts to adopt Journalism History as the History Division’s journal.
  • Suggestions from PF&R Chair Melita Garza for incorporating Native American media into media history.
  • Co-graduate student liaison Christopher Frear shares characteristics of a great mentor.
  • An excerpt from Sid Bedingfield’s book Newspaper Wars: Civil Rights and White Resistance, 1935-1965.
  • And details on the 2018 Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference. The paper submission deadline is January 4.

And more!

You can find the Winter 2018 edition on the Clio page, or you can go directly to the Winter 2018 edition.

2017 Book Award Call for Entries

The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is soliciting entries for its annual award for the best journalism and mass communication history book of 2017.

The winning author will receive a plaque and a $500 prize at the August 2018 AEJMC conference at the renaissance Hotel in Washington, DC, where the author will give a short talk about the experience of research and discovery during the book’s composition.

The competition is open to any author of a media history book regardless of whether he or she belongs to AEJMC or the History Division. Only first editions with a 2017 copyright date will be accepted. Edited volumes, articles, and monographs will be excluded because they qualify for the Covert Award, another AEJMC History Division competition

Entries must be received by February 2, 2018. To enter, submit four copies of each book — along with the author’s mailing address, telephone number, and email address — to:

John P. Ferré
AEJMC History Book Award Chair
Department of Communication
310 Strickler Hall
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY 40292

Please contact John Ferré at 502.852.8167 or ferre@louisville.edu with any questions.

Look back at the annual convention with the Fall Clio

Need a memory refresh on History Division activities from the annual convention? The latest issue of Clio, the History Division newsletter, has you covered with a full rundown of the minutes of the division business meeting and photographs from different division activities in Chicago.

There’s much more in the fall issue. One of the issues the division is considering is adopting Journalism History as the official division journal. Clio Editor Teri Finneman has a rundown on the  state of the transition. With a vote to adopt the journal, an appeal has been presented to division members for financial support of Journalism History during the transition. Read more about the process in this issue.

Also in this issue:

  • New division head Doug Cumming shares some thoughts on fake news and the importance of truth.
  • Teaching chair Kristin L. Gustafson considers the role of mentors in fostering teaching excellence.
  • An excerpt from The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution by Robert G. Parkinson, the winner of the division book award.
  • And there are plenty of news and updates about division members.

You can download the fall issue from the Clio page or go directly to the Fall 2017 issue.

Summer Clio features convention preview

Just in time to add to your summer reading list, the latest issue of Clio is here!

The summer issue has a rundown of History Division sessions at the upcoming annual convention in Chicago and profiles of the winners of the Book Award and the Covert Award. Make a note that the division members meeting is at 7pm on Friday, August 11.

Also in this issue:

  • Division head Michael Sweeney has thoughts on the role the annual convention plays in the circle of life of a scholar.
  • Frank Fee has an update from the committee exploring whether the division should take over the journal Journalism History.
  • PF&R Chair Tracy Lucht addresses how journalism historians could respond to attacks on press freedom.
  • An excerpt from Jason Peterson’s book Full Court Press: Mississippi State University, the Press, and the Battle to Integrate College Basketball.

And lots more!

Grab a glass of lemonade and the Summer issue of Clio. You can download the issue from the Clio page, or go directly to the Summer issue.