by Kristin L. Gustafson, University of Washington Bothell

In teaching, many of us love “the hook” the way we love the hook of good stories. We present puzzles for students to resolve collaboratively.

We offer images or audio that hint at something interesting that will be revealed in the in-depth lecture to follow. We put artifacts in the hands of our media history students and follow where their questions lead.

We share our strategies with others in our Media History community. Our winter Clio included Teri Finneman’s teaching ideas to use in April during Media History Engagement Week and encouragement to make these efforts visible via our hashtag #headlinesinhistory. Our Facebook Chatter introduced a few of our colleagues’ most effective assignments for journalism history students. Our division’s home page offers resources— syllabi, sample assignments, and online links—all to help anyone interested in teaching journalism/mass communication history.

The historical knowledge central to our curriculum is important and interesting. As Tracy Lucht reminded us a few months ago, “history resonates with people.”

Many of us teach across disciplines and in areas outside our specialty. Helping these students explore media history, even in small doses, goes a long way in advancing the use of historical knowledge in addressing contemporary media problems.

A media-history hook I use to engage students in my Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences School is a new set of online videos called Retro Report.

Launched by Christopher Buck, Larry Chollet and Kyra Darnton in 2013, this not-for-profit “living news library” produced under the umbrella of Mirror/Mirror Productions, Inc. provide videos that are a “timely online counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle.”

The videos catch my students’ attention for about 10 minutes. They quickly see how course concepts apply to mini-case studies. They see how history matters. Most of these students will never take a media history course. So this short exposure goes a long way.

As Facebook and other social media curators suggest through the science of social engineering, videos hold our attention more than articles. In a recent Tech.Mic article, Jack Smith IV wrote, “Notice all of the videos you see lately? Facebook figured out that video holds people’s attention, so now it feeds you more punchy videos than articles.” One of the best Retro Report sites for media history is a 13-minute video “Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secrets,” released January 7, 2014. This video tells about the eight Vietnam War protestors who broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigations field office and stole hundreds of government documents—memos, reports, and internal correspondence—and leaked it to the press.

Students learn how the break-in gave the protesters the first tangible evidence that Hoover’s FBI was systematically targeting and harassing hundreds of Americans. This information led to Congressional investigations, revelations of more government spying, and extensive reforms to reign in FBI surveillance.

Students learn familiar media history topics—“The New Left,” prior restraint, and government surveillance (including changes in government surveillance in the U.S. soon after September 11, 2001). At the end of the video, students begin to apply historical knowledge as they consider how Edward Snowden leaked classified documents in 2013 to expose government monitoring (the National Security Agency’s seizing and surveillance of phone records). Students learn how historical knowledge helps us understand the past and the present.

Four more Retro Report videos may be useful to teaching media history:

• “Grappling With the ‘Culture of Free’ in Napster’s Aftermath” (December 7, 2014) connects the 1999 new file-sharing program with contemporary media practices of streaming music and online anonymity.
• “‘Dingo’s Got My Baby’: Trial by Media” (November 16, 2014) introduces public opinion and public sphere, stereotyping and collective or cultural memory.
• “Scalded by Coffee, Then News Media” (October 21, 2013) introduces journalism production practices, such as echo chambers, wire services and word counts.
• “Richard Jewell: The Wrong Man” (October 7, 2013) introduces students to the use of unnamed sources, sensationalism and libel.

Each video links a contemporary issue with a historical moment and that moment’s media representation.

Retro Report producers say that these videos are important in this time when success in journalism is measured increasingly “in page views, retweets and Facebook likes” and news is told in a hurry. They strive to slow down and correct the historical record when news organizations fail to do so. “The results are policy decisions and cultural trends built on error, misunderstanding or flat-out lies,” they write. “Retro Report is there to pick up the story after everyone has moved on, connecting the dots from yesterday to today, correcting the record and providing a permanent living library where viewers can gain new insight into the events that shaped their lives.”

One of our 2015–2016 division goals is to develop our partnerships with other divisions engaged in the growing scholarship reliant on historical context, as well as to be mindful of social media in promoting our scholarship. These strategies relate to our teaching as well. As more and more of us teach across the curriculum—reaching students with little knowledge and perhaps little interest in media history—videos provide us one effective teaching tool. They provide a hook.

As journalism educators and media historians, we have excellent classroom practices and curriculum designs to share with one another. As teaching chair, I continue to invite you to share your best practices that encourage pedagogies of diversity, collaboration, community and justice. Send them to me at gustaf13@uw.edu.