By: Michael Fuhlhage, AJHA President

The academic freedom of AJHA members is under growing threat as a result of state-level anti-DEI legislation enacted since 2023 and executive orders imposed since Donald Trump’s second presidential administration began in January 2025. In response, as president of the American Journalism Historians Association, I have established the Ad Hoc Defense of History Committee with these charges:

• To give voice to our more vulnerable members who may fear retribution if they speak against violations of their academic freedom.
• To chronicle the challenges our scholars face.
• And to give all AJHA members the means to help track the erasure of diversity, equity, and inclusion in public institutions where Americans expect to learn about our nation’s history, both the good and the bad.

By doing these things, we aspire to strengthen the academy, bolster accountability for our country’s deeds in the past as well as the present, and guard against the erasure of historical memory.

I am thankful to AJHA Vice President Erin Coyle, who will chair the committee, and AJHA members Deborah van Tuyll of Augusta University, Gwyneth Mellinger of James Madison University, Marquita Smith of the University of Mississippi, A.J. Bauer of the University of Alabama, and Susan Swanberg of the University of Arizona for agreeing to serve on the committee.

Threatening teachers and scholars for our discussion of race in the fabric of American society and history and all matters of diversity, equity, and inclusion is just part of an arc of tyranny under Trump’s second administration.

This arc extends from the classroom into the streets of Minneapolis and every place where the administration has run past its immigration enforcement responsibilities to quash dissent.

• Its agents have killed eight people in 2026: Alex Pretti, Renee Nicole Good, Luis Gustavo Nuñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Víctor Manuel Díaz, Parady La, Luis Beltrán Yáñez-Cruz, and Heber Sánchez Domínguez.
• It has, as the American Civil Liberties Union states in a lawsuit against ICE, CBP, and other federal agents, violated the constitutional rights of Americans “by racially profiling, unlawfully seizing, and unlawfully arresting people without a warrant and without probable cause” because of racial and ethnic characteristics.
• It has threatened, arrested, and detained observers who sought to collect evidence that could hold Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents accountable, as detailed in a KQED news podcast.
• And it has assaulted and arrested reporters covering anti-ICE protests, treating journalists as agitators and participants, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, which accuses police of using arrests to silence protest coverage.

These pieces add up to a picture of a federal government attempting to evade accountability in the present. But it is also trying to hide the evidence of its historical misdeeds and prevent educators from even discussing them when they pertain to the racism in America’s past. Historical memory and teaching are under siege. Our public museums and public lands are in the crosshairs. At the expense of telling a complete history of the United States that includes an accounting of not just its triumphs but also its less noble chapters, the Trump administration has targeted the Smithsonian Institution with a comprehensive review of selected museums and exhibitions.

The administration framed this review as an effort to “reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story” in the name of ensuring “alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.” This includes a review of exhibition text, websites, educational materials, and social media content with an eye on “tone, historical framing, and alignment with American ideals.”

The result will be the substitution of the triumphalist history of great white men and their institutions that James W. Carey warned we didn’t need more of for the whole truth that recent generations of historians have labored to build. Most recently, Trump officials ordered national parks to remove signs and displays about settlers mistreatment of Native Americans at the Grand Canyon and George Washington’s ownership of enslaved people at the President’s House in Philadelphia.

Since 2023, Republican lawmakers have been targeting colleges that emphasize diversity, equity and inclusion in their recruitment and retention of students and faculty on grounds that these efforts violate free speech and waste public funds. In 2025, state legislatures enacted 14 laws in 12 states to dismantle DEI efforts, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Targets include DEI offices and training, diversity statements, and teaching about white supremacy in courses required to graduate. These efforts, the Chronicle reports, were accelerated by Trump’s executive orders banning race-conscious programs, and they reach as far as the academic freedom of classroom instruction. In Mississippi, for example, HB 1193 prohibits teaching concepts that include “transgender ideology, gender-neutral pronouns, heteronormativity, gender theory, sexual privilege, or any related formulation of these concepts” in any university program, academic course, or office.

New laws constrain the academic freedom of administrators as well as teachers. In Iowa, HF 856 barred administrators from referencing “unconscious or implicit bias, cultural appropriation, allyship, transgender ideology, microaggressions, group marginalization, antiracism, systemic oppression, social justice, intersectionality, neopronouns, heteronormativity, disparate impact, gender theory, racial privilege, sexual privilege, or any related formulation of these concepts” in programs, training, or policies. Texas’s SB 37 went so far as to give public colleges’ boards of regents curricular control to prevent courses from including DEI and establishing a DEI complaint process and a statewide committee to determine what curricula should include.

These concerns are not abstract. AJHA members are affected in a variety of ways expressed privately in conversations at our conventions in Pittsburgh and Long Beach and in discussions via social media. When an instructor was suspended in Texas for including transgender identity in her teaching, it was chilling. Could the same happen to any of us?

My hope is that the AJHA Defense of History Committee can fashion a process through which members can confidentially deposit their accounts of living with DEI restrictions. What is the use of this? To ensure that the vulnerable are heard without fear of retribution. These accounts will be part of the historical record and part of historical accountability in the future.

I also hope that it can devise a clearinghouse for members to report instances where diversity is erased as part of journalism, media and communication history in their own locales, a sort of crowdsourced database of historical amnesia. Members could then engage in acts of guerrilla history, replacing the deleted diversity aspects in rebellious acts of remembering.

James Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” To criticize honestly and rigorously, we must have evidence. The Defense of History Committee will provide the ideas and means to implement the collection of that evidence.

How did you become involved with AJHA?

I found out about the AJHA via American Journalism and the annual conferences. Professor Kathleen Endres, whose work I had long admired, introduced me to several folks at my first AJHA conference many years ago! 

How did you develop your interest in the nineteenth century and media history in the South?

This may be a combination of a couple of different motivations. First, I was born in North Carolina and had a strong interest in the South growing up. That upbringing dovetailed with my father’s interest in the nineteenth century and specifically in early periodicals. He was a literature professor at the University of South Florida and introduced me to the fascinating world of journalism history.

How have you seen your field change since you started?

It has changed a great deal, and for the better in my opinion. We are much more attuned to the journalistic work of marginalized peoples, which has revealed really valuable history, some of which I wrote about in Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth Century South (Cambridge, 2011).

You have been interviewed by a variety of news outlets, podcasts, and public organizations. What advice do you have for other researchers who want to engage in public scholarship?

It is important, of course, to know your audience so that you can pitch your responses the right way. And it is also important to be brief in your answers—something I’m very much still working on!

What hobbies or activities do you enjoy outside of academia?

I am a big baseball fan and also enjoy traveling and hiking.

Jonathan Daniel Wells is a professor of history in the departments of Afroamerican and African Studies, history, and the Residential College at the University of Michigan. His most recent publication The New York Kidnapping Club: Wall Street and Slavery before the Civil War (2020) won the New York Library Society Book Award 2020-2021 and the Victorian Society Book Award.

By: Anthony Montalto

What started as a retreat for professors to take a step back and share research has blossomed into a thriving yearly conference for scholars of journalism history to connect.

On Feb. 7, 2026, the American Journalism Historians Association will hold its annual Southeast Symposium in Panama City Beach, Florida. Last February, 16 students attended the Symposium and gave presentations on topics ranging from method acting, to media coverage of Olympic gymnastics, to how cult leaders used media to brainwash their followers.

As in previous years, the 2025 symposium began on a Friday night, with students and faculty from five universities gathering to share a meal together. In true Gulf Coast fashion—it was seafood! Saturday morning, the conference room buzzed as the group prepared for a day of swapping experiences and knowledge.

For many student presenters, this was the first time they had shared their work at a conference. University of Alabama graduate student Lyric Franklin was one of the presenters.

“My favorite part was having the experience of presenting my work at a conference, getting to meet other students, and learning about their journalism passions,” Franklin said about the event.

Attendees also heard from David Bulla and 2025 AJHA President Debbie van Tuyll, editors of the Southeastern Review of Journalism History. Bulla and van Tuyll shared the journal’s story and described the process of submitting a paper for publication.

Beyond the presentations, the symposium was a place for students and faculty alike to bond over a shared love of history. University of Alabama graduate student Chloe Rigdon summed it all up: “Meeting professors from other universities, and gaining career advice from them, was such a valuable experience. I am so grateful I was able to attend this conference!”

The 2026 AJHA Southeast Symposium will be Feb. 6-8 in Panama City Beach, Florida. For more information about participating in 2027, contact Dianne Bragg at dmbragg@ua.edu.

Anthony Montalto is a Master's student at the University of Alabama.

Editor’s Note: This release was originally published by the Indigenous Journalists Association and reposted with permission.

Indigenous Journalists Association President Sunnie Clahchischiligi (Diné) appointed Melissa Greene-Blye (Miami Tribe of Oklahoma) to fill the board vacancy left by Jourdan Bennett-Begaye (Diné), who stepped down last month. The board voted to approve Greene-Blye during the Dec. 4 board meeting.

Melissa Greene-Blye (Miami Tribe of Oklahoma) worked as an anchor and reporter for 20 years in the news business, covering local news in television markets big and small. She enjoys using her knowledge and experience to educate the newest generation of journalists.

Greene-Blye is the director of the Center for Indigenous Student Media and is a professor in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas where she created and directs the KU Native Storytelling Workshop, a summer media workshop for Indigenous high school students, and is the faculty supervisor for Good Morning Indian Country, an award-winning student-led weekly Native news and information program produced collaboratively by students from KU and Haskell Indian Nations University. She serves as chair of the IJA Education Committee and also serves on the board of IndiJ Public Media.

Clahchischiligi said she is appreciative of Bennett-Begaye’s service to the organization and that Greene-Blye is an excellent candidate to fill the appointment.

“I offer my deepest gratitude to Jourdan for her contribution to IJA and its members,” Clahchischiligi said. “And I extend that gratitude to Melissa, who has agreed to step in. She is a longtime IJA member who has already demonstrated a steadfast commitment to serve the organization.”

The remaining officers and members will continue to serve on the board of directors for the duration of their elected terms.

Kimberly Voss is a professor of journalism in the Nicholson School of Communication and Media at the University of Central Florida. Her recent research has examined culinary journalism and women in the media during the mid-twentieth century.

How did you become involved with AJHA?

My dissertation advisor Dr. Maurine Beasley introduced me to AJHA. I attended my first AJHA conference in Wichita, Kansas in 2006. I have attended many AJHA conferences ever since and thoroughly enjoyed the experiences. My favorite conference was in 2016 in St. Petersburg. I was able to give the Donna Allen Award to food editor Janet Keeler.

What media artifacts or questions are you examining in your current book project?

I am looking at the papers of the Miami Herald beauty editor and advice columnist Eleanor Hazlett, who wrote under the name of Eleanor Hart in the 1950s and 1960s. Her papers reveal what was a significant part of the women’s pages of newspapers. I am also working on a project about wine journalism history in the women’s pages, focusing on Ruth Ellen Church.

What tips or advice do you have for others interested in researching the history of food media?

Scholars should look at the stories that have not been told, especially food journalism from the Midwest. Those stories are often overlooked by scholarship about food on the coasts or the South. Overall, in the 1950s and 1960s, newspaper food journalism has always been framed as simplistic. It was much more than that.

How do you balance finding time for research with your other roles?

I try to make sure conference papers turn into books or journal articles. I also try to make sure that one project leads to another.

What hobbies or activities do you enjoy outside of academia?

I cook and bake—often based on recipes from historical newspapers. I garden and am looking into newspaper garden columns which were once common. I have also become a track fan since my high school son runs and jumps.

The American Journalism Historians Association annual convention returned to California for the first time in 24 years for its 44th meeting held September 25-27, 2025. About ninety scholars attended sessions on key issues impacting how media history is researched and taught including freedom of speech in the press and on university campuses, artificial intelligence, and capturing untold histories. 

AJHA President Debbie van Tuyll welcomed attendees to Long Beach, California in her opening address before describing new opportunities or areas of growth that media historians should consider. van Tuyll acknowledged that some communications scholars believe journalism history is in a “rut,” but argued that contextualizing historical research and examining the bigger picture of media within history can help students and other scholars recognize the importance of the field. She also noted that journalists and academics are experiencing similar attacks against their right to free speech. Drawing on her own expertise in Civil War journalism, van Tuyll encouraged AJHA members to examine how journalists overcame similar threats during war times and use the growing public interest in First Amendment rights to examine free speech in “a systems context.” Those goals, van Tuyll explained, citing a 2024 article from Inside Higher Ed, can be accomplished by refocusing on interdisciplinary research areas and methods, building bridges with transnational critical/cultural scholars, and increased training in quantitative methods. 

The seven paper sessions and eight panels explored research on representation and advocacy in media history, contributions to print and broadcast journalism from the Black Press, and challenges to historical research brought by a decrease in federal funding and threats to free speech. 

Special panels highlighted the life and research of long-time AJHA member Pam Parry who passed earlier this year along panels from American Journalism and the AJHA President each exploring the role of media history and the press in challenging political moments.

Attendees gathered throughout the event to honor dissertation, teaching, lifetime achievement, and book of the year award winners. The 2025 Margaret A. Blanchard Dissertation Prize session featured Robin Sundaramoorthy’s award-winning research on the Federal Communications Commission’s failure to diversify the airwaves in the mid- and late-twentieth century and the important services and community building Black radio stations offered listeners. Holly Swensen’s research on the impact of British media on Australia, Robert O’Sullivan’s study of nationalism and anti-slavery sentiments in the trans-national Irish-American press, and Karlin Andersen Tuttle’s history of five Christian women’s magazines all received honorable mentions.

Keith Greenwood accepted the National Award for Excellence in Teaching and encouraged his fellow educators to help students understand the value of critical thinking, evaluating sources, and investigating new ideas. Patrick Cox, awarded the Sidney Kobre Award for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism History, echoed those ideas in his reflections on running The Wimberley View. Cox reminded attendees that honest mistakes should be acknowledged and forgiven. Additionally, criticism is a natural part of many professions, and their critiques may hold helpful lessons. Applying those ideas to media history research meant removing past blindfolds, view history through multiple viewpoints, and ask difficult questions.  

The AJHA Book of the Year Award featured a talk from the prize’s winning author Gwyneth Mellinger for her monograph, Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow. Mellinger’s research exposed how White reporters in the South used journalism standards to rationalize White supremacy and resist desegregation during the Jim Crow era. Titles from Ira Chinoy, Jeremiah Favara, along with a collaboration between Larry Heinzerling, Randy Herschaft, and Ann Cooper all received honorable mentions.

Additional research awardees included Mark Bernhardt (Wally Eberhard Award for best Historical Research Paper on Media and War), Kaelyn L. Hannah (Maurine Beasley Award for Outstanding Women’s History Research Paper), Felecia Jones Ross (J. William Snorgrass Award for Outstanding Minority-Journalism Research Paper), Rich Shumate (David Sloan Award for Outstanding Faculty Research Paper), and Erin K. Coyle (Jean Palmegiano Award for Outstanding Transnational Journalism Research Paper). Natascha Toft Roelsgaard also received the Rising Scholar Award from American Journalism. 

Multiple panels and activities highlighted journalism in the greater Los Angeles area and the region’s history. The local panel brought together scholars from two universities in the area and two journalists to examine how community journalism has impacted Los Angeles. 

Later, a poolside reception honored NBC4 “Today in LA” co-anchor Lynette Romero and former editor of Long Beach’s Grunion Gazette Harry Saltzgaver for their contributions to local journalism. Nancy Rivera Brooks, a former deputy business editor at The Los Angeles Times, was honored during the Donna Allen Luncheon for her continued coverage of the Latino community in the region. 

Many attendees enjoyed the convention’s proximity to the ocean with tours of the luxury British passenger ship the Queen Mary, time on the beach, and sightseeing along the boardwalk. Others explored the greater Los Angeles area through daytrips to archives or extended their stay to visit theme parks and national parks. 

van Tuyll thanked local conference organizers Madeleine Lisebland, Noah Arceneaux, and Christina Littlefield along with Aimee Edmondson, Patti Pilburn and Erin Coyle for their administrative efforts in her closing remarks during the business meeting. Outgoing board members Elisabeth Fondren, Tom Mascaro, and Ashley Walter were also acknowledged before confirming Andersen Tuttle, George L. Daniels, and Melissa Greene-Blye as incoming members. Coyle was confirmed as first vice president and Pamela Walck as second vice president before the president’s gavel was turned over to Michael Fuhlhage. The AJHA Auction, raising funds for the Sweeney Graduate Student Travel Fund, held a silent auction and several live mini auctions throughout the conference which raised over $2,700. 

The AJHA convention will be returning to the east coast in 2026 for a meeting in Greenville, South Carolina, November 5-7.

By: Debbie van Tuyll

Historians contend the Irish-American press started with the wave of Irish emigrants brought to the United States by the devastating famines of the 1840s, especially the on in 1848, An Gorta Mór. Cian McMahon, the only historian to date to produce a history of the Irish-American press, dates it to 1842 (McMahon 2009). However, research shows that somewhere around twenty Irish American newspapers were issued in the United States well before 1842. The earliest one found thus far dates to the 1810s. Dozens of Irish-American journalists plied their trade in America much earlier, as far back as 1704, if the American Antiquarian Society’s Printer File is correct, an Irish emigrant, John Campbell, became the second editor of the Boston Newsletter. Others would follow, including well-known eighteenth and nineteenth century editors Mathew Carey, John Daly Burk, and William Duan. It is this project to uncover the history of the earliest Irish-American press and the Irish-American journalists who helped create and build the American press that the McKerns grant to Debbie van Tuyll has supported. 

Specifically, the grant was used to obtain the business journal of Hugh Maxwell, editor of two Lancaster, Pennsylvania newspapers, the Gazette, and the Journal from the American Antiquarian Society. Maxwell was born in 1777 at Portaferry south of Belfast in what is today Northern Ireland. At age 12, he traveled to America where he became the ward and heir of a wealth uncle, Archibald Bingham, then in partnership with Mathew Carey who was editor of a Philadelphia literary magazine, the Port-Folio. Maxwell later published his own literary journal, the Maxwell Intelligencer and served as Port-Folio editor. Maxwell learned not only printing but also how to cast type and how to make wood cuts. He also patented a printer’s roller used to spread ink efficiently on lead type (J. I. Mombert, An authentic history of Lancaster County, in the state of Pennsylvania).

In 1817, he moved to Lancaster, about halfway between Philadelphia and Harrisburg, where he established the Lancaster Gazette and eventually purchased the Democratic Lancaster Journal, which he published until 1839, the same year the business journal is dated. He sold the paper in September 1839 to a young man who had been his apprentice, John W. Forney. One might be tempted to wonder if this business journal was prepared as part of the transfer of the business, but there are enough mark-throughs and marginal notes to indicate the journal predated the transfer by a good margin.

Business records are exceedingly rare, particularly business records that are a) detailed and b) accurate and that is why this the 130-page journal is so important. Some newspapers might print circulation figures but given there was not Audit Bureau of Circulation at the time, those are always suspect. This journal does not list circulation figures, but it lists not just individual subscribers but also the exchange papers Maxwell worked it, the taverns, post offices, and publications offices to which he sent newspapers, and individual subscribers and their locations. The journal also includes which days papers were sent to different locations—most see to have been mailed either on Wednesday or Thursday, accounts that had been sent for collection, and, perhaps most valuable, copies of letters Maxwell wrote regarding the running of his business. One of those letters was to Miss Louisa L. Johnson, who had apparently written to see what Maxwell knew about a Mr. Appleton, who, he reported in his return letter, was a drunkard who had left his family, fallen in love with a woman in York, Pennsylvania, and married her. This first wife discovered what he had done, and her relatives sought out Appleton for revenge. He fled but had since come back. Maxwell summarized what he had learned by writing, “Really it appears to me there is, to use a common phrase, more truth than poetry in the above description.”

Having only recently obtained this document, I am still perusing it and working out how to fit it into my current project. I suspect it will become part of the introduction where I explain how newspapers functioned in the early nineteenth century. This journal gives me evidence to back up distribution methods—the journal lists, for example, which subscribers received their papers by carrier and which by mail. The listing of taverns can be used to help explain how availability in public places extended the reach of newspapers. Lacking any further information about business operations, I do not see this making a chapter in-and-of-itself in this project. That said, this project is very likely going to lead to another that consists of a collection of short biographies of Irish-American journalists from the colonial period forward, and I can definitely see all the letters at the end of the journal being a very important component in Maxwell’s biograph. So, it appears this business journal will be used in two separate projects.

Debbie van Tuyll is a professor in the Department of Communication at Augusta University. She previously served as the president of AJHA.

By: Kimberley Mangun

Jeremy J. Chatelain, a longtime AJHA member who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Utah Department of Communication, died on Sept. 15 in Denver. He was 51. 

Dr. Chatelain was a Seminary Teacher for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and an independent historian who studied the power and influence of the 19th-century press in American religious history.

He discovered what he called “an unexpected interest” in First Amendment theory, law, and research during a Free Speech in Society graduate seminar taught by Dave Vergobbi, a past president of AJHA and recipient of AJHA’s National Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Dr. Chatelain found his passion for journalism history in a graduate seminar on historical research methods taught by Kimberley Mangun, a past president of AJHA. They subsequently co-authored a paper for the AEJMC History Division about Abner Cole, publisher of the Palmyra, NY, Reflector and a staunch proponent of the Freethought Movement. Their submission garnered a top-paper award at the 2012 convention held in Chicago. A revised manuscript was published in American Journalism in 2015.

Dr. Chatelain’s 2018 dissertation, chaired by Prof. Mangun, was a deeply researched cultural history of the influence of 19th-century American print on Mormonism in Kirtland, Ohio, between 1831 and 1837. He located and analyzed more than 1,600 articles published in 325 newspapers to demonstrate how “print culture and texts about and by the Mormons created, shaped, changed, and directed the trajectory of Mormonism in its formative years.” Essentially, he tracked the cross-country spread of articles and editorials about Mormons during the 1830s and showed how editors “created and shaped” a consistently negative perception of the uniquely American religion. Dr. Chatelain also studied the early development of the Mormon press and concerted efforts to dispel or correct disparaging commentary on Mormonism.

His dissertation was awarded an honorable mention, Margaret A. Blanchard Dissertation Prize, at AJHA’s conference in Dallas in October 2019. He was delighted to receive the award and discuss his work at the convention, even though quadriplegia made it very difficult for him and his wife, Connie, to travel. 

In 2023, Dr. Chatelain received one of the inaugural AJHA–AEJMC History Division diversity microgrants to study anti-Mormon rhetoric in Thomas C. Sharp’s Warsaw (IL) Signal. He discussed that research-in-progress during a panel session at the Columbus, Ohio, convention. His analysis of Sharp’s incendiary articles and Extras, which motivated mob actions and led to the murder of Mormon leader Joseph Smith in 1844, was published in Journalism History in March 2025.

Dr. Chatelain presented additional research at several Sperry Symposiums at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and published peer-reviewed work in books released by the BYU Religious Studies Center.

His ongoing, diligent research ultimately led to the discovery of nearly 14,000 articles about and by the Mormons published in more than 400 newspapers. Shortly before his death, he was drafting a book proposal based on his voluminous archive that he planned to submit to Oxford University Press.

Scholars interested in newspaper history, religious history, First Amendment theory, and many other topics will soon be able to use his vast collection, thanks to Dr. Chatelain’s generous, forthcoming donation of primary sources to the LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City.

How did you become involved with AJHA?

In beginning research for my University of Missouri Press book [Pulitzer's Gold], and after it came out, I gave a number of presentations around the country, often under the auspices of AJHA, which I joined before the book's first edition came out in 2006. I gave a number of talks for AJHA around the country in connection with early editions of the book. At the same time, I was teaching for Emerson College and was a senior editor at The Economist's monthly magazine, CFO, based at the time in Boston at the time. Before that I’d been a long-time Wall Street Journal reporter, serving in Pittsburgh first, and then, for nearly 20 years, in Los Angeles. During my journalism career, I continued to do research on the Public Service Pulitzer Prize—awarded in the form of its famous Gold Medal. 

How do your decades in journalism inform your research?

I was raised in a “newspaper family” in St. Louis, where my father, Roy J. Harris, was a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (He was named in the citation when the Post-Dispatch and Chicago Daily News jointly won the 1950 Public Service Pulitzer.) Because my own career took me from the Post-Dispatch—as a reporter serving as a summer intern—to the Los Angeles Times, after my graduation from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in 1968, I became very familiar with the reporters and editors who had led Pulitzer-winning research. When I joined The Wall Street Journal (with its own Pulitzer-winning tradition) after getting my master's from Medill, and serving in the U.S. Army, I continued pursuing my interest in the Pulitzer Prizes, and the men and women who’d been involved with winning therm.

What surprised you most while researching the history of the Pulitzer Prize?

My earliest surprise was that so little had been written about the history of the Pulitzers, and especially the Public Service Prize. It seemed to cry out for research attention. And I decided to become the person to do it. The University of Missouri Press was most supportive, especially because I had so many “inside sources” from my Post-Dispatch years. The Post-Dispatch was the only paper to have won five Public Service Pulitzers over those early years. 

What topics or questions are you pursuing in your current research?

I continue to use the approach of digging into the “story behind the story” of how editors and reporters decide to pursue a project; to help it grow into a major story; and to perfect the work to the point that it qualifies for Pulitzer Prize contention. I found, in my research, that little had been written about the Pulitzer “award process,” as it had grown over the decades at Columbia University, which administers the Prizes. People who ran the Prizes seemed very excited that I was dedicating myself to digging into the “back stories” of the award system, as well as each winner. And in the end, Columbia University Press took over later editions of my book.

What hobbies or activities do you enjoy outside of your research work?

In addition to continuing to write about prizewinning journalism, something I’ve done for more than two decades in my connection with Florida’s wonderful Poynter Institute. I am also very interested in music and musical theater. I have acted in community theater in Massachusetts for decades. But the Poynter Institute has been my main “hobby” with examples of my work for them available on their website.

I have also taught journalism course over the years—including at Emerson College in Boston—where I became more involved with AJHA, and occasionally writing for Intelligencer. I also enjoy traveling, and writing travel articles when I visit places in Europe and elsewhere. 

Roy J. Harris Jr. has written for The Washington Post, Boston Globe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Los Angeles Times, and The Economist. His website provides additional background on the current edition of Pulitzer's Gold: A Century of Public Service Journalism along with study guides for students.

By: Autumn Lorimer Linford

With the help of funding from the AJHA Hazel Dicken-Garcia Research Grant, I was able to travel to New York City and conduct research for my upcoming book, Extra! A History of America’s Girl Newsies, soon to be published by the University of Nebraska Press. While there, I was able to find archival materials focused on publishers’ rationale for lobbying Congress in the 1930s to exclude boy newspaper carriers—but specifically not girls—from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. 

In Extra!, I detail the lives and gender-specific experiences of girl newsies and paper carriers. Since before the founding of the United States through the twenty-first century, the newspaper industry was held up by circulation departments that relied almost exclusively on children of all genders for distribution. Despite both girls and boys hawking the news, however, pop culture (and much of scholarly literature) surrounding newsies focuses on the boys. There are several wonderful works on newsies that successfully incorporate a handful of newsgirl stories in with the boys, but without fully exploring newsgirl experiences and contributions to news labor. As historian Jon Bekken lamented in a 2000 article in the journal Media History, “Popular mythology has little room for the women and girls who also worked as ‘newsboys.’”

By focusing the story of newsies on the newsboys, however, it has been too easy for pop culture to paint the history of child news labor as an example of the American dream. "These boys were not child laborers!" the movies and books seem to say. "They were independent young businessmen pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and getting a leg up in life!" Newsboy proponents point to the senators, presidents, sports heroes and movie stars who all started their careers as boys delivering newspapers, as if it were paper routes and selling papers on streetcorners that destined these men for greatness.

A surprising amount of newsgirl artifacts were archived, but as other scholars have often found when researching women and girls, first person documents written by newsgirls themselves were limited. I was able to answer many of my questions about their lives using workarounds any historian would be familiar with using, but I couldn’t answer everything. When and why did newsgirls and papergirls disappear, and when and why did they return? Even more vexing, how involved were newspapermen in that decision? Many of the presses who used child labor for circulation were the same newspapers and magazines that pushed for child labor regulation. Did the adults running newspapers understand their reliance on newsies and papergirls and boys was a reliance on child labor, or did they truly believe (as they often touted) that delivering newspapers was different than the other jobs children held in other industries?

I couldn’t find the answers to these questions in online newspaper archives or the scrapbooks, letters, and ephemera of newsgirls I’d found on other research trips. It was on my research trip to New York, using the generous funding of the Hazel Dicken-Garcia grant, that I finally discovered the truth about the role newspapers played in the lives of newsgirls. The archival materials I found in newspaper business files and correspondence between publishers and editors informed two of the final chapters in my book. Without the grant funding and this trip, Extra! would be incomplete. Instead, I hope to offer an addition to media and gender history that challenges some of the existing notions of newsie labor and helps grow our understanding of the contributions of women and girls to journalism history.

Autumn Lorimer Linford is an assistant professor of journalism at Auburn University.

Editor's Note: Extra! A History of America’s Girl Newsies is scheduled to hit shelved early fall 2026 through the University of Nebraska Press. Other research conducted during the same trip to New York City helped inform "'Is This an Evil Practice?' Newspapers and Newsgirls,” which won top faculty paper at AEJMC History Division 2024.