By: Wendy Plotkin
Are AJHA members typical of their communication colleagues in their appreciation for history? In answering this question, most members would probably cite the unwillingness of their colleagues to read much of the scholarship produced by journalism historians. This lack of enthusiasm for communications history is attributable, in part, to the divide between AJHA members and their colleagues on another issue: the inclusion of communications history courses in undergraduate and graduate media programs. In its 2019 publication, “History in the Curriculum” and the “Statement of Principles on History in the Curriculum,” AJHA articulated its commitment to the principle that all graduate communications programs and undergraduate majors in communications should require at least one communications history course. It also offered data on the relatively low proportion of existing programs conforming to this principle, revealing the huge gap between AJHA’s goal and the situation at the time of publication.
Another potentially important, but unrecognized, gulf between AJHA members and their colleagues is the indifference of most communicators, their employers, and their organizations toward the preservation of the raw materials needed to produce such history. At the most basic level, this includes print and digital newspapers, audio and video broadcasts, and Internet content such as websites and social media sites that are the fruits of their labor. At another level, this includes the process-oriented materials emerging from the organizations that create and influence these media—the media corporations, trade associations, labor unions, and advocacy organizations. Can AJHA take it for granted that these sources will be available for their histories—especially sources in digital form that require different means of preservation from the print sources that are most familiar?
I came face-to-face with these questions when, in 2021, I (a retired historian) volunteered to serve as “historian” for a 75-year-old affiliate of a national organization that advocates for equal treatment of women in the communications industry. The position, established shortly after the organization’s founding in 1949, had been vacant for some time.
In this two-part article, I describe my surprise and concern that the organization seemed to accord little value to its history and the historical records that contained it. Its board was open to allowing me to work with its print records, but willing to sacrifice preservation when faced with the challenges of preserving its digitally created records. It also refused to allow me to use its history to strengthen organizational identity—at a time when it was experiencing a significant drop in membership and its 75th anniversary was approaching.
I attempted to educate the board on the importance of its history to three audiences: the organization itself, young people considering communications careers, and historians of women and communications. Finding the board resistant to these arguments, I queried an archivist association for other examples of this phenomenon, and undertook research in the communications, history, and archival scholarship. They revealed an emerging concern within the journalism community about past and potential future losses of digitally created newspapers and broadcasts. However, articles about the preservation attitudes and practices of organizations that produced media or influenced its production did not surface.
Already an AJHA member, I joined the history division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). An initial review of the flagship journals of the two organizations, American Journalism and Journalism History, provided two insights: little attention was paid to the problem of sources, and the articles contained few citations to the work of the affiliate I was serving or the national organization of which it was a part.
This was the genesis of my decision to describe my experience to AHJA members and to propose that AJHA establish a public history committee that would investigate the status of historical preservation and organizational history within today’s communications industry. With that information, it could propose, evaluate, and implement solutions if it found a problem existed. Since AJHA consists primarily of faculty of college and university media programs—many of whom had significant experience as working journalists—we have credibility commonly lacking among other historians who could be dismissed as intruders seeking to impose their own values upon the members of a discipline they do not understand. AJHA members are in a better position to determine the extent of the problem, and to discern whether AJHA is, indeed, the best organization to remedy the problem. Could this be better handled by the archival community? I will deal with some of these issues in Part II.
About the Organization
The affiliate for which I volunteered was established in 1949. Early in its history, it established the position of “historian” and included this position within its by-laws. These historians’ efforts produced a file cabinet full of print records, scrapbooks, and periodicals stored at the office of the state’s press association, whose staff participated in the creation of the affiliate. Included were an abundant set of records about the organization’s founding left by its two principal organizers.
When I began my service as the organization’s historian, the affiliate’s president asked that I organize the files and find an archive to accept them. I indicated my desire to scan them prior to donating the documents to the state archive, an enthusiastic potential host. This request arose from my experience throughout my career with the high costs in time and money of undertaking research in physical archives.
The Fruits of Digitization, 2021 and 2022—Getting to Know the Organization
In 2021 and 2022, I focused on scanning the records, a task that put no demands on the busy board members. The affiliate had volunteered to host the national organization’s meeting in 2021, and when that meeting was cancelled for COVID-19-related reasons, they continued planning for a 2022 meeting. This was a huge effort undertaken by a small group within the board, and I chose to stay in the background.
During this period, I scanned the organization’s 1949-1959 records. The information derived from scanning these documents convinced me of their value for state and U.S. women’s and communications history—something I had not taken for granted when I first volunteered. On their own, the activities of the organization were mildly interesting, with details of arranging officer and board elections; assembling speakers, agendas, and places for quarterly membership meetings; developing categories and rules for communications contests (the most popular activity); and participating in state programs advocating for freedom of information.
These activities became more significant when combined with the names and backgrounds of the members undertaking them. The backgrounds were available in the major dailies and smaller weeklies within the state, many included in commercially available digitized collections. These publications devoted substantial attention to the activities and staff of the state’s media and media organizations, including women and advocacy groups. Equally valuable, the magazine of the state press association (published continuously since the late 1920s and available in print and microfilm formats) proved to be a treasure trove for this type of information.
I concluded that, aside from revealing the evolving means by which the affiliate sought to empower women communicator over 75 years, its records served as the single best source for identifying women within the state who had served as publishers, editors-in-chief, managing editors, reporters, photographers, and similar positions in broadcasting and public relations from WWI through the 1980s. Few popular books and articles covered them, and they were largely absent from communication history scholarship. There is no doubt that the availability of the affiliate’s records would facilitate the “institutional history of women journalists” and the “enlargement of biographical studies” called for in 2001 by Maurine Beasley in “Recent Directions for the Study of Women’s History in American Journalism.”
Emerging Conflicts Between Favored Digital Distribution Formats and Preservation of Information in Distributed Documents
After the national conference had been held in the summer of 2022—thus freeing the board to consider my ideas—I broadened the scope of my activities. The 75th anniversary of our founding in June 2024 was approaching. I assumed that the board would allow me to add content to the existing history on our website and publish pieces in the quarterly digital newsletter. The newsletter editor expressed enthusiasm for this idea and encouraged me as I wrote a two-part article about the organization’s founder.
At this point, I was alerted to potential conflicts between newer digital formats adopted by the affiliate and the ability to preserve the information they disseminated. The problem was the choice of MailChimp to design and distribute newsletters. MailChimp is a free platform that offers a layered approach to the presentation of information in digital newsletters—emphasizing the visual appeal of short articles at the top layer, and the continuation of these articles via hyperlinks at subsequent levels. The newsletters are emailed to members, and metrics are produced on the number of members who open the emails and the time they spend reading them.
The organization’s newsletter could only be viewed while looking at the email. It could not be downloaded as a document, a feature that discouraged the inclusion of longer articles dealing with more complex topics. Affiliates wishing to encourage readers to learn of past activities could create a portal of these older email versions of the newsletters on their web page. These links would offer these readers the newsletter in the same non-downloadable format, denying them the ability to read the documents without going online to the website. The format also made it difficult to extract articles of interest and organize them by topic—features of prime importance to historians and others seeking to obtain a comprehensive view of the organization’s activities over time. I had put off consideration of how to preserve the affiliate’s digitally created documents, but the incompatibility of my history essays with the technology used to compose the newsletters brought the issue to my attention—and the affiliate’s response to my concerns widened the gap between us.
A subset of the board—whom I had contacted about these concerns—told me that these email newsletters were today’s standard for designing and distributing newsletters. I countered by noting that the national organization offered a compromise that preserved the favored email format without sacrificing the long-term preservation and use of the newsletters. It created a PDF version that email newsletter recipients could download if they did not wish to read the entire newsletter while viewing email. It also placed the PDF versions of newsletters back to 2016 on a “members only” portion of its website.
The group was not satisfied with this solution. It characterized the national organization’s inclusion of downloadable PDFs in the emails distributing newsletters as “old-fashioned.” PDFs were “out” and, they believed, adopting the national organization’s example would discredit them in communication circles. One member indicated that if it came down to a choice between design and preservation, preservation would have to go. Eventually, the group agreed to allow me to create PDF versions of the newsletters to put on the website but failed to follow through on this promise.
Strengthening Organizational Identity Through Organizational History– Or Not
The resistance to providing easy access to past newsletters, a reflection of the “presentist” orientation of the website’s content, also disturbed me because of the value of these newsletters in creating organizational identity. To my mind, there was a pressing need for this heritage-oriented material on our website. Our organization’s membership had plummeted from about 200 in the 1970s to about 40 in recent years, mirroring the experience of the other affiliates and the national organization. These membership declines led to a lack of turnover within the board and signs of burnout among its members. The number of organizational activities and events declined, reducing the appeal of the organization even more—at a time when rising membership fees and the multiplication of membership organizations created new competition for members.
I saw the 75th anniversary as an opportunity to turn members’ and potential members’ attention to the organization’s record of accomplishments over time, enhancing organizational identity at a time when the breadth of activities was shrinking. I believed that the reputations of legendary organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the League of Women Voters, and the American Civil Liberties Union added to their appeal, allowing members to share the prestige accrued from past efforts. This could help the organization maintain and increase membership and morale during times of organizational fatigue, provide the spark that would encourage members to volunteer for leadership positions, and create new stores of energy to expand organizational activities
The board disagreed. One board member expressed skepticism that organizational history mattered to members. The rest of the board demonstrated agreement with her belief by continuing to ignore my call to add several illustrated essays highlighting the organization’s history to the website.
In late 2023, I decided to design, print, and distribute a historical 2024 anniversary calendar to the organization’s members. I submitted it to the board for review on December 1. The board members initially ignored it but rallied when I said I was close to resigning. They not only improved the calendar with their factual corrections and design edits, but praised its quality, even reimbursing me for the costs.
This affirmation and the election of a new president led me to believe that I would finally be able to add historical materials to the web. However, nothing changed. Failing to explain the board’s opposition to this request, the president offered me an opportunity to give a brief unrecorded talk about the organization’s history at an October 2024 membership meeting attended by, at most, 45 people. The president also criticized me for creating the calendar without obtaining prior permission and insisted that I cease all attempts to discuss history in the board correspondence.
I submitted my resignation as the organization’s historian, effective March 31, 2024.
Our 75th anniversary was celebrated in May 2024, at our annual awards luncheon, with a trivia contest on our history serving as the main recognition of our anniversary.
Part II will address the likelihood that, to a greater or lesser extent, the attitudes of this board are shared by a large proportion of those working in the communications industry; the various causes (many structural) of these attitudes; and proposed solutions to be considered by an AJHA Public History committee to the resulting threats to valuable sources and failure to acknowledge the benefits of history, including its use as a tool for organizational health.
Wendy Plotkin is a retired historian who is writing a biography of Dorothy Stuck, a respected editor of a southern weekly newspaper from 1950-1969, and an active contributor to a state association advocating equal treatment of women journalists. Plotkin taught upper level undergraduate U.S. history and history methods at Arizona State University from 2003 to 2009. In 1999, she received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois at Chicago, focusing on racial discrimination in housing in her dissertation and in articles and encyclopedia entries.