A statue of Joel Poinsett -- the South Carolina statesman who first brought poinsettias to the United States -- sits next to his namesake hotel. (Photo courtesy of Aimee Edmondson)  

During a special Zoom meeting on Nov. 11, the AJHA Board of Directors voted to approve a contract to have the 45^th annual conference at the Westin Poinsett Hotel in Greenville, South Carolina. The conference dates will be Nov. 5-7, 2026.

The Board consented at its regular meeting during the Pittsburgh convention last month for the Convention Sites Committee to pursue hotels in Greenville for the 2026 conference. Convention Coordinator Aimee Edmondson reported that securing an ideal hotel in Greenville around the typical late September/early October conference time proved difficult because mid-September to mid-October is high season for conferences.

Edmondson said that five of the seven bids on the request for proposals were not viable because they did not at all align with the AJHA’s needs, as stated in recent surveys of organization members. The two remaining options were the Westin Poinsett ($229/night) and AC Hotel Greenville, a Marriott property ($219/night). For reference, Edmondson noted that hotels for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conferences will be $279 in the coming years.

Although the AC Hotel contract would be during the regular AJHA conference time frame, Edmondson reported that the hotel was not ideal. Among the issues was the hotel layout, which would require break-out sessions (panels and presentations) to be scheduled on different floors in the hotel and cause attendees to travel between floors all day. Edmondson added that the hotel does not have escalators, so attendees would need to ride elevators to two different floors for sessions. Board members were concerned that the disjointed layout would be inconvenient at best and could be difficult for attendees with mobility challenges.

Edmondson said that the Convention Sites Committee felt the Westin Poinsett would be much better for AJHA members. It is in a prime location and has an ideal layout. Additionally, the Westin is a 100-year-old building that Edmondson described as “restored to perfection,” while the AC Hotel is a newer property that Edmondson described as “cold.” See https://www.historichotels.org/us/hotels-resorts/the-westin-poinsett/ for more about the Westin.

Board members wondered how important an historic hotel was to AJHA members. Edmondson stated that an historic property is pretty important, but the most important thing to members is being somewhere they could just walk out of the hotel and go to restaurants. She reported that the Westin Poinsett is in the middle of a charming and robust downtown with more than 20 blocks of shops and almost 100 restaurants (80 percent of which are local).

“It looks like a huge hallmark movie set,” she said.

Board members expressed concern that moving the date to November would put the conference too close to other fall conferences. The Symposium on the 19^th Century Press, Civil War, and Free Expression – which typically would be that same weekend in November – was a particular concern because many AJHA members attend that event.

AJHA President Debra van Tuyll also is involved in planning for the Symposium, which takes place in Augusta, Georgia. She indicated that the dates for the 2026 Symposium have not been set yet, and they may be able to move it for one year. Another option would be for the two conferences to have some joint programming.

Van Tuyll also said that the weather would be nicer and the scenery more fall-like in November than in early October.

Ultimately, the eight board members present for the special meeting voted unanimously to accept the Convention Sites Committee’s recommendation to move the AJHA conference to November, emphasizing that the shift would apply to 2026 only. Edmondson stated that she and the local host committee would begin working to secure donations to keep registration fees as low as possible.

The local host committee for the Greenville conference consists of Nathaniel Frederick (Winthrop), Kenneth Campbell (University of South Carolina), and Dante Mozie (South Carolina State).

As previously announced, the 44^th annual AJHA conference will be Sept. 25-27, 2025, at the Hilton Long Beach in California.

How did you become involved with AJHA?

Janice Hume got me involved with the organization almost twenty years ago. I was finishing my PhD at University of Georgia, and she thought I’d fit in with this particular network of scholars. She was absolutely correct. I haven’t been to the conference in several years for a variety of reasons, but I plan to start going again. I’ve got fall 2025 in Long Beach on my agenda. 

How does your industry experience inform your teaching and/or research?

Most of my professional media experience was producing online content for TV networks, including American Idol, but this was many years ago. The web was much more primitive. I remember doing a Price is Right game, for the CBS website, and we had to make sure it would work on AOL dial-up access. That was quite limiting. 

In terms of research, my professional experience made me realize that any kind of big “innovation” is the result of many minds and many factors. My overall research focus is on the history of technology, so I’m always looking at technological changes, and I try to present a comprehensive, accurate picture. Historians and journalists tend to focus on singular moments of innovation, as if one person invented something. I try to avoid this tendency in my own research

In terms of teaching, my professional experience taught me that every single thing you do needs to be done with full accuracy and precision. For a time in the mid 90s, one of my tasks as an ABC News desk assistant was to write page numbers on a news script in big numbers, using a marker. The regular font wasn’t big enough to be read in a dark studio for middle-aged folks with fading vision. I learned the critical nature of that task the one time I put a “one” on page seven. That threw off a morning newscast for several minutes. So, I try to instill in students this kind of dedication. Even the most seemingly minute task needs to be done correctly, because you don’t know how your job fits into some larger work routine.

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

I did some serious archival research on wireless telegraphy for a few years. I remain fascinated by the twenty years of wireless communication before “radio” as we now use that term became a mainstream technology. Since 2020, I have been focusing on the history of radio in southwest Louisiana, or what I am calling “Cajun radio.” There used to be approximately twenty stations that broadcast in the local dialect of French, and there are still a handful that persist today. I am looking at the way this form of radio has continued, even though everyone in that region has spoken English for a few decades. You can still hear the rosary in French, for example, on a few stations.

A related goal with this project is an examination of the way Cajun culture has been celebrated and promoted via radio. There’s a tradition in that area to listen to Cajun music on Saturday mornings, for example. So even for folks who don’t speak French, including myself, at the very least, you will hear it on Saturdays with the traditional Cajun music.  My own research is very specific to one ethnic group, Cajuns, but I see this project as relevant to any kind of under-represented or marginalized group. How do we maintain these identities in the midst of an increasingly commercialized, homogenized world, where algorithms dictate the programming?

What makes you most excited about teaching or research?

For research, I love the thrill of the hunt. Digging through old archival material and finding some incredible “smoking gun” document or interviewing someone and they casually drop a nugget of pure gold near the end of the recording. I live for those moments.

For teaching, I have to admit that I enjoy the spotlight. In front of a class, I adopt a performance mindset and weave humorous commentary into more serious thoughts on the topic at hand. I have taught some very large classes at San Diego State, over a hundred students for example, and when the lecture goes well, it’s a very positive feeling. It took me a few years to find the right tone, so that I am in fact educating and not just entertaining, but I think I have the balance now.  I started recording lectures on video, during COVID-19, and have kept it up. Several students have told me that they show my lectures to roommates or boyfriends, for example, as they find them so engaging.

What hobbies or activities do you enjoy outside of academia?

My hobbies are so closely aligned to my research that it’s hard to see the difference. I collect old radios, for example, which is clearly related to studying radio history. I’ve also amassed dozens of Cajun and zydeco 45s, the more obscure and unknown, the better. This relates to my Cajun radio research, and some of my interview subjects are impressed at how well this “California professor” actually knows Cajun music. My other hobby is collecting old comic books, preferably pre-1980 genre comics (science fiction, horror, war, Westerns) and anything based on a TV show or film. When I go online or into a comic shop, to seek out some specific issue, this feels exactly like digging through a library or database trying to find some crucial information for my latest research project. 

Noah Arceneaux is a professor in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at San Diego State University.

By: Tom Mascaro

When Donald Trump called journalists "the enemy of the people" in 2017, I contacted University of Michigan Press and urged them to reissue William Porter’s 1976 monograph, Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years. The press generously invited me to take on the project. I anticipated appending an introduction and adding some analysis. But as I re-engaged the original, it became obvious I would have to blend entirely new content, in light of the half century of new scholarship and availability of primary source documents, with Porter’s classic. I also realized I would have to venture outside my comfort zone.

Porter’s original Assault on the Media documented Nixon-era threats to journalism and democracy. Porter explicated a year-by-year review of the most prominent attacks on journalism and journalists and reinforced his work with a collection of primary “Documents of Significance,” memos and excerpts of speeches and court rulings dealing with the press. 

Initially I tiptoed around Porter’s work, not wanting to do violence to the original. I settled into writing a brief introduction to each chapter and then a longer analysis, based on research published since the Nixon era.

Other factors changed my course—and forced my hand. Based on my own research into network documentary journalism history, I wrote about how 1968 altered network news. Working from Reuven Frank’s memoir, Out of Thin Air, and Daniel Walker’s Rights in Conflict, an assessment of the police riot in Chicago at the ’68 Democratic National Convention, including assaults on reporters and their equipment, I wrote a new chapter about the “Prelude to the Assault.” This bridged Porter’s opening chapter, “Background on the Nixon Attitude,” with “Year 1969.”

The major hurdle in completing the project, though, emerged from Porter’s final chapter, “Effects of the Assault.” Porter published Assault on the Media less than two years after Nixon’s resignation—too soon to assess the lasting damage of the Nixon-era assault. But he listed four areas of concern going forward: 1) the impact of the Pentagon Papers decision on press freedom; 2), prior restraint workarounds; 3), confidentiality as a currency of power; and 4), antitrust as a threat to journalism.

I was faced with the reality that you can’t reissue a classic book some fifty years after publication without addressing the aftermath. In particular, I had to come to terms with what had changed. Much of that content revolves around media law and First Amendment questions. Two conditions helped me tackle Porter’s “assignment.” The first was the body of literature published by our colleagues in media law and professional journalism observers who blend contemporary reporting with historical analyses. The second was the availability of online documents among Nixon administration papers at his presidential library. In particular, Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman’s diaries  are available online through the Nixon Library.

I then curated excerpts of Haldeman’s diaries that focused on media policy, journalists, and administration efforts at gatekeeping, agenda setting, and framing—as a counterpoint to academic studies of these theories about the press. I coupled that analysis with a collection of White House memos from Patrick Buchanan, Nixon’s media adviser, curated by Dr. Lori Cox Han  at Chapman University. These troves of primary documents revealed baseline attitudes about journalists as “others,” attempts to court ethnic Whites, challenges to academia, plans to plant stories in sympathetic outlets, and inconsistencies in Nixon-era policies regarding “the media.” Trump’s assault on journalism also triggered a number of contemporary studies that reference the Nixon and other administrations’ era, as did recent academic books on the presidency and the press.

Eventually I was able to interpret Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years from my own perspective, while also honoring Prof. Porter’s original work. I very much appreciate the support of University of Michigan Press in helping me reissue the pages of Porter’s first edition with my interstitial analysis, plus new chapters based on my own and colleagues’ half century of research on the Nixon era. My analysis resulted in a proof of concept proffered by Porter, who saw the Nixon-era assault on journalism unfolding in threatening ways. Our new, co-authored book—Updated with Analysis of 21^st Century Threats to Democracy—documents and warns that attacks on journalists and democracy have worsened in the twenty-first century.

Tom Mascaro is professor emeritus in the School of Media & Communications at Bowling Green State University and a documentary historian. 

By: Natascha Toft Roelsgaard

With immense gratitude, I am writing this status update on my recent research trip to the Library of Congress, made possible by the AJHA and the Joseph McKerns Research Grant. During the balmy days of early October, I spent a weekend reviewing records at the NAACP archive, specifically looking for newspaper clippings and correspondence related to the “work or fight” ordinance enacted in the U.S. during World War I.

This project came about when I stumbled upon a news article written by Walter F. White, an investigator with the NAACP. White had been tasked with providing a report on the status of Black life in the South after the U.S. had entered the war in Europe. During his travels in Alabama and Georgia in early 1918, White observed that the War Department’s “work or fight” ordinance—which expanded on the 1917 Selective Service Act to compel draft-age men to war work or military service—was used by local Southern governments to control the labor of Black men and force Black women into domestic roles for white families. A practice, White noted, “which bordered virtually on peonage.” His findings were summarized in an exposé published by The New Republic on March 1, 1918. 

A further search revealed that several white Southern newspapers rationalized and encouraged the exploitation of the wartime order, as a means to control Black labor and preserve the status quo. In contrast, Black newspapers in Alabama and Georgia denounced the practice, calling on the federal government to step in, and undertook what appeared to be an extensive collaboration with the NAACP on an anti-work or fight order campaign. While this campaign was mentioned sporadically in newspaper clippings, I discovered that several folders on these efforts were located at the NAACP archive, yet to be digitized. With the support of AJHA, I spent the weekend browsing through old leaflets, news articles, and letters in the Manuscript Reading Room in the James Madison Memorial Building.

The trip proved critical to my research project, revealing the NAACP’s myriad attempts to expose and put a halt to the South’s abuse of the wartime ordinance, as well as the federal government’s lack of response. News articles and letters between NAACP investigators also stipulated ties between the Ku Klux Klan and several of the white newspapers and local governments that encouraged the exploitation of the “work or fight” ordinance.

I left the archives with a full notebook and too many scanned pages to count. This winter, I plan to organize the acquired documents and categorize my findings. The goal is to include these findings as a book chapter in my book project on the historical misuse of the law to control Black labor in the U.S., the white press’ involvement in upholding and promoting these efforts and the combined efforts of the Black press and the NAACP in exposing the unconstitutionality of such practices.

I am grateful to AJHA for its continued support of junior faculty and the growing network of inquisitive and passionate scholars it has gifted me with.

Natascha Toft Roelsgaard is an assistant professor of journalism at Muskingum University. She received a McKerns grant in 2023 to support her research.

The 43rd American Journalism Historians Association annual convention running October 3-5, featured an expanded program that introduced a high density session to the conference and celebrated exemplary members with 13 different awards.

Returning to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the convention kicked off in the Kimpton Hotel Monaco in downtown with a welcome message from AJHA president Tracy Lucht who recounted attending her first AJHA convention. Lucht highlighted important steps the organization has taken over the last year to create a balanced budget while reiterating a commitment to fund research microgrants for graduate students, early career members, and under-researched topics. Lucht also spotlighted the important role AJHA holds in supporting all members who face external challenges to the topics they teach or research, especially related to race in journalism history.

Attendees gathered throughout the convection to honor dissertation, life-time achievement, and book of the year award winners. The 2024 Margaret A. Blanchard Dissertation Prize session featured Christopher Schaefer’s award-winning dissertation “Covering the World with the International Herald Tribune” chronicling the transnational history of the publication over the last two centuries. Honorable mentions for the award went to Anna E. Linder’s research on news coverage of rebellions in Spanish colonial Cuba, Karen D. Russell’s project uncovering the identities of popular Nashville radio DJs in the mid-twentieth century, and Carey Kelley’s examination of pioneers of gender equality in broadcast newsrooms starting in the 1960s.

In remarks accepting the 2024 Sidney Kobre Award for Lifetime Achievement, Joe Campbell referred to the friendships and acquaintances he forged among AJHA members over the years, recalled having attended his first AJHA convention in London, Ontario, in 1996, and thanked the organization and its awards committee for granting him an “exceptional honor.”

Campbell, a professor emeritus at American University in Washington, DC, also offered the following seven recommendations for “enhancing high-quality research in journalism history”:

1. keep in mind the critical importance of addressing the “so what?” question in scholarly research;
2. know there is no shame in gentle if persistent self-promotion.
3. strive to share your research with popular audiences;
4. inject even-handed rigor in your work, and avoid the temptation to treat research papers as polemics;
5. embrace and encourage viewpoint diversity in research and in the classroom;
6. impose, or self-impose, a limit of 150 words in writing negative reviews about convention research papers; and,
7. support the AJHA endowment, as a way to help ensure the organization’s longer-term financial health and stability.

The AJHA Book of the Year Award session featured a talk from 2024 winner Aniko Bodroghkozy for “Making #Charlottesville: Media from Civil Rights to Unite the Right” which examined the resurgence of White supremacy amid the 2017 “Summer of Hate” in Charlottesville, Virginia, by comparing events to key moments in the Civil Rights movement. Katherine Rye Jewell, Josh Shepperd, and Ken Ward all received honorable mentions for their newly published monographs.

Amidst those award sessions, the program offered nine panels and 11 paper sessions including a new high density paper session. Key panels included the president’s panel on “Effective Leadership in Times of Turmoil” exploring best practices for faculty and administrators during difficult cultural or political times. A second panel on current issues facing academia discussed the opportunities and challenges artificial intelligence poses to accurate and ethical scholarship, especially when working in digital archives.

Two panels highlighted the role of Pittsburgh journalists in shaping modern news coverage in the twentieth century and The Pittsburgh Courier’s reporting on Black activism in the city and beyond. The Donna Allen Roundtable Luncheon featuring a conversation with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter Paula Reed Ward and the Local Journalist Award Reception honoring Rod Doss, publisher of the New Pittsburgh Courier, and Pittsburgh sports broadcaster Bill Hillgrove introduced attendees to contemporary Pittsburgh journalists. The reception also included a live auction facilitated by auctioneer David Davies supporting the Mike Sweeney Graduate Student Travel Stipend which raised over $1,600 across the live and silent auction.

Between sessions, attendees explored Pittsburgh during a tour of the Heinz History Center, a walk through and dinner in the Strip District, and mini-tours from many of the local convention goers and former Pittsburgh residents.

In closing remarks during the annual business meeting, Lucht thanked outgoing board members Erin Coyle, Matthew Pressman, and Yong Volz along with outgoing American Journalism editor Pamela Walck. She thanked new convention sites manager Aimee Edmondson and new research chair Jennifer Moore for their work organizing the convention alongside local hosts Walck and Katrina Jesick Quinn. Walck and Lucht celebrated incoming American Journalism editor Amber Roessner. Lucht led a video message on behalf of all attendees welcoming incoming AJHA president Debra van Tuyll.

After recent conventions in the midwest and on the east coast, the event is headed to the west coast next year with Long Beach, California playing host to the convention starting September 25, 2025.

By: Peter Joseph Gloviczki

I am honored and delighted to share an update about ongoing research toward a third scholarly book. My research program considers news narratives and representation during and immediately following major media events, with a particular emphasis on the aftermath of school shootings. 

The research is supported in part by a Joseph McKerns Research Grant, generously provided by the American Journalism Historians Association in 2021. Because of the COVID-19 public health pandemic, my research trip was delayed until 2024. Specifically, I visited the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (VTNA) at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. I first came to the VTNA in 2015 and I knew I wanted to return. The McKerns Research Grant made that return possible.

During my visit to the VTNA, I watched a host of long- and short- news narratives spanning the 1990s through the present-day, beginning with the Columbine School Shooting in Littleton, Colorado (1999), and continuing through the Robb Elementary School Shooting in Uvalde, Texas (2022). My work at the archive helped reveal similarities and differences in media coverage of school shootings across the last three decades. I am interested in legacy construction of and for victims of school shootings. 

Methodologically, I use interpretive, reflexive qualitative research methods. Data guide research questions in an inductive, ground-up approach. I diligently listen to news narratives. My chosen research methods include the case study research strategy, popularized by Robert K. Yin and Robert E. Stake, and autoethnography, as popularized by Norman K. Denzin, Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner, and textual analysis, as popularized by Earl Babbie. In theoretical terms, I have been inspired by uses and gratifications theory, as well as changing conceptions of the media audience during our more mobile and social digital era. 

The VTNA provided a treasure trove of news and information spanning 1968 to the present day. The opportunity to sit with these narratives and think deeply lets me consider how and why events are (or are not) braided together in major media coverage. What themes are repeated across time, space and place? When certain themes do not endure, for what kinds of reasons might those themes fade? Archives like this are valuable for researchers who care deeply about media culture. Here, the stories of the past truly come alive. 

My first book is Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). My second book is Mediated Narration in the Digital Age (Nebraska, 2021). I expect to submit my third book for consideration to University of Nebraska Press, when it is ready. This research trip to the VTNA helped me make significant strides toward that goal. Where my first two books considered the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting and the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, respectively, I expect that my third book will consider the 2018 Parkland, Florida, shooting and the 2022 Uvalde, Texas, shooting. 

I went to the VTNA with the desire to spend time listening closely to as many stories of victims’ families as possible, to listen for how families remember their loved ones. Over time, I am noticing how individuals who lost loved ones sometimes publicly speak about horrendous and seemingly unimaginable losses. What I heard when I listened was deeply moving, especially hearing the presence of deep and understandable anger in the voices of victims’ famil

ies. These testimonies also give voice to profound loss and trauma. I feel grateful for the opportunity to engage in this research, helping understand reportage about tragedies in American media culture. 

Peter Joseph Gloviczki (Ph.D. Mass Communication, University of Minnesota, 2012) is a tenured professor at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois. From July 2022 through June 2024, he chaired the Department of Broadcasting and Journalism. He is past president of the Carolinas Communication Association and past head of the Cultural and Critical Studies Division in the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

1. How did you become involved with AJHA?

I learned about AJHA from Dr. Patrick Washburn at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University while I was a graduate student there in the early 1990s.

 I attended my first conference in Pittsburgh in 2000, and I was hooked because of the  the camaraderie and the excellence of the research presentations.  

1. How did you become involved with AJHA?

I became a member of AJHA because of my interest in media history and in joining a community of like-minded scholars. I am excited to be presenting at my first AJHA conference in October! 

2. How did you develop your interest in journalism or media history?

My interest in media history stems from my scholarly background: my bachelor's degree is in history, and I have carried over that interest to my work in the journalism field, looking particularly at early women journalists and media coverage of women and minorities. I have published two articles that I am particularly proud of: "'A True Newspaper Woman': The Career of Sadie Kneller Miller," published in Journalism History, is the first article-length analysis of the career of a trailblazing journalist from the turn of the twentieth century; and "Race Films and the Black Press: Representation and Resistance," published in American Journalism, which examines Black press coverage of 'race films' in the early twentieth century. I am excited to continue producing media history scholarship—at the upcoming AJHA conference, I will be presenting a co-authored paper on Black press coverage of the pioneering Black figure skater Mabel Fairbanks.  

3. How has your current position as a president’s postdoctoral fellow at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota supported your research and/or teaching goals?

I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to be a President's Postdoctoral Fellow, which provides scholars two years of protected research time before transitioning into faculty positions. I have been able to advance my research agenda during this time, presenting several papers at conferences and entering them into the publication pipeline. The Hubbard School has been extremely supportive, providing both mentorship and financial assistance in supporting my research goals. 

4. What question(s) do you wish fellow researchers or colleagues would ask about your work?

I always appreciate being able to discuss the practical implications of my work. Whether it's historical scholarship or another kind of qualitative analysis, I think it's very important to examine how my scholarly contributions connect to, and provide insight about, journalism and media in contemporary contexts, and what real-world problems they address. Talking this through with colleagues helps me articulate the "so what" of my research.

5. What hobbies or activities do you enjoy outside of academia?

I am an avid sports fan and love attending baseball games and tennis tournaments. I'm also a film buff and often go to the movies to watch the latest releases. Finally, I have just started learning to play the guitar and am enjoying it so far!

Carolina Velloso is the President's Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include the professional experiences of women and minority journalists and the representation of women and minorities in media.

By: Jason Lee Guthrie

My research project explores the intriguing case of Leigh v. Warner Bros., Inc. (1997). This case is centered around photographer Jack Leigh’s iconic image “Midnight,” which features the “Bird Girl” statue in a Savannah cemetery. Commissioned for John Berendt’s book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, this photograph became the subject of a significant copyright dispute when Warner Bros. produced a film based on the book. The question at issue in the case is whether copyright law can protect something as intangible as a “mood.” This issue is particularly relevant in today’s entertainment industries, where the boundaries of copyright are continually tested by new technologies and creative expressions. 

My interest in this case comes from my primary research agenda on the history of copyright law. I discovered Leigh v. Warner Bros., Inc. (1997) while researching the well-known Williams v. Bridgeport Music, Inc. (2015) case, commonly referred to as the “Blurred Lines” case. In that instance, Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke were found liable for infringing Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up.” The outcome of the Williams case was unprecedented in copyright law and had the potential to disrupt established practices within the entertainment industry. Although the subsequent Gray v. Perry (2018) case somewhat mitigated its chilling effect, it has nonetheless introduced further ambiguity and potential litigation concerning the copyrightability of a creative work’s intangible qualities, such as its aesthetic, vibe, or “mood.”

My favorite aspect of this project so far has been the chance to work with University of Georgia doctoral student Lexie Little. The funds from the McKerns grant were primarily to hire her as a research assistant. Anyone acquainted with her work will not be surprised at all to learn that she has been fabulous to collaborate with. Her meticulous attention to detail and insightful analysis have been invaluable. To date, we have completed extensive primary source research, focusing on the legal history of the case and the comprehensive collection of Jack Leigh’s papers housed at the University of Georgia’s Special Collections Libraries. This collection includes 200 linear feet of material, providing a rich source of information on Leigh’s work and the legal battle that ensued. 

Our research also examines how the case was covered in contemporary news media and the entertainment industry trade press. This dual approach helps to contextualize the legal proceedings within the broader cultural and technological shifts of the late 1990s. By analyzing articles, editorials, and industry reports, we gain a multifaceted understanding of the case’s impact and the public discourse it generated.

Some key findings thus far are that Leigh’s lawsuit against Warner Bros. was only partially successful, highlighting the complexities that copyright law encounters when it seeks to address rapid technological change. The case occurred during the early days of the internet, a period marked by significant changes in how creative works were produced, distributed, and consumed. Our research explores how these technological advancements influenced the court’s handling of the case and the evolving legislative logic surrounding copyright. By examining cases that have cited Leigh v. Warner Bros. in the past 25 years, we hope to shed light on its lasting impact on copyright law. This historical perspective is crucial for understanding current debates about the copyrightability of increasingly ephemeral, digital works.

Lexie and I look forward to presenting our findings at a conference and ultimately submitting an article to an academic journal. The case of Leigh v. Warner Bros., Inc. offers a fascinating lens through which to explore the boundaries of copyright law. By examining the legal, cultural, and technological contexts of this case, our research could contributes to a deeper understanding of how copyright can—and cannot—protect the intangible qualities of creative works. This historical perspective is essential for navigating the complexities of copyright in the Digital Age.

Jason Lee Guthrie is an assistant professor of communication and media studies at Clayton State University. Within media history, he studies creative industries and intellectual property law. He received a Joseph McKerns Research Grant in 2023.

By: Natascha Toft Roelsgaard

The American Journalism Historians Association 2024 conference in Pittsburgh is fast approaching, and so is the chance to participate in our annual auction event to support graduate student travel. Maybe you are finally ready to part ways with an old bottle of whiskey collecting dust in the dark corners of your office, or you want to donate a signed copy of your latest book. 

Every year, AJHA members near and far donate treasured items to the cause, from books, magazines, and newspapers to antique cameras, newspaper totes, and original artwork. The money raised will help fund student travel to our annual conferences through the Sweeney Graduate Student Travel Stipend. 

Academic conferences present rich opportunities for networking and sharing research, both essential to graduate students as they advance in their academic careers. At the 2023 conference, six students received a travel stipend. One of them was Claire Rounkles, a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri and assistant professor at the University of Memphis.

“The opportunity the conference provides students to engage with scholars and to learn how to present is invaluable. While receiving the travel stipend, I presented papers, work in progress, and served on a panel,” Rounkles wrote in an email. “Besides the opportunity to advance my research, I have also fostered connections that have helped me in the job hunt.”

Over 60 items were donated last year, and the auction raised $2,358. The committee hopes to surpass $3000 this year to help even more students attend the conference. If you want to donate an item, please fill out the form before Sept. 20. Uploading a photo and description of your item only takes a few minutes. Items will be up for bids during the week of the conference. Donated items must be brought to the conference in Pittsburgh, Pa.

The travel student stipend, named after the late Professor Michael S. Sweeney, ensures the inclusivity of graduate students at future conferences. “Any effort to continue the Sweeney Travel stipend will help future scholars and advance the legacy Mike Sweeney held of promoting students to be the best they can be,” Rounkles wrote in an email.

The auction website opens the week of Sept. 23 and will accept bids until just before the annual business meeting on Saturday, Oct. 5.