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 75^th 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.

How did you become involved with AJHA?

I was David Sloan's student at University of Alabama starting way back in 1989.  I went into grad school without a clue what grad school was.  But I saw a media history course on the schedule and JUMPED on it.  I had been a history (and English) major at Principia College and had spent the 1980s as a journalist, so it was obvious that Media History was meant for me!  David was my media history professor, and what a fortunate, fortunate situation for me—and for all of David's students.

He had a vision for bringing students along and furthering their careers in academia.  Most notably, he didn't make us rewrite our papers in his voice; he exercised a light hand as an editor.  He insisted on us submitting to conferences, and he showed us how to do it—he really guided us through the process.  In some cases, he asked students to write book chapters.  He even asked me to co-write a book, and then in another class, our entire class wrote a book. 

I came out of my master's degree and subsequent PhD as a veteran, almost, and of course by then I was part of AJHA, having completely dived into the deep end there.  David made sure we students submitted to AJHA, as he was one of the co-founders of our organization.

You have a regular speaking schedule and put on PowerPoint shows. How do those events differ from traditional research presentations? How have those shifted the way you present research in other settings?

I've written four popular history books, which is a childhood dream come true.  These are the ones I present to audiences via PowerPoint—but not just PowerPoint.  One format is a sort of interactive storytelling, where I recruit members of the audience to act out stories; another is a scripted one-woman show; three others are PowerPoint shows, although I take great pains to make them entertaining.  In one PowerPoint show, for example, I trick the audience into failing a quiz about the Wright Brothers, and by the time the show is over, they pass the quiz when asked again.  Don't I wish it would be that easy with my students!

These presentations differ from research presentations by length—I generally speak 45 minutes to 55 minutes as the entertainment for the group who asked me to speak.  I get bent out of shape when a group that meets over lunch wants a shorter speech... that's very hard for me.  These presentations also differ by audience—I speak mostly to non-academic audiences at public libraries, garden clubs, historical societies, and the like....  I do also like making academic presentations a little entertaining, maybe drawing a laugh or a sort of gasp, maybe.

Of course, those little sparks have to match the topic.  For example, I was presenting an academic presentation on the settlement literature that brought colonists to America to start with.  One of the prime writers of this over-the-top PR was John Smith, the one associated with Pocahontas.  So when I quoted John Smith's work in my AJHA presentation, I whipped out an action figure of John Smith from the movie Pocahontas and quipped, "...and we think of him as just a movie star."  I remember he fit nicely into the empty microphone holder on the podium.

You’ve described your writing style as having “the breezy storytelling quality of fiction, of course while staying true to history,” how did you settle on using that style?

I think I can call back the answer from my days as a general assignment reporter on The Sampson Independent, a small daily newspaper in the farm country of North Carolina.  The Independent is based in the happenin' town of Clinton, which in my day had about 7,000 residents—yet it was a big city and had a daily newspaper.  That tells you something about the rural nature of the area.

I decided early on that my writing shouldn't be done in a dry and "just-the-facts" Dragnet style; it should be interesting to read.  My thought was that many of my readers probably read only the paper, so they should be reading something fun to read.  Fortunately, I had lots of chances to write in an entertaining way, as I was given a column once a week (always fun to write!) and often wrote the Sunday Feature Page on more lighthearted topics.  Then there were the usual features.  Of course, we had some hard news, and I did write that seriously.

In every case, these things were written based on facts—OK, sometimes the column got fanciful.  But otherwise, I was writing the facts—but interestingly.  To me, truth is more interesting than fiction anyway; I get quite impatient with most novels because they aren't true.  So writing the truth in a readable way became my goal.  I easily transferred that goal to historical research and writing, since I have always read history for fun, anyway.  Since journalism and history are definitely related, I think both should be entertaining and readable, while also being true.

What is one piece of advice or lesson you have from your recent research or teaching?

My advice is pedagogical for any of us who feel like they're losing the battle of educating our students.  Every year about this time (I'm writing this at the end of the fall semester), I quote Miss Shields from the movie A Christmas Story as she (and I) grade papers:  "F!  F!  My life's work down the drain!" 

Sometimes I get very discouraged that "no one" among my students (as it seems momentarily) applied their lessons.  This year the issue was naturalness—my freshman English students are actually writing short media history papers, and I know their findings and analysis should be interesting... but this year they seemed to fall down before attaining that natural sound that everyone wants to read.  They tended to sound stilted and panicky to fit into a mold.  I told my husband that my lesson learned this year was to retire! ...  But NO!

I've come to realize that we professors and teachers are the nerds who followed the rules when we were students, got brave enough to apply the spirit as well as the rules, who stayed up late researching and writing and worrying about grades.  My students who made me become Miss Shields this semester are, simply, the ones destined for careers other than mine. 

An example:  During our final exam this year, three of my students who happen to be nursing majors took charge when a fellow student had a medical emergency.  One of those take-charge nurses was a real struggler in my class.  But wow, what a great nurse that student will make!  That's part of it—we're all heading to where we need to be.  I remind myself that I can only launch them into their sophomore year with my fingers crossed that they'll get their feet under them and come to the realization that writing isn't a series of rules, but a natural telling of what you know.  And I admit a good number of my students did break through this semester (despite Miss Shields' lament) and wrote some readable research that was fun to hear about.

So my advice is:  Don't be discouraged.  We all feel like Miss Shields sometimes, but when you pull out of that nosedive, you'll see that some of the students' work is very interesting indeed.  

What hobbies or activities do you enjoy outside of academia?

Gosh, is there any time outside of academia?  Actually, I swim all summer and have just taken up swimming in the school year, too, when I can.  I love traveling to see our grown sons, one in Chicago and one in Los Angeles (I'm in Birmingham, Alabama)—and I love traveling to the ocean and swimming in it.  It's also a great and relaxing challenge for me to shop with a laser focus for bargains, my goal being to be able to get gifts for my large childhood family on the cheap.  My husband accuses me and my sisters of bragging about how little we spent whenever we give a gift, and I think he's right!  But it's so much fun to find those bargains!

Julie Hedgepeth Williams teaches part-time at Samford University, where she's delighted that her freshman English class can be taught as media history. She's also a part-time writer of popular history books which all started as AJHA papers. She won AJHA's Sidney Kobre Award for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism History in 2021.

• Don’t be afraid to push back to ensure the cover design reflects the book’s thesis. The Press initially designed cover art that featured a photograph of Nixon holding a press conference. Although apropos, it omitted the shadowy, threatening nature of the Nixon era captured so well by Porter’s original. I wanted to emphasize the theme of the book—the ominous nature of government attacks on a free press. I was delighted when the Press produced a new layout.

  

• Block Quotes. Ask the editor/typesetter to use the same spacing as the regular text, to avoid the appearance of an impenetrable slug. Some style editors insist on a block quote based on a number of lines, but others avoid them (because no one reads block quotes, they contend). Weave in what you can to protect the narrative flow, but ask for more space to invite the reader to engage a blocked passage.

• Snag URLs Now! Some online sources permit a single view of an article and then require a subscription. If an essay seems important, Export the article as a PDF to your research files when you first encounter it. Copy the URL and paste it with the date accessed directly into your PDF.

• 

• Photo Rights and Text Licensing. Find out the class of rights/licensing the publisher desires before you engage the rights holder, to avoid having to undo an agreement and re-sign for worldwide rights. 

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

How did you become involved with AJHA?

One could say I’ve been a “lurker,” trolling work conducted by AJHA members for some time.  I’ve worked for years to frame archival material gifted to me by a family member (my grandmother), a lifetime journalist, editor and linotype operator. As someone with limited background in journalism history, AJHA seemed a great place to connect with some of the scholars who provided insights into  this academic area (and this proved to be accurate). Though I taught Intro to Journalism for a few years prior to a focus on communication/public relations, AJHA—and its conference—the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference—provided a place for me to gain insight on academic work in journalism history, particularly on women journalists. 

What drew you to studying crisis and risk communication? How do you see those interests connecting to journalism history?

My doctorate at Purdue focused on public affairs and issue management under Dick Crable and Steve Vibbert, two early scholars in the field.  My work in crisis and risk communication has focused on the connections between public relations and emergency managers from a more pragmatic perspective, as students and I have worked to understand how emergency managers might foster improved risk and crisis messages using public relations principles. Besides this, I’m fascinated by work my thesis adviser, Dr. Denise Bostdorff, at Wooster College, has long conducted on Presidential crisis rhetoric. One goal of mine is future work grounded in crisis and risk communication history at a more local level. 

How have you seen the field change since you started your career?

The biggest and most obvious change in the field of crisis/risk communication has been social media, which has been both a blessing and the bane of emergency managers, as it requires another level of focus and expertise to convey emergency/risk/crisis messages via social media channels, but to monitor and respond to mis- and dis-information. Clearly, social media has changed the practice of crisis, emergency and risk communication, as authorities and practitioners face the complications of “unvetted” reports when striving to provide accurate information in real time so community members and others at risk can make informed decisions. 

What tips or advice do you have for others exploring similar topics, archives, or questions that you examine in your research?

Attend the conferences, read the journals, listen to the podcasts, and network with other scholars in the areas in which you want to learn more.  I also encourage “newbies” to volunteer, always an excellent way to meet other members, learn about their research, gain insights about the research process. AJHA members are generous in sharing their insights and tips around archival research, framing questions, and providing resources. 

What hobbies or activities do you enjoy outside of academia?

Travel, cooking, reading, classical music, good theatre, engaging series (“Slow Horses,” “Inspector Ricciardi,” and “Where’s Wanda” have been recent favorites). Over break, my husband and I look forward to making sure we’ve seen all the Oscar-nominated films from 2024.

Theresa Russell-Loretz is an associate professor and former chair of the Department of Communication and Theatre at Millersville University. Russell-Loretz is also a former chair of the NCA Public Relations Division and currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Public Relations Research.

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.