By Nathaniel Frederick II

As a member of AJHA and the National Association of Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), I support the officer’s goals to emphasize media literacy. The timing is perfect to broaden our scope and introduce our work to a new audience.

I attended the NAMLE conference for the first time in 2013, with the intention of learning new pedagogical techniques for a restructured of course I was scheduled to teach. There, I met educators, academics, activists, and students with a passion for understanding media messages and the role of media in our culture. The most surprising aspect of my experience was observing the international scope of media literacy efforts.  In 2015, NAMLE and the UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Alliance held concurrent meetings. Attendees were able to meet with educators focused on raising the profile of media and information literacy in countries across the globe.

The goal of NAMLE is for people to be critical thinkers and media producers, using all forms of communication. Similarly, media history involves critical analysis and comparisons that help evaluate contemporary media systems.

In a course titled, “African Americans in Media and Culture,” I incorporated critical media literacy (Kellner & Share, 2006) which focuses on ideological critique and analyzes the politics of representation of gender, race, and class, and sexuality, while incorporating alternative media production.  This perspective suggests that media can be tools for empowerment when marginalized or misrepresented people in the mainstream media receive the opportunity and tools to tell their stories and express their concerns.

By incorporating the work of media literacy scholars and exploring new pedagogies, we can facilitate active media citizenship by providing historical context to public health crises, social movements, and misinformation in journalism. Before the pandemic, Winthrop University collaborated with a number of stakeholders to organize a media literacy series titled, “News Literacy and the Future of Journalism.” The series included eleven events over eight months that sought to deepen the public’s knowledge and appreciation of the vital connections among democracy, the humanities, journalism, and an informed citizenry. Topics included the history of fake news; editorial cartoons; investigative journalism; and the future of journalism. By collaborating with other departments to recreating a similar media literacy events, a virtual program and would be inexpensive and a worthwhile endeavor.

I look forward to the research and pedagogical insights that come from alliances between AJHA and NAMLE. This interdisciplinary exploration will make media history engaging to students and highlight the relevancy of different subjects.

Nathaniel Frederick II is an Associate Professor at Winthrop University. He studies African American magazine history, representations of masculinity in television and film, the American Civil Rights Movement, and African American sacred music. 

By Teri Finneman

I still vividly remember grabbing the newspaper off the kitchen table and hurriedly slamming through the pages.

Somewhere, in the middle of the paper, there it was: my very first byline. I was 17 years old and now a real journalist for the newspaper of my hometown of 2,500 people.

I often say I owe everything I have today to my work with weekly newspapers between the ages of 17 and 22. After that, I dared cross that red line over to the world of dailies, one I swore I would never cross.

In 2014, I returned to the world of weeklies when I partnered with the North Dakota Newspaper Association to capture oral histories of older/retired North Dakota journalists. I’ve been doing that work ever since. I frequently guest speak at state newspaper conventions throughout the Heartland, where I mingle with community journalists and return home to the world of weeklies.

Therefore, when I finally got the opportunity to teach journalism history, it was important to me to highlight community journalism history. After all, as Reader (2018) notes, there is little prior research focused on U.S. weekly newspapers despite the fact that “community newspapers, the vast majority of them weeklies, accounted for 85 percent of all newspapers in the United States and for three-fifths of overall print circulation” in 2015.^[1] 

I wanted to go beyond journalism history in New York and Washington, D.C. I wanted journalism students to be told that a career in community journalism was just as important as one in the big cities.

Early in the fall semester, I invited the Kansas and South Dakota newspaper associations to talk to my history students about why community journalism matters. They impressed upon Generation Z that community journalism can align with their values of entrepreneurship, putting their multimedia skills to use while advocating for a community.

From there, I divided my class of 34 students into seven groups. I had already worked with the Kansas Press Association to identity seven notable journalists in the state to work with us so students could capture their oral histories. By the end of the semester, the class presented nearly 570 pages of new Kansas journalism history to the state historical society.

I began the assignment process by giving the students an overview of how oral history differs from journalism. I learned from my prior experience doing a similar project in South Dakota that it was best for me to be the one to go over the legal paperwork with the subjects. I also provided the students a base list of 100 questions that I ask of all of my oral history subjects. From there, it was on their group to complete the rest.

I am a big proponent of group contracts for group projects where every single task is written down and a student’s name is placed in front of it. Then, it is crystal clear who is in charge of (and accountable for) what. Students divided up research on the journalist, additional question development, the interviewing process, audio editing, transcript proofing and corrections, social media posts, and biography write-ups.

The pandemic created some issues in that I usually block off a whole day for collecting oral histories in person. Instead, we needed to use Zencastr and train our subjects how to log into that system so that students could remotely capture their audio through their laptops from home.

The students ended up having long phone calls with their journalists instead of video taping with them in person. They took turns interviewing their assigned journalists and hearing their life stories.

It was disappointing the students couldn’t meet these journalists in person. But even with the altered and distanced assignment, the impact on Generation Z was clear:

Doing the oral history project was one of the most fascinating things I have done. Talking to someone who made a profound impact in journalism history was like jumping into a book and seeing everything firsthand. Buzz Merritt is a very multi-dimensional man with a lot of great stories to tell. It was very different from just reading a history book because I learned about how his family dynamic, his favorite parts of the job and things he wants us to know. Participating in this project not only taught me more about journalism history, but also introduced me to an entirely different generation and how it made journalism what it is today.

 Kansas journalist Buzz Merritt is pictured at his desk with two generations of newspaper technologies. Credit: Buzz Merritt.

Throughout this oral history project, I have learned just how important it is to document journalism history. This was one of the most rewarding projects I have ever had the opportunity to be a part of. When interviewing Craig McNeal, I was so impressed and fascinated with everything that he has accomplished in his life and I found his career to be very inspiring.  

When I first heard of what we were going to do for the oral history project, I had no idea the significance of what we were embarking on. I never quite understood how history was made or how people conducted informational interviews with a certain subject… I never thought that I would be making history in one of my classes, but I can honestly say it was a lot of fun, and I feel grateful for the lessons I’ve learned and the new outlook I have gained.

These kinds of experiential learning projects require a lot of coordination for the professor among students, between clients, and between students and clients. If/when I embark on this endeavor again, I will decrease the number of oral history subjects to four or five to make it more manageable in a 16-week semester. 

I benefited from a grant that helped fund this project. But whether or not you have the time or funding for a large project, the bottom line is this: How are you incorporating active learning of your state’s community journalism into your journalism history class?

Teri Finneman is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Kansas and past chair of the AEJMC History Division. For more on this project, visit http://journalism.ku.edu/cherry-picked-ku-class-produces-oral-history-kansas-journalism.

Please introduce yourself and include your connections/role with AJHA. 

Like many longtime members, my involvement with AJHA began as a graduate student. I presented research as a master’s student at the 2001 convention in San Diego and discovered a welcoming and supportive group of people. Participation in subsequent conferences enabled me to practice presentation skills, get feedback on projects, and prepare for the job market. In fact, I was informally interviewed for a position at the University of Utah during the history tour that was part of the 2005 San Antonio convention. Also at that convention, I was elected to the Board of Directors. In 2010, I was elected second vice-president of AJHA and began a rotation through the senior leadership roles.

During my 20-year affiliation with AJHA, I’ve also served as coordinator and host of the Donna Allen Luncheon; chair of the research-in-progress paper competition; reviewer for both RIPs and papers; reviewer and board member for American Journalism; and cohost of AJHA’s 2018 convention in Salt Lake City. 

Salt Lake City has been my home since 2006, when I accepted a tenure-line position in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. I teach the introductory news writing class, the capstone journalism class that focuses on diverse beat reporting, and the required course on mass communication history.

What drew you to your topic/time period? 

I became interested in the Black press during my doctoral program at the University of Oregon. A study of Ida B. Wells and her anti-lynching crusade sparked my interest in Black newspapers and how editors used them to create community and advocate for civil rights. 

 

My dissertation focused on Beatrice Morrow Cannady, editor of the Portland, Oregon Advocate, and her activism for Black Oregonians during the 1920s and 1930s. I then studied other Black newspapers in the West while working on a documentary about Cannady for Oregon Public Broadcasting and preparing a book manuscript for Oregon State University Press. 

Just when I was thinking about my next project, I was fortunate to spend time with Hank Klibanoff. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Race Beat co-taught a special course with me at Utah about the media and civil rights. I asked if there was someone who deserved further study and Hank blurted: Emory O. Jackson, editor of Alabama’s Birmingham World. Jackson managed the paper from about 1940 until his death in 1975 and fought for the franchise, equal educational opportunities, an end to police violence, and other civil-rights issues.

A few months after we chatted, I attended the 2009 AJHA convention in Birmingham. I slipped away and walked to the Birmingham Public Library Department of Archives and Manuscripts, one of the repositories for Jackson’s papers. That initial dip into his files was enough to convince me that I wanted to learn more about the editor and the Birmingham World.

How did your thinking in the development of your topic start and then lead to this publication? Did it stray? Did you make any sudden and unexpected turns? 

From the outset, I wanted to learn as much as possible about Jackson, his activism, and the World. But as I read issue after issue and pored over Jackson’s personal papers, I realized that he was most passionate about voting rights, ending police brutality, and securing equal educational opportunities. I decided at that point to honor Jackson’s work in those areas and focus on them in my book.

What surprised you most about this project? 

Emory Jackson is described in a few articles and books as passionate, dedicated, and fiery. Those are apt descriptions of the man who devoted decades to the newspaper, worked for the NAACP, and gave countless talks to groups about civil rights. Yet Jackson missed key stories, stories that might have ensured his place in the Civil Rights Movement. For example, he didn’t interview Martin Luther King Jr. during the protests in Birmingham in April and May 1963, even though the minister was working out of a hotel near the Birmingham World office. Nor did Jackson report on King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” That Jackson did not document important events from a race perspective is both surprising and disappointing.

What did you find to be your biggest challenge in working your way to completion of your monograph?  

Time, distance, and funding presented challenges. I continually sought research grants to help defray the cost of trips to Birmingham, Atlanta, and Detroit. My semester-based teaching schedule meant that most trips occurred during summer breaks. And the gaps between each trip necessitated a period of reorientation to my project and its historical context. 

What are you working on now? 

After the 2019 release of my book and the 2020 publication of a monograph about the Negro/National Newspaper Publishers Association, I decided to take a break from research. This has given me time to accept numerous interesting invitations in 2021. For instance, I delivered the keynote address (about Jackson) at the 12^th annual Discerning Diverse Voices Symposium, held virtually at the University of Alabama College of Communication and Information Sciences. Most recently, I helped two Oregon high school students, each of whom is creating a documentary about Beatrice Morrow Cannady to enter in the state history competition.

What topic would you like to tackle next? 

I presented research on The Nation’s coverage of the early years of the Civil Rights Movement at the 2016 AJHA convention. I would like to revisit that project and explore the magazine’s reportage of the period from 1960-1965. 

David R. Davies is professor in the School of Communication at the University of Southern Mississippi. Before entering academia, he was a reporter for 10 years in Arkansas, working for both the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette. Winner of the second Margaret A. Blanchard Dissertation Prize (in 1998), Davies is the author of The Press & Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement (University Press of Mississippi, 2001) and The Postwar Decline of American Newspapers, 1945-1965 (Praeger, 2006). He is co-editor (with Pam Parry) of the Women in American Political History book series (Lexington Press). AEJMC recently awarded him a $5000 Senior Scholar Grant to study Mississippi editor Ira Harkey.

When and how did you first become involved in AJHA?

My first AJHA was in 1994 in Roanoke, Virginia. At that time I was a first-year PhD student at the University of Alabama, and my adviser, Dr. David Sloan, had encouraged us to come to AJHA. I was amazed at the welcome the graduate students received, and I was hooked. AJHA has been my primary academic conference home ever since. I take absolutely any opportunity to tell folks how important this organization has been to my career.

You’ve recently been awarded an AEJMC Senior Scholar grant. How does that proposed project fit into your overall research agenda?

I've taught at Southern Miss since 1991, and I've spent almost two-thirds of my 30 years here in administrative jobs. While I enjoyed administration -- particularly my time as department chair -- I was unable to do as much research as I would have liked in those years. I was absolutely thrilled to receive the Senior Scholar grant, as it offers much-needed support for my research agenda as I've returned  to the classroom full-time. The award means a lot to me because of my longtime membership in the AEJMC History Division, which as we all know shares much of the membership of AJHA.

The project is also important to me because of my longtime interest in Ira B. Harkey, Jr., of the Pascagoula Chronicle in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Harkey was an important voice of reason at a time when editorial leadership was lacking in much of Mississippi during the civil rights years. He was a rare breed indeed -- an integrationist! -- but his contributions to Mississippi journalism have been overlooked. I hope my project will represent progress in shedding light on Harkey and the important role he played in these years.

What do you believe is the importance of researching racial justice topics? 

Researching historical topics in racial justice allows us to study how a society comes to terms with momentous change. Given the incredible upheaval in recent years surrounding racial justice, such insights are more important than ever. Sadly, I think there are many parallels between historical coverage of race and the coverage that we see today. 

As a past dissertation prize winner and mentor of several Blanchard finalists, what advice do you have for advising historical dissertations?

Gosh, this is a tough one. My students' success is very much much a reflection of their hard work, resolve, and talent. But if I had to draw a few lessons from my experience, I would say it's most important for students to pick an important and compelling topic with ample primary sources. The advising process works best if there's a schedule of some sort. There's some elasticity built in, of course, but both adviser and student need something to serve as a guidepost for a timely completion. Then it's important to stay in touch with your adviser and committee as the work progresses. I don't have to tell you how important AJHA is to the process both for the sense of community it brings as well as for the research insights of our colleagues. 

How does your international experience (teaching study abroad in England each year) influence your historical study? 

The experience has given me so many opportunities to make cross-cultural comparisons in my history and writing classes. It's been absolutely invaluable. While I have not yet researched a British media history topic myself, several of my graduate students have, and it's been rewarding to watch their progress as they work in British archives and libraries.

What are some of your hobbies or interests outside of academia?

I'm an enthusiastic -- if not particularly gifted -- language learner. I've been taking Spanish and French classes here and there, and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. I'll finish my BA in Spanish in 2023. I've found that it's informed my teaching to have the experience of being a student again. I can now empathize better with the students as they have difficulties navigating the course management system or the university registration system or learning a new concept. 

Otherwise, my wife Jennifer and I read, watch a lot of Netflix and tend to the dog and six cats. Annie the dog has gotten way more walks than usual in the Covid years, and we're all about that. And Jennifer and I are very much looking forward to traveling -- aren't we all -- once the pandemic is behind us all.

By Donna Lampkin Stephens, AJHA President

The decision none of us wanted to make has been made, and now — for a second straight year — we are left with making the best of it.

Despite promising news on the vaccine front, AJHA officers and conference personnel made the call in early March to again forego an in-person October conference after survey results of the membership indicated most of us still don’t feel comfortable committing to an in-person experience yet.

It was the right decision again, even though no one is happy with the outcome. It is simply too much of a risk, health-wise, as variants of the virus continue to evolve. And for many of us, finances would have been an issue as travel funding at so many institutions has been all but axed in the COVID-19 era.

Although by the advent of 2021, I think we all suspected we might be here (even if we didn’t utter the words aloud), we didn’t make the decision based on our guts. Instead, we took a data-driven approach that confirmed what we’d thought.

Of 314 surveys sent to AJHA members, we received 157 responses; 139 of those were completed for an 88.54 completion rate. Of those, only 15.89 percent (24) were very likely to attend a regular in-person conference; 17.22 percent (26) were somewhat likely. Thirty-five (23.18 percent) were unsure.

Twenty-four respondents (15.89 percent) were somewhat unlikely, with a whopping 42 (27.81 percent) very unlikely.

So 66 of the 151 respondents to that question were somewhat or very unlikely to attend an in-person conference. 

On the other hand, 95 (68.84 percent) of 138 respondents reported they were very likely to attend an online only conference. Twenty-four others (17.39 percent) said they were somewhat likely. Twelve were unsure; only four (2.9 percent) were somewhat unlikely, with just three (2.17 percent) very unlikely.

While it wasn’t what we wanted, those numbers made our call easy to make.

Our virtual conference in 2020 gained good reviews, and between a year of experience and a few more months to prepare, we feel confident we can have an even better online experience in 2021.

Demographically, a great majority of the survey respondents (109) are active faculty members; 14 others are retired, and 11 are students. 

Perhaps more than most organizations, our membership and participation skew older; once we get involved with AJHA, we tend to stay involved for many years. Forty-one of the respondents have attended more than 10 conferences; 17 have attended more than 20. 

Many of us remember spending time during previous conferences visiting with some of the founders of our organization, picking their brains about research projects and tenure applications. With covid appearing to more severely affect older people, how could we take a chance of endangering anyone’s health, even in what we hope will be the waning days of a pandemic? It just wasn’t worth the risk.

Another reason this was an easy call was the work of our Convention Sites Chair Caryl Cooper and Loretta Champion Johnson of HelmsBriscoe, who after doing so last year in Memphis, successfully negotiated with our Columbus hotel so that we won’t be penalized financially. The Memphis hotel agreed to move our contract from 2020 to 2022; the Westin Columbus hotel agreed to do the same, from 2021 to 2023. So we will retain our site schedule, just with a two-year pause.

One factor did make it easier for the Columbus hotel to be so amenable — thank God for that Ohio State home football game in October 2021.

The virtual conference will be Oct. 8-9, 2021. Submission deadline is June 15.

by Kathy Roberts Forde (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

The past four years have utterly transformed my understanding of the relationship between journalism and democracy, past and present. Our democracy is fragile; that much I understood from deep historical reading. And I knew our press could either make it stronger or weaker. What I did not adequately understand, until I dug into my new line of research while simultaneously living through the Trump era, was how quickly the news media could help rip democracy apart.

My Substack newsletter Letter from a Region (subscribe here, if you’re interested) gives me a forum to think through sticky problems of journalism and democracy and, I hope, have conversations with journalism students, instructors, and professionals, and anyone else interested in these problems.

We have all lived through the dangerous mendacity of the Trump administration and its partisan news organ Fox News. During these years, I was researching and writing Journalism & Jim Crow: The Making of White Supremacy in the New South (University of Illinois Press), the book I’ve co-edited with Sid Bedingfield that will appear later this year. In the research, I kept seeing clear parallels to our country’s present vexing problems. I see clearly now a disturbing reality: U.S. news media have often not served democratic ends or as guardrails for democracy.  They have often been essential actors in violent, racist, anti-democratic political movements.

Letter from a Region allows me to share what I’ve learned in working on this book and to suggest how understanding the past can help us make better decisions in the present. It allows me to place current events and problems in historical context. And some of the historical context I provide is a significant revision of what we thought we knew about the history of journalism.

So what specifically did I learn from writing and editing Journalism & Jim Crow? From the end of the Civil War in 1865 through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, many white news leaders and newspapers in the South actively involved themselves in building and defending white supremacist political economies and social orders across the South. They held political office; used their newspapers to spread lies in racist political campaigns to disfranchise Black voters and thus institute white supremacist, one-party rule; ran industrial enterprises that profited off the stolen labor of Black men, women, and children in the convict leasing system; and struck corrupt deals with political and business leaders while misleading the public in their newspapers. They fomented racial terror, like lynching.

What’s more, these white news leaders used their papers to spread racist disinformation that whipped white racial anxieties into white mob fury, leading to episode after episode of electoral violence meant to disfranchise Black voters and consolidate authoritarian, anti-democratic rule. The parallels with the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6—with the incitement of President Trump and the mass delusion about electoral fraud caused by the relentless disinformation spread by Fox News and its right-wing peers—are vivid.

Sid and I hope Journalism & Jim Crow will inspire other journalism historians and journalism studies scholars to take seriously the role of press leaders and organizations as political actors. This idea of the press wielding hard power through political activity—not only  wielding soft power through news coverage—is one I’m exploring in my newsletter.

Democracy requires constant renewal, and so does journalism.  What can be done to discipline anti-democratic news media actors like Fox News, One America News, Brietbart, InfoWars, and other right-wing media that traffic in dangerous and anti-democratic political disinformation? This is a massive, urgent problem that requires our best thinking. In Letter from a Region, I’m thinking through this problem, and related ones, using history as a tool with which to think. And I’m eager to think with others in the tradition of the Pragmatists, like John Dewey, who believed the more minds working a problem, the better. I’m not so arrogant as to believe I’ll find a solution, but I at least want to be part of the conversation with other people who care.

James Carey famously said that journalism and democracy are really “names for the same thing.” And he centered public conversation in this understanding. A journalism that is indifferent to honest and inclusive public conversation, he wrote, will become a “menace to public life and an effective politics.”

We have seen that happen in one large segment of our news and media ecosystem, and the result has been near destruction of US democracy. As journalism historians, we can and should continue to undertake cultural histories of journalism. We need to pay attention to the messages journalism has spread and their influence on public life and democratic struggle. But we must also account for the hard power news leaders and institutions exercise in political and economic life. Letter from a Region is my way of thinking through all of these concerns in a more informal, more conversational, more community-minded way than my formal scholarship allows.

I’d love to have readers of the Intelligencer (and their students!) join me in this conversation.

Sheryl Kennedy Haydel is an assistant professor in public relations at Louisiana State University's Manship School of Mass Communication. She holds a bachelor's degree from Clark Atlanta University, master's degrees from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland, and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern Mississippi. Prior to her academic career, she was a journalist for publications including Chicago Tribune, Detroit News, Detroit Free Press and Austin American-Statesman.

Some of your research focuses on historical influences of the Black College Press. How did you become interested in that topic?

My research area is an extension of my commitment to uplift and empower marginalized communities – especially Black Americans. It’s also reflective of my lived experiences. As the former editor of my college newspaper – the Clark Atlanta University Panther – I’m riveted by how these Black spaces with scant resources managed to carve out space for students to express themselves on their terms and advocate for unapologetic progress. Being editor was one of the most demanding and rewarding times of my collegiate years. The Black college press is an under-mined part of the movement for civil rights and an extension of the Black press.

Also, I’m always curious about the layered effort needed to bring about liberation for Black American men and women. History is the necessary thread that authentically tells the stories of oppression and triumph of Black people. Considering how our ancestors arrived in this country and then were denied education and many other birthright resources, yet still carved a path for themselves and their descendants, leaves me speechless, humbled, and inspired. Once I discovered that student-run newspapers on Black college campuses in the early twentieth century beat the same drum to end systemic racism, I had found my calling as a researcher. Black people who faced punishment if they were caught reading then leveraging newspapers to speak their truth is worthy of exploration.

Now, I must thank Dr. Vanessa Murphree because she taught me my first media history course. One of our assignments was to visit an archive and find something interesting to share with the class. An archivist at the Amistad Research Center on Tulane University’s campus asked me one simple question: “Tell me something about yourself? Maybe this will help us find you something to explore?” I said, “Well, I’m from New Orleans and I earned my undergraduate degree from an HBCU.” Out he came with a box full of newspapers from historically Black colleges and universities. I took pictures, scribbled notes, and immediately said, ‘this is it!’ This class assignment evolved into a class paper and then my 400-page dissertation. I can vividly remember the sense of urgency to get it right and to keep the paper relevant. Going through hundreds of newspapers from the 1920s to the 1950s is something I will never forget.

What are some of the most important things you've discovered in that research?

In the early twentieth century, student journalists on Black college campuses were deeply engaged in the fight for racial equality. They cared about Black political currency and building a stronger sense of Black excellence. These student editors and writers advocated for change long before the modern-day civil rights movement of the 1960s. They were activists and clearly understood the power of words, the value of higher education, and how to strategically use media to inspire their peers. They also were equally resistant to censorship. Much like their mentors in the Black press, they were constantly pushing back on murmurings that their work wasn’t their own. I admire their sense of proud ownership and accountability for what appeared on the pages of the Black student-run press. Finally, they had an irreverent sense of humor. Not everything was so serious. They teased each other about fashion, flirting, and how they behaved at school dances. For example, the Southern University Digest published jokes. They were well-rounded students who understood that they had a role to play in the fight for liberation.

You also look at topics like first-time minority voting and social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter--two topics that are especially relevant these days. How does your historical knowledge enrich your study of these contemporary issues?

Black students in the twentieth century cared about the same things that Black student change-makers do today. They are equally as passionate about racial equality, political justice, and communal solidarity. Black students will use whatever platform they can to share the same messages of advocacy. I keep this at the forefront of all of my contemporary projects because it reminds me of the connection between then and now.   

How do you bring your historical perspective into the classroom?

I use historical research in each of my classes (for example Principles of Public Relations, Public Relations Writing and Applications, Public Relations Campaigns (undergraduate) and Strategic Communication Campaigns (graduate)) to ground students in the mission and purpose of our industry. I use it to provide a foundation that fosters an enduring passion, dedication, and understanding of the symbiotic relationship between journalism and public relations since the inception of our industries. Knowing this history keeps us all accountable and prepares them to be a valuable asset as communicators. Of course, I pull from David Sloan’s books, especially The Media in America: A History, and the other scholars such as Jinx Broussard. I also invite guest speakers to share from a historical lens such as an editor from The Louisiana Weekly or The New Orleans Tribune – both Black New Orleans-based publications – which means a diverse offering including retired practitioners, seasoned scholars, and younger representatives of the aforementioned areas. In my graduate course, I employ a mix of older peer-reviewed articles and contrast them with peer-reviewed articles that have been published in the last two to three years to see how history continues to shape the profession. 

What are some of your interests and hobbies outside of academia?

I love riding my bike with my two teenagers (I can’t! I just wrote I have teenagers, but it’s true). We do at least 10 miles but try to do 15 or more miles each outing. I enjoy working out, taking walks, and dancing to some of my favorite music.

Anything else you want to add that AJHA members would want to know about you?

Stay tuned for a book project I’m the co-editor of coming out in August 2021. It’s titled Black Identities and Media and will be published by Louisiana State University Press. The book is comprised of original essays, ranging in theoretical applications and methodologies, exploring media representation, media effects, and historical accounts of media practices relating to Black communities and their varying identities. Scholarship centered in Black identities often frames racial identity as a monolith, erasing the group’s intersections, including such attributes as gender, sexuality, class, and ability status. Moreover, literature often overlooks how these identities are represented across media platforms, including newsprint, radio, television, social media, and more. This volume provides a much-needed exploration of those intersections and centers the role of Black media creators -- including producers, journalists, and social media influencers -- to highlight Black representation in various genres of mass media. This text will be ideal for use in college classrooms and among general audiences and scholars seeking to explore and discuss the spectrum of Black identities represented within mass media.

Pamela Walck (Duquesne University) was a Joseph McKerns Research Grant recipient in October 2018. Following is her McKerns Grant report.

News of the first American troops landing in the United Kingdom had scarcely made headlines across the Western world when a lurking societal question emerged in newspapers: What role would U.S. women play in the war? Would American women, like the generation before them, be content to demonstrate their patriotism by knitting socks and planting victory gardens? Or would they seek more significant roles—positions which one Los Angeles Times editorial warned would give some a case of ‘gooseflesh’. The column opined that such a limited view of the role women should play diminished their patriotism and capabilities in a total war. But this seismic shift in how society viewed women’s work would not come easily.

In some quarters, officials would lament how difficult—and unsuccessful—Office of War Information (OWI) campaigns were when it came to recruiting U.S. women for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) or the Naval Reserve’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES). By 1945, with hopes of an end to war in sight, the OWI launched a final push for more military womanpower. Along the way, governmental officials found unlikely allies: newspapers, comics sections and paper dolls.

During this ‘golden age’ of paper dolls it was popular for graphic art, including paper dolls, to mimic news photographs and vice versa. Paper dolls were commonplace inside print publications from Good Housekeeping and Godey’s Lady Book to newspapers such as the Boston Herald, The Boston Globe, The Boston Post, Boston American and the Buffalo Express.

It is not surprising that the military would target newspaper comics for propaganda efforts: a 1946 government survey found that 84 percent of men and 82 percent of women read newspaper comics as well.

Thanks to my 2018 McKerns Grant, I was able to travel during July 2019 to Kansas City, Missouri, where an international paper doll convention was being held—just miles from the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library archives, which houses the papers of Philleo Nash from the Office of War Information during these critical war years. Through archival research, I was able to find examples of how wartime propaganda worked to not only normalize women in the workplace and in the military—but also aimed to garner public support for the military service of African Americans and other minority groups during a segregated time in American history.

In addition to the archival work, I was also able to attend the paper doll convention and collect oral history interviews with a dozen men and women who grew up during the war years, played with paper dolls, and were influenced by these temporary artifacts that commonly appeared in the comic section of newspapers each week.

Through these oral history interviews, my co-author Ashley Walter, a doctoral candidate at Penn State, and I were able to explore how newspaper paper dolls may have influenced the collective memory of Americans during this critical moment in time—and how it would impact views of women in the military for years to come. Despite being very temporary in nature, the feelings these paper dolls evoked remain long lasting. For many women who were children during the war years, their collective memories are of a time when newspaper dolls fed into a general feeling of American pride and patriotism.

After presenting this project as a research-in-progress at AJHA—and receiving a warm reception on the direction of our work—I am thrilled to report that our manuscript is currently under revise and resubmit with Media History, a Taylor & Francis publication based out of the United Kingdom. I am thankful for this research grant funding, which made this project and new line of research possible in the first place.

by Tom Mascaro, Service Awards Committee Chair

Every historian can name archivists, compendia, and collections that facilitate our work in immeasurable ways. As we build from past AJHA conventions, we might look for ways to honor other nominees for the Distinguished Service Award from the ranks of historical preservation, more workshops on historical uses of specific collections, grant-writing workshops for media historians, and perhaps a consultant group within AJHA to build templates to help members find, write, and secure grants for media history.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Workshop on Media History Grant Proposals at last October’s virtual AJHA conference offers a jumping-off point for the association to consider how to expand our access to grants for the various aspects of journalism and media history.

Joshua Sternfeld, senior program officer for NEH, expressed keen interest in attracting media history funding proposals, including for preservation and access. Josh is highly knowledgeable about the NEH process and approachable as a resource for those interested in writing history project grants. Funds are also available from various state grants for history.

Ken Ward presented a Research-in-Progress proposal (AJHA 2020) on the use of geography databases to track the “expansion of newspapers across the American frontier.” Ken’s was an excellent project to involve multiple investigators on a history mission, the kind more commonly available to quantitative-scholar teams. His project requires a central leader, or Principal Investigator, but also associates that could easily come from the ranks of media history graduate students on various campuses. Such a project would not only present a proposal suitable to larger history grants, but it would also involve grad students and young scholars with AJHA and the grant-writing process, which would expand our membership and facilitate their careers.

AJHA honored James Danky with the rare Distinguished Service Award for his exceptionable commitment to preservation of “alternative” publications at the University of Wisconsin. We may want to have a discussion among the Service Awards Committee about ways to nominate and/or honor other archivists who serve the academic field in roles from outside academe.

In my field of documentary history, Daniel Einstein, the retired UCLA Film and Television Archivist, published an indispensable two-volume compendia cataloging every network news documentary and special report from 1955-1989. Every broadcast journalism historian of long-form, documentary, and news magazine history relies on Dan’s books.

Another stalwart professional who supports academe from outside the circle is documentary film archivist Kenn Rabin. Kenn’s list of credits includes The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, Eyes on the Prize, Vietnam: A Television History, Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer’s Journey, and Ralph Ellison: An American Journey. He is always busy on film projects, but extremely knowledgeable about archive sources, Fair Use Copyright provisions, costs of footage, and the challenges to historical media projects. He would be a great addition to a future conference program as a speaker or workshop leader. I’m sure there are many more.

“Ideas” are easy; execution takes time and effort and a place on anyone’s busy schedule. That said, I could see using AJHA as a focal point for media historians who need assistance on grants. We could create an informal group of advisers, something more formal -- like a workshop somehow tied to our annual convention (without adding sessions), or maybe a Zoom group to help scholars complete their proposals in a timely fashion and search for innovative ways to fund our research. I’d welcome suggestions.

The AJHA Board of Directors has voted to appoint Autumn Lorimer Linford as interim editor of the Intelligencer. Linford's interim appointment will expire in October, at which point the board may appoint her for a full three-year term.

Linford is a doctoral student and Roy H. Park Fellow in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, where she specializes in journalism history under the direction of Barbara Friedman. Her master's degree is from Brigham Young University, where she completed her thesis on symbols in American Revolutionary newspaper nameplates under the direction of Kevin Stoker.

Linford has presented her research at AJHA, AEJMC, and the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference. Most recently, her paper presented at the AJHA virtual conference in October received the Robert Lance Award for Top Student Paper and honorable mention for the Maurine Beasley Award for the Outstanding Paper on a Women's History topic.

Professionally, Linford has worked as a reporter and photojournalist at the News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina), Deseret Morning News (Orem, Utah), Daily Herald (Provo, Utah), and Riverton (Wy.) Ranger. Among her journalism awards are the News & Observer's Ambitious Reporting Award and 2nd Place Multi-Media Project from the North Carolina Press Association, both for her 2019 coverage of 13-year-old Hania Aguilar's murder.

Linford's professional experience stood out when the AJHA Publications Committee assessed her resume. Second Vice-President Aimee Edmondson had been speaking with Linford about potential service opportunities because she wants to get more involved in AJHA. Based on her experience, the Intelligencer editor position seemed like a good fit.

"Ms. Linford's extensive background in publishing and editing give her the skills to do the work," Publications Committee Chair Paulette Kilmer wrote in the committee's report recommending Linford's appointment.

The report noted that "although we usually do not appoint graduate students to serve as editors, one who is organized and adept at time management could serve AJHA in this vital capacity while getting the opportunity to network with historians at all levels of experience and gain an impressive accomplishment for the resume."

As reported in the December 2020 Intelligencer email, the board approved in October a new system for the newsletter in which AJHA's committees curate and produce content. Edmondson, whose role as second VP is to oversee the committees, has been assisting with shepherding content for monthly distribution to members.

Since the newsletter's re-launch in December, Administrative Secretary Erika Pribanic-Smith has been posting the content and producing the monthly email. Pribanic-Smith, who edited the Intelligencer from 2014-2016, will mentor Linford as she begins her interim term.