We have reached some of the best months of the academic calendar—summer break. This May to September stretch is full of vacations, family events, and getting back to that book you started reading last fall. It is also chocked full of study abroad courses, conferences, research trips, and completing the final edits on your latest manuscript—all of which your fellow AJHA members want to hear about.

Has your research led to an exciting revelation or brought you new challenges? Do you have fascinating stories from a recent archive trip or tips on navigating research? Maybe you just published a book or have one upcoming that you would like to promote. Or, are you retooling a syllabus for a class this fall or tried a new lesson in the classroom this year that helped students understand media history in a new way (or was not as successful as you hoped)? The Intelligencer wants to publish your research essays, book announcements, and reflections on teaching. Have another idea? Send your pitches, completed essays, or questions to the publication’s editor, Karlin Andersen Tuttle, at kja30@psu.edu.

An upcoming conference in Ghent, Belgium will examine the lives and work of lesser-known journalists whose careers shaped the industry and reported on some of the world’s biggest news stories. Liberas, an archive organization based in Belgium and dedicated to the history of liberalism, will host “Forgotten Journalists: Lived experiences and professional identities in the past” on June 6 and 7, 2025, in conjunction with Ghent University, the Laboratory of Journalistic Practices and Identities, and the Center for Archives on Media and Information. The conference aims to “make visible those whose work has been underestimated, or whose journalistic (or partly journalistic) careers have been neglected.” The two-day event will also include keynote presentations from scholars including Noah Amir Arjomand (University of California), Marie-Eve Thérenty (Université de Montpellier III), and AJHA member Will Mari (Louisiana State University). Abstracts are due on August 30, 2024, and travel grants will be provided to two early career researchers attending the conference from outside of Europe. More information about the conference is available on the Liberas website.

The American Journalism Historians Association is seeking nominations for three board positions and second vice president.

Board members serve for three years. The second vice president will ascend to first vice president after one year and then to president the following year. Board members and officers are expected to attend board meetings at the annual convention.

A nominee to the Board of Directors or to any officer position must be a member of the AJHA for at least one calendar year immediately preceding the date of the election. No more than one person from an institution can serve on the Board at one time.

To make nominations and to vote in an election, an individual must be a member of AJHA.

Those who wish to nominate candidates may do so by sending an email with the nominee's name, contact information, and affiliation to Election and Nominations Committee Chair Cathy M. Jackson, cmjackson@nsu.edu.

Please confirm the candidate's willingness to be nominated before sending the name to Cathy.

You should send a brief bio and photo of the nominee along with a statement of why the person wants to serve.

The deadline for nominations is 5 p.m. ET, August 1, 2024.

This year, voting will occur electronically, which means members do not have to come to the convention to vote. A write-in option will be available.

By Tracy Lucht, AJHA President

Grades are posted. Graduates have walked. Gowns have been hung. That can only mean one thing: It’s time to gear up for AJHA’s annual conference. I am eager to see the papers, panel proposals, and research in progress everyone submits by June 1. Don’t forget about grants and awards. The local committee is on their game, and Dave Davies is doing vocal warmups.

Last year’s auction, led by Jon Marshall, was a smashing success and raised a record $2,758 for the Mike Sweeney Travel Stipend. This year, Jon and committee have set a fundraising goal of $3,000. Can we do it? I think we can.

The first step is to donate items or packages. Use this form, which will ask you to describe your item, upload a photo, and suggest a starting bid. You may use your name or remain anonymous. Help us promote the item by telling us what is special about it or why people should bid.

As you start thinking about what to donate, consider packaging smaller items together around a common theme. The hope is the sum will be greater than the parts. The idea is not to spring-clean our shelves or closets but to think about what will excite bidders. I haven’t finalized my package yet, but I have a theme in mind. For larger items, consider how you will get the item to Pittsburgh and how a winning bidder will get it home. AJHA does not ship items (although you could offer to do so as part of your donation). Larger items should be distinctive enough to stand alone.

Over the summer, the auction committee will upload items to Give Butter, the same app we used last year. You’ll be hearing about auction items in the weeks before the conference. The final step is to download the app, if it’s not already on your phone, and bid away. Like last year, a couple of the items will be live-auctioned, but all other bidding will happen on the app.

Bid early, bid often, have fun.

When I am asked about this organization, one thing I always mention is our mentoring and support of emerging scholars. Most of us can personally attest to the value this group has added to our careers. The convention is where the magic happens, and we certainly don’t want graduate students to miss out. Let’s hit that $3,000 goal and show our support.

On other matters:

I want to thank the board and committee chairs who have worked hard this year to move forward with some important messages and initiatives. AJHA issued a statement opposing state legislation that censors the teaching and learning of history. Many of us work at public institutions in states where DEI programs, scholarship, and concepts are under attack. Please know AJHA sees, supports, and values you.

In addition, we hosted a webinar for graduate students on turning a class project or thesis into a conference paper submission, and the public relations committee launched a new social media strategy to increase our visibility. Thanks to all who made these things happen—and to all of you who make this organization so vibrant.

How did you become involved in AJHA?

My advisor, Richard Kielbowicz, now retired from the University of Washington, encouraged me to get involved, along with AEJMC’s History Division and ICA’s Communication History Division—now I try to encourage all of my students, in turn, to get involved with these and other organizations. You’re stronger together and that goes with the weird twists and turns of any academic career—better to do it with friends and colleagues along the way. And it’s easier to pass good stuff onto the next generation when you’re part of an institution such as AJHA, AEJMC or ICA.

What’s with this interest in the “materiality” of media history? And transitions? And why books?

I’m really interested in the “things” of media history, as explored by the work of scholars such as Brian Creech, Susan Keith, Florence Le Cam, Juliette De Maeyer, Rachel Plotnick, Michael Stamm, Perry Parks, and others. As part of that, I’m interested in the messy nitty-gritty of analog-to-digital transitions and their impact on news workers, and the related fate of technology tools, from software to hardware. I’ve written A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies, which is about the computerization of the newsroom in the 1960s through the 1990s, The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960, which is a social history of that space, along with very early analog-to-digital precursor technologies, as well as Newsrooms and the Disruption of the Internet, which is about, well, the internetization of the newsroom from the 1990s through the 2010s. I’m happy to email anyone a PDF copy of my books, I feel that books can help researchers tell more nuanced (and think thus more true) stories and I suspect that this is a reason why so many media historians write them. But articles are important, too, as they can be where single incidents, people, processes or particular technologies can be explored in depth.

How do you fund your research? Where would you point grad students or early-career scholars toward, resource-wise?

I try to keep a close eye on H-Net and its various announcements, as there are archival grants advertised there. I try to look at a particular library and its collection and see if there’s a fund for outside researchers to visit—you’d be surprised how many of the latter are out there and how easy it is to apply to them (from places that are private like BYU and Duke to public like the NYPL and here at LSU). It’s good, too, to apply to institutional opportunities like AJHA’s McKern or the Cokie Roberts Research Fund for Women’s History—the only way not to get something is not to apply! I’d try to not let a letter get in the way of an application, either—I’m happy to write one for anyone wanting to come down to LSU.

What’s one thing you wish your fellow scholars knew about media history?

I really want the actual, and positive, reality that media history is a growing, healthy field to be front of mind. It’s easy to get discouraged in the academy, with the fate of one’s discipline, but as the former chair of the Media History Division at AEJMC and someone who’s been active in both AJHA and ICA, along with other organizations, such as the Radio Preservation Task Force, this is a great time to be studying, teaching, and publishing about media history—take heart, people!

What hobbies/interests do you have outside of academia?

My family and I love to go hiking, camping and Ruth and I love to go dancing with friends; Ruth’s field work brings us to fun places, and so we also enjoy traveling as a family (and whenever possible, we bring our dog, Roux, along—and you may have seen him with us from time to time).

By Mark Bernhardt

As academics we have an obligation through our roles as authors, peer reviewers, and editors to ensure that only quality work gets published. That includes an obligation not to lower the bar for prestigious scholars in the field because of who they are. The consequences of not upholding our standards go beyond just publishing bad scholarship; it can result in serious offense and harm.

During the first-year research methods course in my PhD program, a fellow student told the professor that he had found a partially plagiarized sentence in a book and asked to whom he should report it. The professor, a late-career academic, responded that in such a scenario it should be reported to the book’s publisher. However, he cautioned, if the author was a major scholar, it was best not to report a minor plagiarism incident because doing so could result in professional blackballing. And so, I learned that the research and scholarship rules that I was being taught to follow meticulously did not apply to eminent late-career academics (and I include retired professors in this classification) because others would protect them.

It was many years before I directly witnessed what a renowned late-career academic could get away with. I serve on a committee that reviews the articles published in a prestigious journal and selects the winner of the sponsoring organization’s best article award. One year I read an article that analyzed the styles of three film directors who were blind in one eye, with the author asserting that their vision impacted the films they produced. Reading about the first director, the author revealed that, according to medical professionals, there are relatively minor difference in the way people with vision in only one eye and people with vision in both are able to see and it would not affect one’s view through a camera lens. What support was there then for the author’s thesis? Not finding it in the discussion of the first director, I moved on to the second. Nothing there either. And then came the third, who the author divulged was not even blind in one eye but only wore an eyepatch as part of the persona he created for himself, with photographic evidence showing that he switched between wearing the patch over his right and left eyes! I was dumbfounded. How did such a poor piece of scholarship get published in such a prestigious journal? Did the editor have the misfortune of selecting the world’s worst reviewers to evaluate the manuscript for the double-blind peer review process? Then I looked at the author’s bio. Not only was she an accomplished late-career academic, she was also a former editor of the journal and former president of its sponsoring organization. I strongly suspected I had found the answer to my question.

I do believe that these incidents are not common in academia, though I may be naïve, and that the vast majority of late-career academics are not willing to aid fellow late-career academics in publishing subpar work as a favor. That it happens at all, however, creates a bad perception for early- and mid-career academics who are held to higher standards. They may also feel that they cannot be too outspoken about the problem because late-career faculty could derail a tenure and promotion application and often run the journals and discipline-specific organizations, which puts them in positions of power through which they can hinder someone’s career advancement.

Recently, an essay published in a journal that is clear about not being peer reviewed but that does aspire to be scholarly, got me thinking about the ways publishing poor quality work can cause serious harm. The author, a late-career White man, mischaracterized the work done in the subdiscipline of social history, made false claims about how historians are using postmodernism, and included a misogynistic and racist assessment of multiculturalism’s detrimental impact on history as a discipline and how Black and women historians behave as colleagues. It is a problem when a late-career scholar is ignorant of how a field has developed, and it becomes a bigger problem when a journal disseminates that ignorance to others. Additionally, under no circumstances should a scholar make claims for which there is no supporting evidence. Peer reviewers and editors have an obligation to reject such manuscripts.

I found the author’s discussion of multiculturalism the most disheartening component of the essay. He begins by saying that most multiculturalists reject unity in American national identity, articulating his preference for a single national narrative that encourages pride in the nation. The author then expresses concern that multiculturalism may fracture the “common culture” that has prevailed on campuses. Regardless of whether that happens, he claims to have noticed a difference in the “colleagueship” of Black and women historians, which he attributes to multiculturalism’s influence.

As a history professor at Jackson State University, Mississippi’s largest HBCU, I can attest that my students would scoff at the notion that multiculturalism is detrimental. It is only because of multiculturalism that the history of women, people of color, those who identify as queer, and other underrepresented groups in academia have gotten to have their stories told. They were not part of the single national narrative pushed by the discipline until the late twentieth century. Scholars had to fight hard for change, often at great personal cost. While a truly inclusive single national narrative might be nice, it is only through multiculturalism that we have any chance of constructing one, and the likelihood for success is hardly apparent. At the moment, it is conservative politicians who are working hardest to develop a single national historical narrative—specifically one that rejects multiculturalism and downplays or disregards past bad acts. Recently, the AJHA took a strong oppositional stance to such censoring of history and placing restrictions on those who teach in the discipline. Regarding his concern about multiculturalism fracturing the common culture that previously prevailed, my students would advocate smashing it because they know well that the university they attend exists because they were never intended to be part of that common culture.

As troubling as his views are—and some of his claims are obviously incorrect—it is far more troubling that his views were published. I understand that disagreement is a driving force within academia as we all put forth arguments supported by evidence that others critique and challenge. Wrestling with controversial ideas is a component of this. In the case of history, it is essential that such dialogue be published to further our understanding of the past. Outdated understandings of the discipline, misinformation, misogyny, and racism provide nothing to advance that dialogue—they hurt it—and no scholarly journal should provide a platform for those views.

Finally, as for any difficulty he finds in his working relationships with Black and women colleagues, I guarantee that multiculturalism is not the root cause. Unfortunately, not only do women and people of color in the academy have to deal with such ugliness, some editors prove no help by giving their prejudiced peers a forum through which to be heard.

We all must be vigilant about maintaining high standards regarding everything that is published in scholarly journals. Those standards must apply to everyone. When a different standard exists for late-career academics, as it sometimes does, it hurts us all, and can do so far more severely than just by granting individuals undeserved publications. Yes, we should be wary about censorship and silencing voices. However, in some cases it is clear that what is being said is harmful. Scholarly journals should not be a forum for harming anyone.

The American Journalism Historian Association announced Karlin Andersen Tuttle as the incoming editor of the Intelligencer, the organization’s electronic newsletter. Andersen Tuttle, an AJHA member since 2019, recently earned a dual-title PhD in mass communications and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Penn State.

“I am excited to take on editing The Intelligencer and continue its work highlighting members’ achievements, research, and pedagogy,” Andersen Tuttle said. “The annual AJHA convention created such a supportive space for me as a graduate student to present my research and learn more about the field. I plan to use my position to continue to grow that community and encourage future scholars.”

Before pursuing a PhD, Andersen Tuttle wrote for a daily newspaper in Washington state, The Spokesman-Review, and worked in marketing for a regional library system. After moving to Pennsylvania, she worked in public relations and marketing at Penn State where she wrote and edited a twenty-eight page quarterly magazine covering faculty and graduate student research. She currently serves as the editorial liaison for the journal Mass Communication & Society.

Her dissertation, “Your Trusted Friend: Untold Histories of Five Christian Women’s Magazines, 1974-2023,” included reviewing over six-hundred magazine issues, archival material, and oral history interviews with the magazines’ editors and staff members.

Andersen Tuttle also holds an MA from Penn State in Media Studies and a BA in English with minors in journalism and editing, publishing, and design from Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington.

How did you become involved in AJHA?

I earned my PhD in American Studies from NYU. While I was researching conservative media activism, I was unfamiliar with AJHA or journalism history as a field. In 2016 I attended the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference because it was hosted by the NYU Journalism, which just so happened to be located in the same building as my department. That’s where I first learned about AJHA, and where I first met Anthony Nadler (with whom I’d later edited the book News on the Right).

Why are you a journalism historian?

Much of what I study wouldn’t be considered “journalism” to many, perhaps most, in our field. I’m primarily concerned with right-wing media, and how the modern conservative movement in the United States cultivated a critical disposition toward the press. The book I’m currently writing for Columbia University Press, Making the Liberal Media, is less about the press than about the long history of right-wing antipathy towards it. Over the course of my research, I realized that what counts as journalism is often in the eye of the beholder. While many may (rightly) consider right-wing media as propaganda, its audiences often experience it as news. As I’ve written in American Journalism, I see journalism history as a study of what Raymond Williams once called “structures of feeling,” or the dialectic between how people experience reality and more formal or systematic notions of what’s true. In short: I’m interested in how people, particularly conservatives, have experienced the news of the day throughout history. This focus allows me to see an ongoing battle for credibility over who has the authority to tell the “true” story of public life, a battle often overlooked by scholars operating under traditional normative understandings of what counts as “journalism.”

Why should we care?

Our field is dwindling. History departments are being defunded, and journalism department lines for historians are few and far between. Declining funding and accelerated time-to-degree expectations are making it difficult for graduate students to justify dissertations that involved time consuming (and often costly) archival research projects. The long-term survival of journalism history requires adopting a capacious definition of terms and a welcoming disposition. If a weirdo with a PhD in American Studies and a bizarre fixation with right-wing propaganda can find a home in “journalism history,” anybody can.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve found in the archives?

Phone sex transcripts at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. I was in Simi Valley researching the Reagan administration’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. I stumbled across a folder marked “Pornography,” and couldn’t resist taking a peek. Apparently, some anti-porn crusaders had documented their 900-number calls in an attempt to get the Reagan administration to shut them down. My favorite transcript begins “Hello you miserable worm. This is Mistress Sharon from page 34 of High Society. I knew you would call. You just can’t get enough, can you…”

What hobbies/interests do you have outside of academia?

I’ve never had a hobby. When given the opportunity, I enjoy: travel, hiking, making people laugh, conspiring (non-criminal), organizing (political), performing high-concept punk rock (hype-man), washing dishes, and Werner Herzog.

A.J. Bauer is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama.  

By Michael Fuhlhage

It’s not an overstatement that I owe my success as a scholar to the American Journalism Historians Association. I want to use this column as second vice president to talk to everybody in the organization, but especially to those of you who joined recently as graduate students and junior faculty, about what getting involved has meant for me and how you can get the most out of being an active member.

The 2005 AJHA convention in San Antonio was my first time presenting research. I was a master’s student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism trying to figure out my way from the newsroom into the academic world, and I joined a crop of AJHA rookies that included scholars I now count as friends, including Gwyneth Mellinger, Jennifer Moore, and Keith Greenwood. I’m sure I knew far less about the way academe worked than anybody at that convention, and “wide-eyed” would be a charitable way to describe the nervous wreck that was me at my first academic convention. There was, as it turned out, no need for worry. The senior scholars took me in immediately, offered pointers, asked intriguing questions to help me deepen my thinking, and of course encouraged me to keep coming back. It’s a friendly, open, and welcoming group that I found immediately endearing and adopted as my scholarly home. I’ve been to all but one AJHA convention since then.

There are so many opportunities for members to push themselves in new directions, I came to learn. And I’ve benefited as a scholar from taking part in them. Here’s my progression and how taking part in AJHA committee service has helped me to grow.

After getting papers accepted for presentation a couple of times, my mentors in my doctoral program at UNC suggested I try organizing panels. Once I got the hang of that, I began submitting research in progress in my quest for feedback on emerging projects. Each of these outlets for sharing ideas is an opportunity to learn to be better at finding evidence and writing historical research.

After getting a couple of panels accepted, I was invited to join the Research Committee as panels competition coordinator.

Linda Lumsden told me when she recruited me to succeed her as research chair that overseeing the research papers competition would teach me more than I could imagine about what made excellent research in the form of accomplished scholars’ judgments about what made a successful paper and what elevated nominees for awards above the rest.

As research chair I also oversaw the Joseph McKerns Research Grant competition, a role that gave me and reviewers the opportunity to see how other scholars define excellence in research. Reading the files of grant winners was like taking a master class in how to construct proposals that ensure funders that their money will be well spent. Their example has given me ideas for how to formulate my own successful research funding requests.

The research chair also works with key members of the committee, the panels and research in progress coordinators, to make sure submission, reviewing, and acceptances went smoothly. It’s a role that puts you in the position to have positive contact with every author of an accepted research paper and funded grant proposal and to connect with scholars who serve as paper reviewers. It’s a role that helps build relationships with professors who are among the most likely academics to be invited to review your tenure file.

Those experiences as research chair gave me the confidence to run for and serve twice on the AJHA Board of Directors, joining in decision-making and advising about the direction of the organization. It was that service that led me to believe that I could handle entering the rotation from second vice president this year to first vice president next year to president after that—as long as I have my fellow members and leaders to show me the ropes and keep me pointed toward true north.

I’m serving for the reasons I laid out in my candidate bio last fall, namely these: As my scholarly home for 19 years, the AJHA has been a source of inspiration, instruction, direction, and friendship since San Antonio. Without it, I wouldn’t have made the connections that helped me achieve tenure, found an audience for my research, and found my scholarly purpose. It’s my goal to use my position in the AJHA’s leadership to encourage an expansive definition of diversity in scholarship, help junior scholars, and defend history against those who seek to undermine it.

The journey has been nourishing and fulfilling so far. It started with taking a small step by joining a committee and pitching in. The AJHA has done so much for me, and I am honored that I have the chance as second vice president to pull together the program for our next convention. See you in Pittsburgh!

Michael Fuhlhage is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University and currently serves as AJHA Second Vice President. 

How did you become involved in AJHA?

I’ve been a member of AJHA for so long I don’t even remember exactly when I joined—though I know it was in the Dark Ages of Microfilm, when I was a graduate student constantly explaining to classmates and professors how the intellectual rewards of reading old newspapers could ever outweigh the miseries of spending hours with my head inside a microfilm reader. So I was thrilled to discover an association full of scholars who just got it—just got both the value and the pleasure of studying the many and changing ways societies have told themselves stories they recognize as consequential and are willing to accept as true.

Later on a Joseph McKerns research grant sent me to Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, where the rich collections of 19th-century journalists’ papers got me thinking about the many different ideas of what journalistic “truth” could mean. That laid the foundation for my latest book, Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History.

Since you’ve written a whole book focusing on fakes, frauds, propaganda, and humbug, do you think journalism is irredeemable?

No, no, no! Journalism has a lot to answer for, but I had, and have, no intention of catastrophizing it. Part of what I wanted to do was explore on their own terms the ever-evolving and surprisingly diverse expectations of what newspapers were for and what “truth” meant. But I also make the argument that the twentieth-century turn toward objectivity, for all the rightful concerns that ideal has always raised, was also a genuine effort by journalists of good will to stamp out the fakes and the humbugs–and that we still have something to learn from how that worked.

How has the way you do newspaper research changed since those Dark Ages of Microfilm?

Obviously digital search engines have radically altered some of the ways we do research. Having essentially eliminated the tedium of page-by-page scrolling and scanning, they now allow us to zoom in on, say, rival papers’ accounts of obscure events, or the evolving uses of a word, or the journey of a rumor or story from paper to paper, or how often particular reporters got bylines.

But using search engines can also tempt us to stick to only those questions we already know how to ask and whose answers we can already envision. And as someone who has always loved historical newspapers for their intimate connection to communities long gone and the stories they told about what mattered to them, I still enjoy diving at random into the higgledy-piggledy columns of some local paper (whether digitized, filmed, or in hard copy) and imagining myself among those who read and discussed it back when its ink still smeared. Decades after I first happened upon the column of telegraphic news in the Vincennes (Indiana) Western Sun for March 21, 1868, for instance, I am still wondering what its readers made of the squib that read, in its entirety, “Rats cannot live in Alaska, because their holes freeze up, nor in St. Thomas, because their holes are turned wrong side out by earthquakes.” What did “truth” mean to those readers? How did that story fit into their vision of their world?

What hobbies and interests do you have outside of academia?

I’m not a bad photographer—I do street photography with an SLR camera—and I am a terrible pianist. (Cheerfully terrible. Also terribly merciful; I have an electronic keyboard and a set of headphones, so no one hears me but me.)

Andie Tucher is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of Journalism and Director of the Communications Ph.D. Program at Columbia Journalism School. Her latest book is Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History (Columbia UP, 2022).