The deadline for submitting nominees for the 2018 AJHA Margaret A. Blanchard Doctoral Dissertation Prize is Feb. 1.

Eligible works shall include both quantitative and qualitative historical dissertations, written in English, which have been completed between Jan. 1, 2017, and Dec. 31, 2017. For the purposes of this award, a "completed" work is defined as one which has not only been submitted and defended but also revised and filed in final form at the applicable doctoral-degree-granting university by Dec. 31, 2017.

To be considered, please submit the following materials in a single e-mail to the address below:

• A cover letter from the applicant containing complete (home and work) contact information (postal addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses). The letter should express a willingness, should the dissertation be selected for a prize, both to attend the awarding ceremony and to deliver a public presentation based on the dissertation at the 2018 American Journalism Historians Association Annual Convention 4-6 October 2018 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
• A letter of nomination from the dissertation chair/director or the chair of the university department in which the dissertation was written.
• A single PDF containing the following (with no identifying information):
• A 200-word abstract.
• The dissertation table of contents.
• A single chapter from the dissertation, preferably not exceeding 50 manuscript pages (not including notes, charts or photographs). The chapter should, if possible, highlight the work’s strengths as a piece of primary-sourced original research.
• In a separate PDF but in the same e-mail, a blind copy of the complete dissertation.
• To be considered, all identifying information—including author, school, and dissertation committee members’ names—must be deleted from items 3 and 4 above.

Nominations, along with all the supporting materials, should be sent to AJHAdissertationprize@gmail.com.

More information about the Blanchard Prize can be found on the AJHA website.

50 Years in Agenda Setting Research: Past and Future Perspectives Conference
July 18-21, 2018
University of Colorado Boulder — College of Media Communication and Information

2018 marks the 50-year anniversary of the hallmark 1968 Chapel Hill study where agenda-setting research as we know it was born. This initial study, a collaboration between Max McCombs and Donald Shaw, has given birth to thousands of subsequent inquiries spanning a wide array of academic disciplines and media contexts.

To celebrate agenda setting’s important role in mass communication theory, the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder invites graduate students and faculty alike to attend a three-day conference focused on past, present, and future applications of the theory.

Join us as we celebrate the original theorists and trace the development of agenda setting. All scholars conducting contemporary research rooted in agenda setting are encouraged to attend. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: need for orientation, network agenda setting, agenda building and agenda melding. New media applications of agenda setting, such as studies of fake news and computational propaganda, are also encouraged.

Honored guests include the seminal theorists: Dr. Maxwell McCombs, Dr. Donald Shaw and Dr. David Weaver. In addition, the conference will be chronicled by The Agenda-Setting Journal, with editor Dr. Salma Ghanem attending. All presenters will be encouraged to complete their work and submit it to a special issue of The Agenda Setting Journal dedicated to the conference. Top work from the conference will receive expedited consideration for publication in the journal. The conference will be highlighted by a plenary panel led by McCombs, Shaw, Weaver and Ghanem.

The conference will include a refereed paper session. To be considered, authors should submit an extended abstract of no more than 750 words (not including references) detailing the proposed study. Works in progress will be considered, but preference will be given to abstracts with a clear path to completion (e.g., data, clear research questions, initial analyses). Abstracts should include background information on the author(s), including an abbreviated bio that describes research that relates to agenda setting. Please submit your proposal as a PDF to the e-mail address christopher.vargo@colorado.edu no later than Monday, February 1, 2018. Drs. McCombs, Shaw and Weaver will review the submitted abstracts.

This conference provides an intimate opportunity for all participants to engage in conversation and debate. Events scheduled include: paper presentations, panel sessions, brainstorming (future research) sessions and round-table discussions. Conference admission fee includes breakfasts, lunches, and welcome dinner.

To register, visit: http://www.cvent.com/d/dtqqzd

For questions contact: christopher.vargo@colorado.edu

Important dates

• Deadline to submit abstracts: February 1, 2018
• Acceptance Notification: March 1, 2018
• Deadline to register with a presentation: May 1, 2018
• Conference: July 18-21, 2018

Cost of Attendance

• Faculty – $225,Present & Attend; $175 Attend Only
• Students - $150, Present & Attend; $75 Attend Only

See http://jagwire.augusta.edu/archives/49646

The American Historical Association has announced its first winner of the Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize, which honors the best book about journalism history. The first award will be presented in January to Amelia Bonea, author of “The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics of Reporting in Colonial India, c. 1830-1900.”

Last year, the AHA announced it would begin recognizing outstanding scholarship in the area of journalism history and chose to name this newly minted prize after Palmegiano. Palmegiano served as president of the American Journalism Historians Association from 1998-99 and worked for many years to have journalism history recognized within the AHA, one of the world’s largest and most recognizable academic organizations.

The AHA will award the Palmegiano Prize each January. Submissions for the 2019 Palmegiano Prize are due in May. For more information on submissions, visit the Palmegiano Prize page on the AHA website. 

Scholars representing universities from across North America were recognized for their work on research papers at the American Journalism Historian’s Association’s annual convention in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Teri Finneman of South Dakota State, won the Wm. David Sloan Award for Outstanding Faculty Research Paper for “‘The Greatest of Its Kind Ever Witnessed in America’: The Press and the 1913 Women’s March on Washington.” The runners-up in that category were Charles Lewis of Minnesota State University for “This Means War: A Case Study of Caustic Political Copy in the Frontier Press of Minnesota, 1857-1861”; John Coward of the University of Tulsa for “Indian Ideology in The Warpath: Lehman Brightman’s Red Power Journalism”; and Candi Carter Olson and Erin Cox of Utah State University for “A Mighty Power: The Defenses Employed by Utah’s Women Against Disenfranchisement by the EdmundsTucker Act of 1887.”

The Robert Lance Award for Outstanding Student Research Paper went to Vicki Knasel Brown of the University of Missouri-Columbia for “Commercial and Religious Press Coverage of the Mormon Struggle in Missouri, 1831-1838.” The runners-up were Bailey Dick of Ohio University for “Faith as the Basis for Radical Vision: The Reporting of Dorothy Day as a Catalyst for Social Movement"; Thomas Schmidt of the University of Oregon for “The Narrative Turn in American News Writing: How Newspapers Adopted Narrative Journalism in the Late 20th Century”; and Patti Piburn of Arizona State University for “Discovering the Arizona Republican Newspaper, 1896-1898: Yellow Journalism in America’s Territorial Press.”

Finneman also won the Maurine Beasley Award for Oustanding Paper on a Women’s History Topic with runner-up honors to Carter Olson and Cox as well as Dick. Erika Pribanic-Smith of the University of Texas-Arlington and Jared Shroeder of Southern Methodist University also received runner-up honors in this category for “Manifestos, Meetings, and Mother Earth: Emma Goldman's No-Conscription League and the First Amendment in 1917.”

Lewis won the J. William Snorgrass Award for Outstanding Research on a Minorities Topic. Coward earned a runner-up as did Jason Peterson of Charleston Southern University “Mississippi’s Forgotten Son: Billy Barton and his Journalistic Battle for Redemption in the Closed Society” and Felecia Jones Ross of The Ohio State University for “In Plain Sight: How the African-American Covered Extraordinary Women as Figures in the Community.”

The Wally Eberhard Award for Outstanding Research Paper in Media and War went to Pat Washburn and Mike Sweeney of Ohio University for “Grand Jury Transcripts in the Chicago Tribune’s 1942 Espionage Act Case: What Is Missing Is Significant.” The runners-up were Dominique Trudel of University of Montreal for “Revisiting the Origins of Communication Research: Walter Lippmann’s WWII Adventure in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare”; Pamela Walck and Ashley Walter of Duquesne University for “Soaring Out of the Private Sphere: How Flyin’ Jenny and Her Comic Strip Helped Pioneer a New Path for Women’s Work During World War II”; and Scott Morton of Catawba College for “Hanoi Hannah and the Anti-War Movement: How the American Print Media Covered a Female Enemy Radio Propagandist Who Exploited U.S. Societal Unrest During the Vietnam War.”

Elisabeth Fondren of Louisiana State University won the Jean Palmegiano Award for the Outstanding Research Paper on International/Transnational Journalism for “Publicizing Tragedy: The Sinking of the Lusitania As an International News Story.” Brendon Floyd of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville received the runner-up for “The Worst Kind of Democrats This Side of Hell”: John Daly Burk, the United Irishmen, the Federalist Party, and American Identity in the Early Republic.”

Three new members were elected to serve three-year terms on the Board of Directors of the American Journalism Historians Association during its 36th Annual Convention in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Joining the board are Dr. Candi Carter Olson of Utah State University and Sonny Rhodes of the University of Arkansas-Little Rock. Dr. Kathy Bradshaw of Bowling Green State University was elected to a full term on the board, after finishing out the remainder of a vacant term.

“AJHA has felt like family since my first conference,” Olson said of her election. “I'm pleased to have the opportunity to give back to the organization and help it to envision a future where journalism history is a vital and important part of the educational endeavor at all levels."

Bradshaw, who has also been serving as AJHA’s representative to the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, said she is “'honored and thrilled to have been elected to the AJHA Board of Directors."

"AJHA is special to me because members are fine historians with industry backgrounds who are engaged with the present,” Bradshaw said. "There are special moments every year at AJHA, and I'm happy to be able to contribute to maintaining the foundation for those special moments."

Rhodes, who served as one of the hosts for the 2017 Annual Convention, said being selected for the board “was both humbling and extremely gratifying.” “Whenever I'm with fellow AJHA members, I feel like I'm at a family reunion—a happy family reunion,” Rhodes said. “I learned some things from helping host the Little Rock conference, and I hope to use that knowledge to help plan future conferences. I'd especially like to look at creative ways to help finance those gatherings and to improve student attendance at them.”

By Robert T. Buckman

One reason I drove to the SPJ convention in Anaheim this year was to scratch some things off my bucket list, including Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on the Arizona-Mexico border and the Ernie Pyle Home and Library in Albuquerque, N.M.

I have shared by email with my friends, on the anniversary of his death, the dispatch I used to read every year to my feature writing classes on the Death of Capt. Waskow. In more recent years, I’ve also read his dispatch from the Normandy beachhead just after D-Day.

Photos here (TO COME) show the house he built in 1940 for him and his wife, Geraldine, or Jerry, but he spent little time in it. Later that year, Scripps-Howard sent him to England to cover the German blitz. After the U.S. entered the war, as you know, he accompanied the troops as what today would be called an embedded reporter—first to North Africa, then Sicily, then Italy, where he wrote the Waskow dispatch, then to France, where he finally burned out and came home on leave in September 1944. A few months later, though, he went to the Pacific to cover the war against the Japanese. He was killed by a Japanese machine gun on April 18, 1945, on the tiny island of Ie Shima, off the coast of Okinawa.

His wife, who suffered from mental illness, died seven months after he did. They were childless, and in 1948 the house was donated to the city, which made it a branch library. It is tiny, two bedrooms, 1,145 square feet. Besides library books, it contains a good deal of Pyle memorabilia, as you will see, including his handwritten last dispatch, to mark the surrender of Germany, which was then imminent but he was killed three weeks before it happened. It was found in his pocket. Zoom in on the piece of paper in his typewriter. It’s the Normandy dispatch.

He received the Pulitzer Prize for war reporting in 1944.

Outside, in the side yard, is a marble monument. You’ll recognize what’s inscribed on it. So you see, I wasn’t the only one affected by his emotive prose. The death of Capt. Waskow also appears as a scene in the 1944 movie, “The Story of G.I. Joe,” in which Burgess Meredith plays Pyle and a very young Robert Mitchum plays Waskow.

If you’re ever in Albuquerque, it’s worth a visit, even if it isn’t listed in the Albuquerque tourist guide I picked up at the New Mexico welcome center on I-40. It’s located at 900 Girard SE, just nine blocks south of Central Avenue, which is also Historic Route 66. It has strange hours: Closed Sun-Mon, open 10-6 Tue, 11-7 Wed, 10-6 Th-Sat. Take a bookmark home as a souvenir; I brought several extra for some of my alumni.

If you go in the evening, when you’re done go back to 3222 Central SE and have a brew or two at Kelly’s Brewpub, located in an old car dealership and decorated with Texaco signs and Norman Rockwell reproductions.

___________________________________________________

Robert T. Buckman recently retired as associate professor of journalism at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

The Southeastern Review of Journalism History (Debra Reddin van Tuyll, editor-in-chief, and David W. Bulla, managing editor; Leonard Teel, editor emeritus) is a peer-reviewed journal inviting research papers on any facet of U.S. and international journalism history. The Review, founded by Dr. Leonard Teel at Georgia State University (as The Atlanta Review of Journalism History), sees journalism history broadly and will consider all forms of mass communication that have had impact on any area of journalism’s past. Topics in past editions have included column writing, coverage of major topics and events in national and international history (such as civil war, economic policy, frontier society, immigration, national liberation, racism, and slavery), muckraking, reporting arts, leisure, and sports, sensationalism, and travel writing, among others.

The Review encourages both undergraduate and graduate students to submit papers that they have presented at mass communication conferences. Such conferences include American Journalism Historians Association, AEJMC, AEJMC History/AJHA Joint Conference, ICA, Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression, and regional or mid-winter AEJMC conferences. 

This is a call for submissions for our Spring 2018 edition. Submissions are due by Dec. 15, 2017, at midnight EST. Papers should be double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman font, with endnotes, and submitted in Microsoft Word format. Please limit article size to 7,500 words (25 double-spaced pages in 12 Times New Roman), not counting the title page, abstract, and endnotes. Use of the Chicago Manual of Style is highly recommended but not required. Please included the following:

An email with the attached paper, with the author’s name, the date, and her/his affiliation.

In the attached paper, please include the title page, a 200-word abstract, body of the paper, and endnotes.

Also include the author’s information (email address, telephone number, institutional affiliation, student or faculty status) in the text of the email.

An undergraduate student submitting a paper needs to also send a statement that her/his paper has been presented at a research conference (confirmation email or PDF of a conference program will do).

The journal is also accepting book reviews of recently published books. Reviews should be no more than 1,000 words in length and focused on books that deal with some aspect of journalism history.

Editors Debra Reddin van Tuyll and David W. Bulla of Augusta University are coordinating paper submissions. Authors will be notified in mid-February whether their research papers have been accepted for publication in the Spring 2018 edition of the journal. 

For submission of a research paper, please email Dr. van Tuyll at:

dvantuyl@augusta.edu

For submission of a book review, please email Dr. Bulla at:

dbulla@augusta.edu

Deadline:  February 1, 2018
 
The third annual conference on Transnational Journalism History is seeking papers that deal with any aspect of the history of journalism and mass communications that transcends national borders.

This year’s conference will be June 1-2, 2018, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada at Concordia University.

The conference is sponsored jointly by the journalism and mass communication programs at Concordia University, Dublin City University and Augusta University.

Conference planners have one book underway from the 2016 inaugural conference (presently in the proposal stage). The work deals with the Irish Diaspora press. As second book, tentatively titled A Handbook of Transnational Journalism History, is planned from the second and third conferences, and we have one publisher who has already expressed interest in receiving a proposal for this book. 

For the 2018 conference, we are particularly looking for papers that offer definitions, methodologies, theories, and case studies of transnational journalism history. Papers should be able to be presented within 20 minutes, so around 10 to 15 pages. Papers of up to 25 pages, not including footnotes, will be accepted as well, but the presentation of the paper cannot exceed the 20-minute limit.  Abstracts of 250 words are also accepted for research-in-progress. 

Papers may be submitted in French, but presentations will need to be given in English.

Papers and abstracts should be submitted to Debbie van Tuyll (dvantuyl@augusta.edu) by February 1, 2018. Submissions will be double-blind reviewed.

Work presented at this conference will be considered for publication in a Handbook of Transnational Journalism History. Any questions may be addressed to Debbie van Tuyll or Mark O’Brien (mark.obrien@dcu.ie). This conference is sponsored by Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec); Dublin City Univeristy (Dublin, Ireland); Augusta University (Georgia); and the University of Groningen (Netherlands).

Editor’s Note: Marist College professor Kevin M. Lerner presented his paper, “The Other New Journalism: David Halberstam, J. Anthony Lukas, and Reported Narrative in the Dawn of the Big Important Book,” at May's International Association of Literary Journalism Studies conference held in Canada. The Intelligencer asked Dr. Lerner to tell us more about how and why he started researching this topic, and why this research is important and interesting for himself and our field.

By Kevin M. Lerner, Marist College

While I was working in the New York Public Library archives and records division, gathering material for what would become my dissertation (and later the basis for my current book manuscript), I came across a letter of recommendation in the editorial papers of the New York Times. Typed on an electric typewriter with a janky “a” key that repeated almost every time the author touched it, and all in lowercase, with x’s through mistakes, the letter recommended a young Baltimore Sun reporter named J. Anthony Lukas:

lukas (who is a friend of mine, so be warned) is just what every young newspaperman ought to be. he is very very bright, and he has a high s ense of the profession and integrity, and unlike xxxxxx many bright young guys he has been a nd is willing to do the harder part of the profession—the dirty legwork part. so  he is aavery finished and versatile reporter. he is aa guy who has always had his eye on foreign cities but he has also realized that xxxx the way to get there is to do aa good job covering tough local stories. [sic]

The management at the Times would take the advice of this letter’s author, despite his lack of typing skill, and bring Tony Lukas on as a reporter—and it was good advice. Lukas won a Pulitzer Prize at the Times for his story about a woman named Linda Fitzpatrick who lived a drug-fueled life in Greenwich Village in contrast to the Greenwich, Connecticut of her upbringing. His recommender was David Halberstam, who had known Lukas since the two of them worked together at The Harvard Crimson.

I was digging around in Tony Lukas’s personnel file because I was writing my dissertation about (MORE), an anti-establishment journalism review that Lukas would found in 1971. The letter of recommendation had some very small use for me in the dissertation project, but it kindled another idea which would have to wait until I finished and filed and had time to devote my brain to something else. So I did something that is likely familiar to almost any historian who has worked in an archive and I filed away that idea for later.

That was how I came to work on the project that became “The Other New Journalism: David Halberstam, J. Anthony Lukas, and Reported Narrative in the Dawn of the Big Important Book,” which is still very much a work in progress, and which I presented at the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies conference in Halifax last May. I am interested in two interlinked ideas here which fit into the larger arc of my ongoing research agenda. 

First, I want to investigate the informal networks of journalists that influence how journalism is practiced. There has been much work on the institutions of journalism, but I want to know more about the history of these backchannels, where journalists exchange ideas about doing journalism, but also get each other jobs or connect each other to editors for freelance work. It seems to me that these networks have an outsized influence that has been undervalued in research. I hold that there is, in fact, a group of elite journalists, many of whom know each other, who operate at the highest levels of the profession and determine much about the standards that other practitioners will be held to.

Secondly, and more importantly, I am investigating the intellectual history of journalism, and at the same time, the history of intellectual journalism. In other words, I am interested in the way that ideas about what constitutes journalism have changed over time, and also the ways that journalism interacts with the broader history of ideas. That’s where the subtitle—and the working thesis—for the present study come in.

Halberstam and Lukas overlapped at The Times with Gay Talese, the elegant and self-aware stylist of nonfiction prose who left daily newspapers to become a part of that loosely affiliated group of like-minded writers known as the New Journalists. And while there are piles of book and papers about the flashy New Journalism, I would argue that the focus on New Journalism has distracted from another movement that was developing at the same time, at the hands (and typewriter fingers) of journalists such as Lukas and Halberstam: a journalism that takes the idea of narrative seriously, but puts even more of an emphasis on reporting. (Halberstam, I’m beginning to discover, required a lot of editing.)

I’ve been calling this genre the “Big Important Book,” and I believe it is one that continues to influence the intellectual life of the United States far more than the occasional masterpiece of nonfiction prose. These are the books that show up on The New York Times list of best books of the year; the books that get their authors invited onto Fresh Air to talk to Terry Gross. They’re well-written, but mostly they are well-reported, and full of intriguing ideas. They’re Big Important Books.

Tony Lukas published five books, four of which I would classify as BIBs. One of them, Common Ground, told the story of the school integration busing crisis in Boston and won him his second Pulitzer and is still in print more than three decades after its publication. David Halberstam published… a lot of books, at least ten of which could be BIBs. And they are merely representative of forty years of journalists doing the same sort of quiet, but important work. Needless to say, there is a lot to read, and while the initial study will probably stop at the coincidence of these two friends working the genre, I don’t know exactly how far this project will go.

As I said, this is a work in progress, but the reading list is one that I look forward to tackling.

______________________________________________________

Kevin M. Lerner is assistant professor of journalism at Marist College. He is also editor of the Journal of Magazine & New Media Research, published by the Magazine Media Division, Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication. His scholarly research concentrates on the history of American journalism, with a focus on the 1970s, alternative forms of journalism, press criticism, and anti-intellectualism in the press. He is completing a book on the history of (MORE), an anti-establishment journalism review.