By Erika J. Pribanic-Smith, University of Texas-Arlington

Julie Hedgepeth Williams holds the distinction of receiving the first AJHA Dissertation Award, presented at the 1997 national conference in Mobile, AL. Williams wrote her dissertation entitled “The Significance of the Printed Word in Early America: Colonists’ Thoughts on the Role of the Press” at the University of Alabama, under the direction of Wm. David Sloan.

Patrick Washburn said he proposed the dissertation award in 1996, at the first meeting he attended as a member of the AJHA board of directors. At the time, Washburn headed the graduate program in journalism at Ohio University and was chairing several historical dissertations. He hoped that the award would attract newly minted faculty to AJHA.

“It would be a way to keep adding young members to the association rather than the membership simply getting older and older,” Washburn said.

Washburn headed an ad hoc committee to investigate the award processes of other academic societies and propose a structure for AJHA’s award. Washburn said he suggested two primary things: giving the dissertation award at a convention time slot with no competing events on the program and giving a cash award to the winner.

“It would underscore the fact that AJHA considered this a major award,” he said.

Washburn credited David Abrahamson of Northwestern University with making the dissertation award session a major highlight of the annual convention. Chair of the Dissertation Award Committee for 20 years before handing the reins to Jane Marcellus (Middle Tennessee State) in 2016, Abrahamson made several decisions that defined the award. 

He solidified the judging process, appointing as jurists faculty members from schools without doctoral programs to avoid bias. He decided against ranking the honorable mentions to emphasize the importance of each dissertation. He created a special printed program just for the dissertation session, and he made sure to acknowledge the faculty members who chaired the dissertations.

“I and others who chaired dissertations that were honored appreciated that acclaim,” said Washburn, who has mentored three award winners and one honorable mention.

Abrahamson said the process for submitting and judging dissertations has remained basically the same since the beginning. Two juries review portfolios consisting of an abstract, table of contents, and sample chapter to arrive at the four finalists, and then they review the full dissertations of the finalists to decide on the winner. The committee receives, on average, 12 nominees per year, though Abrahamson said it has considered as many as 23 dissertations in one competition.

“My recollection is that we received 11 entries the first year, which was really reassuring because when we set up the prize, we had no idea how it would be received,” Abrahamson said.

Williams, who had been a member of AJHA since 1992, said that Sloan told her about the award and encouraged her to enter. 

“It seems David (Sloan) and AJHA go hand in hand,” Williams said. “I feel like he directed me with the idea of further AJHA papers from dissertation chapters in mind.”

Sloan said that Julie had demonstrated she was serious about history while working on her master’s thesis on the colonial South-Carolina Gazette, and he commended her excellence as an historian—both as a thorough researcher and a talented writer.

Williams presented her work at the Mobile conference along with three honorable mentions: David Domke, whose dissertation advisor was Hazel Dicken-Garcia (University of Minnesota); David Mindich, who wrote his dissertation under Carl Prince and Mitchell Stephens at New York University; and Doug Ward, whose mentor was Maurine Beasley at the University of Maryland.

Beasley has advised three dissertation award winners and six honorable mentions. She said that in addition to enhancing AJHA’s reputation as a worthwhile organization, the award helps keep journalism history a viable element in journalism and media education.  

“It aids in establishing journalism history as a contemporary means of scholarly inquiry,” she said.

Sloan added that the award encourages more student interest in becoming historians, which in turn encourages more involvement in AJHA. Washburn noted that no other organization gives a journalism history dissertation award, so AJHA’s award remains important.

Those who have advised multiple award-winning dissertations said that the award did not influence how they advised their students—they always mentored their students to exhibit the qualities that are the hallmark of the award. Beasley and Sloan both said they always have placed a strong emphasis on using primary source material. Advisor of two winners and an honorable mention, Sloan also stressed the importance of selecting a significant topic.

Over the past 20 years, 56 advisors have mentored 81 students to Dissertation Award honors. Among the most prolific mentors was Margaret “Peggy” Blanchard at the University of North Carolina, who advised the 2003 winner as well as honorable mentions in four competitions. One of her advisees, Mark Feldstein, suggested that AJHA name the award after Blanchard. 

The dissertation award has been called the Blanchard Prize since 2003. Abrahamson said that Blanchard was quite ill at the time—she died in 2004.

“As it turns out, Mark had been one of her last doctoral students and was quite passionate about the renaming and its timing,” Abrahamson said. “Given Peggy’s status among media historians, the renaming passed unanimously after a brief discussion.”

Other North Carolina faculty have continued Blanchard’s legacy. In total, nine UNC graduates have earned AJHA dissertation awards and honorable mentions—including two honorable mention recipients this year. Southern Mississippi also has produced several honorees, thanks largely to the mentorship of David Davies. Davies, who won the award for his dissertation under Sloan in 1998, has advised five honorable mention recipients.

For a full list of previous winners, including links to the dissertation award session programs for each year since 1998, visit ajha.wildapricot.org/Blanchard 

By Teri Finneman, South Dakota State University

The second Media History Engagement Week attracted participants from 13 states and Sweden in the #headlinesinhistory Twitter discussion during the first week in April.

The week to recognize media history was the work of a subcommittee of members from the AEJMC History Division and AJHA who want to bring more national publicity to our work. 

Throughout April 3-7, our members and their students across the country (and world) tweeted #headlinesinhistory to share historical news stories and special class projects about journalism history.

The Twitter initiative resulted in 330 posts from 110 people, reaching 40,288 Twitter followers. Watergate and World War I were the most tweeted topics. Most of the participants (64%) were women.

You can view the discussion here: https://tinyurl.com/ycvx3zal.

In April, Paula Hunt was presented with the University of Missouri Distinguished Dissertation Award, a campus-wide honor that recognizes exceptional original scholarship and research at the doctoral level. Hunt’s dissertation chair was Earnest Perry, associate dean for graduate studies at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Starting in Fall 2017, Hunt will be a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Utah State University.

Maddie Liseblad recently received a Teaching Excellence Award from Arizona State University’s Graduate and Professional Student Association. Liseblad was given the award for her efforts teaching copy editing.

Texas A&M University Press has published Jim Startt’s book, Woodrow Wilson, the Great war, and the Fourth Estate.

AJHA Intelligencer Editor Dane S. Claussen, Thiel College, has been appointed to the Research Committee of the 13th World Media Economics & Management Conference, to be held May 6-9, 2018, in Cape Town, South Africa. The Research Committee will choose, in a two-step process in August 2017 and January 2018, which papers will be presented at the conference. Claussen is a former Head of AEJMC’s Media Management, Economics & Entrepreneurship Division. The three other US scholars chosen for the 2018 Research Committee are: Sylvia Chan-Olmsted, University of Florida; Richard Gershon, Western Michigan University; and Kent Wilkinson, Texas Tech University. The Committee’s 14 other members are from various other countries, including three from South Africa and two from the United Kingdom.

By Will Mari, AJHA membership co-chair, and the membership committee 

During my first AJHA convention in North Carolina, in October 2012, Jim McPherson paid for one of my dinners. 

He then made sure I met a bunch of senior scholars, and then, if that wasn’t enough kindness for one weekend, fed me again when I missed my flight and had to spend an extra night in Raleigh. Jim, who will be retiring soon from Whitworth University, continued to mentor me as I finished my dissertation at the University of Washington and started my first full-time academic job at Northwest University. 

But his care and concern were and are not the exception: Carole O’Reilly at Salford University in the UK, Ross Collins at North Dakota State University, Betty Winfield, professor emerita from the Missouri School of Journalism, Michael Fuhlhage at Wayne State, Stephen Banning at Bradley, Candi Carter Olsen at Utah State, Katherine Edenborg at the University of Wisconsin-Stout … I can definitely go on … these people have all mentored me in ways big and small. 

Indeed, we are all at least partially the result of a vast collection of folks who have influenced, encouraged, and welcomed us in mentoring relationships within the academy. 

But mentorship goes horizontally, too, from peer-to-peer. 

Scholars such as Nick Hirshon at William Patterson, Teri Finneman at South Dakota State and Will Tubbs at the University of West Florida—these peers have all mentored me. Whether it’s through listening conversations, reading over drafts, comparing research notes or connecting me to archives and collections, these younger fellow mentors have already had a crucial impact on my work and sanity. 

As a member of AJHA, you have the opportunity to mentor junior scholars, but also peers. Research and teaching in media history can be a sometimes lonely mission—but mentoring up, down, and across draws us into a bigger community of scholars from varying fields, departments, universities and countries. It enhances our work, and makes us better colleagues at our home institutions. 

It’s more important than ever to mentor someone, or graciously let yourself be mentored, in this age of global change and connections. 

Recently, I met a media historian from France, François Robinet, who encouraged me to spread the word about the Société pour l'Histoire des Médias. Robinet, the chair of the history department at the University of Versailles, believes that there should be stronger ties between French, British and American media-history scholars. I agree. 

We should be ready to extend our mentoring and our reception of mentoring across national borders. Ultimately, we’ll all benefit from a more mentored academic world. 

If you have questions or suggestions for the membership committee, or are interested in getting connected to a mentee or mentor, please email me at william.mari@northwestu.edu. And follow AJHA’s Twitter account at @AJHAsocial to get connected to fellow scholars there. 

The American Journalism Historians Association announced Dr. Matthew Pressman as the winner of the annual Margaret A. Blanchard Doctoral Dissertation Prize.

Pressman, an assistant professor of journalism at Seton Hall University, completed his dissertation at Boston University under the direction of Dr. Bruce J. Schulman.

Pressman’s dissertation, “Remaking the News: The Transformation of American Journalism, 1960-1980,” focused on the evolution of the journalistic concepts of newsworthiness, objectivity, and the role of media in relation to the empowered.

“I’m greatly honored that the scholars on the Blanchard Prize committee selected my dissertation as the winner,” Pressman said. “As a relative newcomer to academia, it’s extremely gratifying to have senior scholars in the journalism-history field recognize my work. I’m currently adapting my dissertation into a book (to be published in 2018 by Harvard University Press), and winning this award gives me further inspiration to make that book as good as it can possibly be.”

Pressman and three honorable mention recipients will present their research at the AJHA’s 2017 National Convention in Little Rock, Arkansas, this October.

Those earning honorable mention were:

• Dr. Lorraine Ahearn of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for “Narrative Paths of Native American Resistance: Agency and Commemoration in Journalism Texts in Eastern North Carolina, 1872-1988” (Chaired by Dr. Barbara Friedman).

• Dr. Denise Hill of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for “Public Relations, Racial Injustice, and the 1958 North Carolina Kissing Case” (Chaired by Friedman).
• Dr. Rianne Subijanto of the University of Colorado at Boulder for “Media of Resistance: A Communication History of Anti-Colonial Movements in the Dutch East Indies, 1920-1926” (Chaired by Dr. Janice Peck).

The Margaret A. Blanchard Doctoral Dissertation Prize, given for the first time in 1997, is awarded annually for the best doctoral dissertation dealing with mass communication history. An honorarium of $500 accompanies the prize, and a $200 honorarium is awarded to each honorable mention.

By Maddie Liseblad, Arizona State University

I knew by age six I wanted to be a journalist. By that time, I was publishing my own newspaper, complete with pretty awful drawings to accompany my stories. And my stories, yeah, not so sure there were really what you would call articles. But, I had a fantastic mentor – my neighbor Jan. Every day Jan would walk by my house with his dog, and as often as I could, I would join them. During these walks I interrogated poor Jan about being a journalist and about life in general. Jan told my mom I was going to be a journalist for sure because I certainly knew how to ask questions. Little did he know back then that, fast forward some twenty years or so, Jan was going to be training me to take over his newspaper editor role.

I’ve had many mentors throughout my life, fantastic people who have encouraged and supported me, but also not been afraid to provide constructive criticism. I wouldn’t be who I am today without their guidance. There’s my Swedish teacher in high school, Gertrud, who encouraged me to explore my creative writing voice. There’s Lee, my first television news manager who showed me what kind of a boss to strive to be. There’s Ingmar, who showed me that public relations really isn’t the dark side. And then there’s Dean, my undergrad journalism professor. Dean is the reason I am where I am today, pursuing my Ph.D. at Arizona State’s Cronkite School. 

I think it’s important for all of us to have mentors to help guide us, to steer us in a good direction. For me, switching gear and entering academia late in life has been kind of daunting. I have found I have a passion for historical research. I probably enjoy it so much because in a way, I still get to be a journalist and tell a story. I enjoy the hunt for that obscure piece of evidence, that primary source that has been forgotten. There’s great satisfaction in bringing history to life again. And I have found many kindred spirits in AJHA members and a support system I think is pretty unique.

As a graduate student, my experience with AJHA is that it is an incredibly welcoming organization. I was told before I attended my first AJHA convention that I was going to enjoy the experience, much more so than any other convention I had been to. And that certainly turned out to be true. The setting is more intimate and we all share a deep passion for history. There’s a connection from the get-go that is very inclusive and special.

While it was certainly intimidating to walk up to senior scholars whose work I greatly admire and whose footsteps I’d like to follow, the setting and atmosphere at the convention made it fairly easy. And you know what? Those senior scholars all turned out to be fantastic. They were very willing and eager to share their experiences and knowledge. I was treated as a valued colleague, rather than “merely” a graduate student. 

I can’t say enough good things about the people I have encountered through AJHA. They have helped me in several different ways, everything from pulling reading material for my comprehensive exams to telling me which archive to find what in. I have never once been turned down, even when I have had complex questions or requests.

Within AJHA, I have found not only one, but a whole network of journalism history mentors. And furthermore, I have found colleagues and friends. I don’t regret for one moment that I joined and got involved with AJHA as a graduate student. What I do regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.  

Maddie Liseblad is the chair of the Graduate Student Committee. If you are a graduate student and have questions about AJHA, please contact her at MaddieL@asu.edu.

By Teri Finneman, South Dakota State University

Oral History Committee member Melita M. Garza of Texas Christian University is featured this month in the spotlight on members’ oral history projects. Garza describes her project below:

"With the help of a $1,500 Dean’s Research Grant from the Bob Schieffer College of Communication, my goal is to develop an oral history project and undergraduate research course that would examine the role journalists have played in chronicling movements for social change beyond matters of black-and-white. My project seeks to illuminate the role of journalists in civil rights reporting across fault lines of race, gender, geography, generation, and class. 

"In this way, the project would contribute to the idea of the U.S. civil rights movement as “long and wide” rather than constrained to a racial binary, the geography of the South, and the time period of the 1950s and ‘60s. The traditional binary view, which historian Charles Payne called “the Montgomery to Memphis Framework,” is increasingly being challenged by scholars such as Mark Brilliant, who propose a Long and Wide Civil Rights Movement model to more accurately and comprehensively capture the conflicts and accomplishments of movements for equal rights. 

"Historians have long followed the trail of journalist coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, looking among other thing, at their role as “sympathetic referees” in the black freedom struggle. As this project looks more expansively at the journalistic role in the nation’s freedom struggles, I seek answers to questions such as: How did the reporters’ background, training, and personal and journalistic outlook play into their news coverage of various struggles for civil rights not typically included in the broader accepted narrative? How did journalists report across ethnic, racial, economic, and other differences? How were their efforts accepted in the newsroom and community at large? 

"This project attempts to answer these and other questions through oral history interviews with journalists across the fault lines and fissures that the late journalist Robert C. Maynard so eloquently spoke to. I’m kick-starting the project by attending Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez’s Voces Oral History Summer Research Institute this summer at the University of Texas at Austin."

Deadline: 30 June 2017, via http://bit.ly/BlocksPlatesStones-Submit

Details: http://bit.ly/BlocksPlatesStones

Keynote Roundtable: Dr Richard S. Field (Yale), Prof. James Mosley (Institute of English Studies), Dr. Ad Stijnman (Leiden), and Prof. Michael Twyman (Reading) 

Call For Paper Abstracts & Poster Abstracts:
The material turn in fields that rely on historical printed matter has led to interest in how those texts and images were—and are—produced. Those objects, including cut woodblocks, etched and engraved metal plates, and lithographic stones, could be fundamental to research. Tens of thousands survive from the last 500 years, but the vast majority are inaccessible because they do not fit into the cataloguing structures and controlled vocabularies used by the libraries, archives and museums that hold them. Those that are accessible tend to be under-used, as few researchers are equipped to understand them or communicate about them across disciplinary boundaries. Even the most basic term is debated: in book research, a matrix is the mould for casting pieces of type; in art research, each resulting type is a matrix (and the sheets printed from them are the multiples). As new possibilities to catalogue and digitize these artifacts are revealing their research potential, it is essential to establish how they can best be made available and how they can be used in research.

This deeply interdisciplinary conference will survey the state of research into cut woodblocks, intaglio plates, lithographic stones, and other matrices/printing surfaces. It will bring together researchers, curators, librarians, printers, printmakers, cataloguers, conservators, digital humanities practitioners, and others who care for or seek to understand these objects. The discussion will encompass all media and techniques, from the fifteenth century through the present. Please submit abstracts for papers (20 minutes) and posters (A1 portrait/vertical) by 30 June 2017 at http://bit.ly/BlocksPlatesStones-Submit.

Location: (Senate House, London; reception at British Academy)

Funder: This event is part of a 12-month British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award, ‘The Matrix Reloaded: Establishing Cataloguing and Research Guidelines for Artefacts of Printing Images’,  http://bit.ly/BARSEAMatrixReloaded. The discussions will support the creation of a research network to distill a single, interdisciplinary best practice from existing standards across disciplines and heritage collections and produce a program to train researchers to engage with matrices/printing surfaces.

Contact Info: Dr Elizabeth Savage (Institute of English Studies)

URL: http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/blocks-plates-stones-conference

The American Journalism Historians Association is seeking nominations for three board positions and the office of second vice president. Board members serve for three years and are expected to attend board meetings at the annual convention. The 2nd VP, under normal circumstances, rises to the presidency in two years, then serves on the board for an additional two years. A nominee to the Board of Directors or to any of the other Officer positions must have been 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 Amber Roessner,
University of Tennessee, ataroessne@utk.edu. Please confirm the candidate's willingness to serve before sending the nomination to Amber, and if possible, you should send a brief bio of the candidate.

Deadline for nominations is 5 p.m. August 26. Nominations may also be made from the floor.

Media and Communication's Volume 6, Issue 1
Title: Media History and Democracy
Editor: David W. Park (Lake Forest College, USA)
Deadline for Abstracts: 30 June 2017
Deadline for Submissions: 30 September 2017
Publication of the Issue: March 2018

Information: The journal Media and Communication hereby announces a thematic issue (to be published in 2018) dedicated to the topic of media history and democracy. Democracy, in its many guises, has long been an influential concern for media historians. The emphasis on democracy in this thematic issue is intended to link up with media histories that take on the intersection of democracy and media as understood through any one of a number of lenses. The issue of democracy brings this thematic issue in contact with numerous approaches to media history. Authors will find connections to be made between democracy and concerns for: history of technology, social history, cultural history, political history, the history of social networks, intellectual history, and more. Democracy need not be conceptualized as a formal political system for this thematic issue, and many authors may find it fruitful to consider the multifarious aspects and meanings of democracy as they reflect on how they might draft a submission to this thematic issue. Media and Communication is an international journal, and we are particularly interested in programming a thematic issue that features historical scholarship from around the world, including manuscripts that address transnational communication flows. This thematic issue of Media and Communication would be a good match for articles addressing the following topics:

The history of democratic ideals in the development of media technology;
Considerations of democratic formations as they relate to journalism history and historical understandings of the role of journalism;
Histories of media as they relate to political activism;
The history of alternative and independent media outlets as they relate to democratic processes;
The history of public service broadcasting and its applications worldwide or transnationally;
Histories of media reform movements;
Treatments of the history of literacy and its political meanings;
Internet histories as they relate to citizenship or democracy;
The historical roles of interpersonal communication and social networks as they relate to democracy;
The history of media policies and regulation designed to arrange for (or thwart) democratic communication;
Historical themes concerning the relationship between capitalism and democracy.

Instructions for Authors: Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal’s instructions for authors (http://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/pages/view/forauthors) and to send their abstracts (about 200–250 words, with a tentative title and reference to the thematic issue) by email to the Guest Editor (Dave Park: park@lakeforest.edu) by 30 June 2017.