The Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the History of Journalism will be awarded again at the 2018 convention of the American Historical Association (AHA), to be held January 4-7, in Washington, D.C.

The Palmegiano Prize is awarded annually to the author of the most outstanding book published in English on any aspect of the history of journalism, concerning any area of the world, and any period. Books that focus on the recent past should have a significant historical component. Books that deal with journalism in relation to other forms of mass communication are eligible for consideration.

Books with a copyright of 2016 are eligible for the 2017 award.

Nominators must complete an online prize submission form for each book submitted.

One copy of each entry must be sent to each committee member and clearly labeled “Palmegiano Prize Entry.” Electronic copies may be sent only to committee members who have indicated they will accept them.

Entries must be received by May 15, 2017, to be eligible for the 2017 competition. Entries will not be returned. Recipients will be announced on the AHA website in October 2017 and recognized during a ceremony at the January 2018 AHA annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Other specific submission instructions will be posted on the AHA website on or before March 31, 2017, according to that website. This Intelligencer post also will be updated when that information is available.

By Candi Carter Olsen, Katherine Edenborg, Will Mari and the membership committee 

AJHA fulfills a unique role for many of us, encouraging our ongoing and future research, supporting our teaching and generally connecting us to each other across campuses (and associations!). We have strong ties to AEJMC’s and ICA’s History Divisions. 

But in order to grow and remain strong, we need to recruit and retain graduate students and junior faculty in journalism, media studies and communication departments across the country and world. 

Here’s a list of the top 10 reasons you can give to someone who might be interested in joining AJHA:

1) Getting early-stage graduate students to older colleagues offers immense opportunities for emotional and mental support during the long dissertation stage. Media history is hard. It involves deep dives into primary sources, balancing expectations from committee members who might have backgrounds as diverse as traditional history, sociology, communication studies and journalism, and teaching. 

Getting to know older members and hearing their hard-earned words of wisdom can go a long way toward helping students succeed and start healthy careers. In Will Mari’s case, meeting and being mentored by folks like Jim McPherson and Betty Winfield helped get him across the finish line in May 2016 with his dissertation 

2) Connections with fellow graduate students, newer faculty and more established faculty can lead directly to great new ideas for teaching and course development. 

3) Meeting other media-history scholars can spark collaboration across continents and disciplines. Need help tackling a long-term project? AJHA might be just the place to get pointers for how to make the best use of archives and other sources. 

4) AJHA helps you get a foothold in the academic world, experiencing the norms and give-and-take of a conference, and learn how to make the most of feedback from peers. 

5) Presenting at AJHA looks good on a younger scholar’s CV

6) AJHA’s practice of only holding two sessions at a time means participants have an audience of engaged peers and senior scholars at their session, no matter what time it’s held. 

7) AJHA’s history tour provides participants with an opportunity to learn about new places while also relaxing with fellow scholars.

8) Feedback that you get at AJHA can help presenters move an article to publication, which helps graduate students get competitive jobs. 

9) AJHA has several committees that provide graduate students with an opportunity to get involved, network with other scholars, and put a national service line on their CV. AJHA’s size means that there are several opportunities to participate in various roles.

10) On a less serious note, the food at AJHA is amazing. The conference organizers always make sure that attendees are well-fed and caffeinated throughout the day. Food is an important draw for both grad students and fulltime faculty. 

Please ask a grad student in your life, or a colleague in your department, or allied department, to consider visiting AJHA’s next conference and then joining it. It’s up to all of us to find great new colleagues for the future of our fine organization. Let’s get to it! 

If you have questions or suggestions for the membership committee, please email Kate at edenborgk@uwstout.edu, Candi at candi.carterolson@usu.edu or Will Mari at william.mari@northwestu.edu. 

Ybor City, by Patrick Cox

Michael Murray, right, interviewed Sidney Kobre about his AJHA award at St. Louis NPR affiliate KWMU during the 1986 convention. They discussed the impact of Kobre’s work and the influence of Joseph Pulitzer in the Midwest and nationally. (Credit: University of Missouri)

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

AJHA’s fifth annual convention was pivotal for the young organization. Preeminent scholars Walter Ong and James Carey delivered speeches, the women’s luncheon became institutionalized, and the organization presented the first distinguished service award to its eventual namesake, Sidney Kobre.

Maurine Beasley, who served on the Board of Directors at the time, remarked on the outstanding intellectual content of the 1986 St. Louis convention.

“It marked AJHA really coming of age in the academy by drawing in leading figures as speakers and inspirations to all of us,” Beasley said.

Michael Murray was president of AJHA in 1986 and chief organizer of the St. Louis convention. Murray cited Ong as a major influence during his undergraduate and master’s programs at St. Louis University, and he thought members would enjoy hearing Ong speak. Then-board member John Pauly had been Carey’s student at the University of Illinois and suggested inviting him.

Murray transported Ong to the Clarion Hotel, where the conference took place.

“Once we got to the hotel, it appeared that everyone attending the meeting was right there in that conference room, packed to the rafters,” Murray said.

Beasley said that the two speakers were part of AJHA’s drive to bring fresh ideas into journalism history. 

“It was an extremely scholarly speech—mind expanding and provocative, moving us beyond the usual consideration of the roles played by outstanding figures in journalism history,” Beasley said of Ong’s address.

Alf Pratte summarized Carey’s talk in the Winter 1986/87 Intelligencer. Carey told the group that modern journalism disrupts collective memory by stressing speed over meaning and called upon journalists to encourage oral culture in everyday communities.

Convention attendees also heard from James Lawrence, long-time editorial page editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Murray initially invited Joseph Pulitzer Jr., but Pulitzer suggested Lawrence could provide better insights on local journalism history. Lawrence began working for Pulitzer Publishing in 1938 under Pulitzer’s father, Joseph Pulitzer II.

Another highlight of the convention was the presentation of the first distinguished service award at the Old Courthouse—site of the Dred Scott trials. AJHA co-founder David Sloan suggested presenting the new award to Kobre because of his impressive scholarly resumé in history and commitment to AJHA since its beginnings. 

Startt, a board member at the time, said that Kobre probably did more to establish the field than any other scholar. He also recalled Kobre engaging AJHA members in many “lively corridor discussions.”

 “There was so much to learn from him, for he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the press,” Startt said.

Upon receiving the award, Kobre delivered remarks drawing parallels between the journalist and historian. According to an article in the Winter 1986/87 Intelligencer, Kobre also discussed the benefits of studying media history and emphasized the importance of AJHA to create a network among journalism historians.

In the early days of the organization, AJHA provided a venue specifically for women historians to network. The Women’s Lunch—the precursor of the Donna Allen Luncheon—first appeared on the program as an official event in 1986. Beasley said that Barbara Cloud, AJHA president in 1984-85, began the lunch because the men typically went off by themselves to have meals at conventions and did not invite the women. Beasley noted that the men resented the formal listing of a luncheon for women, so the Donna Allen Lunch eventually was open to all convention attendees.

Paulette Kilmer counts the Women’s Lunch among her favorite memories from her first AJHA convention—in 1986. She met Beasley as she was heading out for the luncheon and tagged along. 

“I recall that moment because it changed my life as a scholar and probably as a person,” Kilmer said. “I can’t remember who was there very clearly, but I can still hear the laughter, feel the goodwill, and appreciate the practical advice from those who already had run the doctoral gauntlet.”

Carol Sue Humphrey also attended her first AJHA convention in 1986, and she said her fantastic experience there was why she fell in love with the organization. She said she enjoyed the combination of research and a field trip—the group visited the St. Louis Arch.

For the full 1986 convention program, visit ajha.wildapricot.org/past-conventions. It recently has been digitized as part of an effort to electronically preserve all of the convention programs.

By Teri Finneman

Oral History Committee Chairwoman

We continue our series examining members’ oral history projects with this feature from Nicholas Hirshon, an assistant professor in the Communication Department at William Paterson University. A former reporter for the New York Daily News, Hirshon has written two books of sports history, Images of America: Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum (2010), about the former arena of the NHL’s New York Islanders, and Images of America: Forest Hills (2013), about the neighborhood that long hosted the U.S. Open. His email is hirshonn@wpunj.edu.

***

There are many historic markers in New York City, but not in the neighborhood where I’m from. I grew up in the middle-class suburb of Forest Hills, Queens, which is a long haul on the bus and the subway to the tourist-teeming landmarks of Manhattan. Forest Hills has history, but it cannot compete with the likes of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. Too often, its past is forgotten altogether.

This irks me as a historian. I have devoted much of my research to shedding light on the rich past of my hometown, where few scholars tread. And I could not do it without oral history.

At the annual AJHA conference in October, I presented a research-in-progress on a sports television program with a Forest Hills connection. I grew interested in the topic several years ago when I was working as a newspaper reporter and covered the closing of a bowling alley near my boyhood home. I learned that the alley had hosted a short-lived NBC game show named Phillies Jackpot Bowling in 1959 and 1960. The program had a pioneering format in which professional bowlers competed for tens of thousands of dollars by attempting to bowl six consecutive strikes in nine tries. Phillies Jackpot Bowling was instrumental in raising interest in bowling across the United States and precipitating an era when top bowlers earned more than many baseball and football stars, a dynamic that is unthinkable in the modern sports landscape.

After I transitioned from practicing journalism to teaching and researching it, I wanted to examine the history of Phillies Jackpot Bowling. The problem was the lack of sources. No clips from the show seem to have made their way online, and only one episode has survived, available only for on-site viewing at an archive in California, thousands of miles away. None of the people involved in the show left an archive. Reports in newspapers and magazines offer an incomplete picture of events.

Oral history proved fruitful to fill in the gap on previous projects. But Phillies Jackpot Bowling went off the air more than half a century ago. I figured everyone involved in the show had died long ago. Not true. To my surprise, I was able to track down and interview four bowlers who appeared on the show. Their vivid memories of the program provided much-needed color and made possible my tribute to my hometown’s history.

Today the bowling alley is no more. The alley was renovated into a furniture store when I was still a reporter, and I wrote articles advocating for a historical marker nearby. The owner agreed and put up two plaques, one on the façade and another inside with a display of bowling memorabilia.

Now it’s up to me – and oral history – to put the plaque in context.

Do you have an oral history project you would like featured in the newsletter? Email Teri Finneman at finnemte@gmail.com.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/insider/putting-the-timess-first-email-address-to-bed.html

Volume 3, Issue 1 of Historiography in Mass Communication was posted at http://history-jmc.com/Home.html in early January.

The Table of Contents is:

Michael D. Murray, “Characters I Have Known: Reflections from CBS News (and the AJHA)”

Historical Roundtable: Studying the Colonial Press
David Copeland, Roger Mellen, David Sloan, and Julie Hedgepeth Williams

Kobre Award Interview: Mike Sweeney

Book Award Interview: Peter Hartshorn

See:

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/01/20/oral-history-no-longer-subject-irb-approval

http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21714964-foreign-correspondent-was-105-obituary-clare-hollingworth-died-january-10th

(Editor’s Note: Prof. Candi Carter Olson presented her paper, “Because of the places she had to go: Changing women’s roles through the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh,” at the 2016 AJHA Convention in St. Petersburg. The Intelligencer asked Prof. Olson how she started researching the Press Club, what her research means and why it’s important.)

By Candi Carter Olson

Utah State University

Like most journalism historians, I’m regularly asked to tell people why they should care about my topic, which is women’s press clubs and their members. After all, women’s press clubs seem like something that should be relegated to the past, even though some still exist. Women’s press clubs sprang up in the late nineteenth century in response to a growing need for professionalized women to organize in a way that they could educate other women and promote women’s literary accomplishments. 

Many of women’s press clubs lasted only a few decades, and those that made it to the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s integrated men into their membership in response to changing societal norms. For example, the Women’s National Press Club voted to allow men in membership in 1970 and changed its name to the Washington Press Club. 

While women’s press clubs were at their height, we newswomen seemingly made a lot of progress. Due to a number of factors, there was a drastic increase in women on news staffs throughout the United States during the early-to-mid twentieth century. Even though most newswomen reported for women’s and society pages, many also took on formerly masculine-bastion roles as war reporters, political reporters, and leaders across the newsroom. The changes seemed so large that the women’s movement’s push to drop women’s and society’s pages in the 1970s seemed logical: Women were conquering newsrooms. Their stories needed to be seen in all sections of the newspaper as well. 

Statistics show us that after the 1970s, women’s progress into newsrooms stagnated. This happened for various reasons, although my interest, obviously, is in whether the drop in newswomen’s organizations affected these numbers. 

The 2015 Status of Women in the U.S. Media report drives this point home: Today, women produce only 37 percent of the bylines in newspapers, and they’re only 32 percent of the on-air faces that we see on our nightly news. Wires and internet news sources have the best representation, with 38 percent of wire bylines and 42 percent of digital news being produced by newswomen. This, by the way, was the first year in several that this survey found an increase in women’s representation. The percentage of women in supervisory positions in newsrooms is no better. A 2016 American Society of Newspaper Editors Diversity survey found just 37 percent of supervisory positions were occupied by women. 

By researching women’s press clubs, I am finding stories and strategies of newswomen that made a difference in women’s stories becoming a mainstream part of the news industry and in women’s faces becoming more common across the newsroom. 

The Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh, whose earliest years I presented at AJHA in October, is the second oldest women’s press club extant in the United States. It was organized by seven so-called newshens in 1891 ostensibly for “friendly intercourse and the advancement of women’s interests in journalism.” Throughout its 125 years, the group has strategically used its organization to grow numbers of women journalists.

One of my favorite stories from this club’s first decade involves the club getting around male newsroom leaders by inviting in their wives, training them to be writers, then deploying them to become professional writers themselves. Because they were married to the editors, these women also had the ear of the person in charge of hiring and used it to get women reporting jobs. Janey Coard Smith, who at 15 was the youngest charter member, recalled, 

"Several of the papers did not at that time approve of women writers on the staff, so we cunningly conceived of inviting into the fold, as associate members, wives of outstanding editors. Many of these were marvelous women in more ways than one, and ere long every paper had two or three women in editorial rooms. Those associate members were very helpful, inspiring, several of them later developing into writers."

Through organizing, the WPCP found strength in numbers.

The group also used stereotypical ideas of feminine behavior—such as the image of the perfect hostess and homemaker—to reassure the public that newswomen were not challenging men’s roles. They held an annual banquet, where they showed off their performance skills through music and plays they wrote themselves, and hosted the public to the height of the time’s fashion. 

The 1895 banquet excluded men; however, Pittsburg Times Managing Editor Morgan E. Gable sent a congratulatory note to the women’s press club on the event. This letter sums up the importance of women’s press club in advancing the cause of newswomen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: 

"Though you have not sent me an invitation to your banquet, you will find that the Times will tomorrow say editorially that the time is not long past when a woman in a newspaper office was a curiosity. …They crowded out no man. They have made a distinct field of usefulness for themselves, which grows steadily as time rolls on. That is to say, they have come to stay."