By Teri Finneman and Will Mari

AEJMC History Division Membership Co-Chairs

As media historians, part of our mission is to emphasize the importance of what we do to our colleagues in journalism studies and out in the professional world. To that end, we’re calling for participation in the second annual Media History Engagement Week, slated to start April 3, 2017. 

Like National News Engagement Day, Media History Engagement Week will not only raise awareness about the importance of our field, but also expose students to the messiness and continuing relevance of history to the present. 

Last year, participants from 20 states and six countries took part in the #headlinesinhistory Twitter discussion, with dozens of students tweeting images, videos and text from ongoing research projects, assignments and classroom activities. 

While there’s a serious benefit to getting students and faculty friends to tweet about media history, it’s also fun. 

We’d like to give you some basics about the media-history-engagement initiative and ideas you could include in your spring syllabus.

The main mission of the week is to promote journalism history during the week of April 3-7. The Twitter hashtag is #headlinesinhistory. We hope campuses across the country (and even the world) will be tweeting #headlinesinhistory to share why journalism history matters and/or share class projects about journalism and communication history.

Media History Engagement Week can make #headlinesinhistory a national conversation. Here’s a few concrete ways to make that happen: 

• Collaborate with other colleagues and their students across the country on a specific project or assignment.
• Have your students research the archives of their campus newspapers. Post/share images of front pages or something visual (cartoons are especially fun).
• Have students search for family history in newspaper archives

If students are doing an oral-history project, have them tweet about the most surprising thing they found

• Organize a movie night on campus of journalism history-related movies (you could open this up to the general public, too). You might show one movie and then have an open forum discussion after.
• Have students read the First Amendment on campus or from collections of historic journalism.
• Have students research and then profile of a significant journalist/photojournalist or a publication. A time frame could be specified (anyone between 1900 and 1980, etc.). The end result could be a paper presentation or a poster presentation. If poster presentations are the desired medium, the instructor could arrange to have the posters displayed as an exhibit for the public and campus to enjoy.
• The above doesn't have to be an assignment. It could be a contest sponsored by the journalism department/school/college, with awards of some kind given for the best projects.
• Digital curated project that focuses on a person or an era, with Storify or some other digital/online platform used. A 10-minute slideshow could accompany it.
• Plan for a trip to a local archive or museum and have our students share via Instagram or Twitter (or both) some of the things they’ve found. For those of us without the means or institutional support to put together an archive field trip, the assignment could be configured for digital archives.
• Scavenger hunt with media-history clues.
• Organize a class field trip to your local media outlet and have students dig through archives there.
• Turn class into a game of Jeopardy! or journalism-history trivia with prizes.
• Create a museum space in a department foyer or hallway within the department for students to showcase journalism history.
• Create a vintage photo Instagram page. Partner with a local newspaper and pull tons of their early-to-mid twentieth century photos and create a fun Instagram page to share with the community.
• Assign students to find out how area media are preserving journalism history (or not) at their outlet.
• Create an activity to do with local elementary, junior high or high school students (might be good to get your College of Education colleagues on board, too).
• Partner with a local media outlet and do oral histories with their staff.
• Plan an evening talk about your research that is open to the general public in your community.
• Get prominent historians on board to do a live Periscope, Facebook Live, or a live Twitter Q&A with students.
• Engage with your English department colleagues to see if any of them are up for an interdisciplinary media-history project

If any of you are interested in speaking during live Twitter Q&As or video chats with students, please let one of us know at finnemte@gmail.com or william.mari@northwestu.edu. 

If you plan to participate and/or you have some more ideas to add to this list, please either email one of us or post in the AJHA or AEJMC History Division Facebook pages. We would love to note which campuses plan to participate so we can watch for each other and work together in early April. 

Let’s continue to make media history relevant this spring with Media History Engagement Week!

Brian Gabrial of Concordia University, Canada, was awarded the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Journalism History at the 2016 Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil war, and Free Expression at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga.

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Linda Lumsden of the University of Arizona published a profile of suffrage martyr Inez Milholland in the 'Longform" section of talkingpointsmemo.com. Lumsden's biography of Milholland, who died 100 years ago on Nov. 25 while campaigning for votes for women in California, came out in paperback this fall to commemorate the centennial of her death. Lumsden also conducted a livechat  on the article for TPM. The article link is (get a free three-day trial subscription to read the full article):

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/longform/the-woman-on-the-white-horse-inez-milholland​

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Ellen Gerl of Ohio University published the article, ”'Out of the Back Rooms': Physician-publicist Virginia Apgar Makes Birth Defects a Popular Cause,” in the Fall 2016 issue of  Journalism History. An earlier version of the article was presented at the 2015 AJHA conference where it was a runner-up for the Maureen Beasley Award for the Outstanding Paper on Women’s History.

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Owen V. Johnson of Indiana University gave the paper, “Light & Shadows:  Living and Doing Research in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1972-1989,” at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, Washington, D.C., on November 18, 2016. He also published two articles in Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History: “Wrestling with Fame:  Ernie Pyle & the Pulitzer Prize,” 28:2 (Spring 2016), pp. 46-53 [with Holly Hays]; and “Keep Them Smoking:  The Ernie Pyle Cigarette Fund,” 28:2 (Spring 2016), pp. 54-55.  

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Dane S. Claussen of Thiel College has been nominated as one of two candidates for Vice-President of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). The election will be held in Spring 2017. If he is elected, he will take office on Oct. 1, 2017. Claussen would then automatically become President-Elect in 2018-19; President in 2019-20; and Past President in 2020-21. He would be a member of AEJMC’s Board of Directors during all four years. Claussen’s opponent in the vice-presidential election is David Perlmutter, Dean and Professor, College of Media and Communication, Texas Tech University.

Claussen is probably best known within AEJMC for serving as Editor of the quarterly scholarly journal, Journalism & Mass Communication Educator (J&MCE) from March 2006 until September 2012. In addition, he has served as Head of the AEJMC’s History Division; Mass Communication & Society Division; Magazine Media Division; Media Management, Economics & Entrepreneurship Division; and LGBTQ Interest Group, among other division roles. Claussen also has been an elected member of AEJMC’s Teaching Committee; appointed member of its Publications Committee; and ex officio member of its Diversity Task Force.

From Webmaster Erika Pribanic-Smith and

History in the Curriculum Chair Gerry Lanosga:

The Faculty Job Board is a new feature on our AJHA website where members can post faculty positions available at their institutions. The page is set up as a forum (message board), which job-seeking members can follow to receive notifications of new postings via email. To access the job board, visit https://ajha.wildapricot.org/Job-Board (member login required).

The $500 award will be presented to the author of the best mass communication history article or essay published in 2016. Book chapters in edited collections also may be nominated.

The award was endowed by the late Catherine L. Covert, professor of public communications at Syracuse University and former head of the History Division. Last year’s Covert Award was won by Richard Kielbowicz  for his article “Regulating Timeliness: Technologies, Laws, and the News, 1840-1970,” published in Journalism & Communication Monographs, vol. 17 (Spring 2015).

Nominations, including  six  paper copies of the article nominated, should be sent by March 1 to Professor Nancy L. Roberts, Communication Department, University at Albany, 1400 Washington Ave., SS-351, Albany, NY 12222.

Transnational Journalism History

Deadline:  February 1, 2017 

The second 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 9-10 in Dublin, Ireland. Keynote speaker  will be Marcel Broersma of the University of Groningen. 

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

Conference planners anticipate at least one book to result from the 2016 inaugural conference and the 2017 conference. Abstracts of 250 words (for research-in-progress) or full papers (for completed projects) should be submitted to Debbie van Tuyll (dvantuyl@augusta.edu) by February 1, 2017. Submissions will be blind reviewed.

Any questions may be addressed to Debbie van Tuyll or Mark O’Brien (mark.obrien@dcu.ie).

We Can Help Protect the First Amendment

By Dave Vergobbi

“Democracy depends upon journalism.”

-- The Society of Professional Journalists.

I’m betting many of you had a unique fall semester in 2016. Mine was. It actually began December 15, 2015, when Donald J. Trump stated at a Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas, “We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some way. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people.” I was alarmed that a presidential candidate would make such a statement, but I dismissed it. I knew Trump couldn’t actually win.

Then on February 26, 2016, perfectly complementing my media law class engagement with the hard-won New York Times v. Sullivan’s actual malice standard that put libel law on a First Amendment basis and finally eradicated seditious libel—guaranteeing our right to criticize our government and its officials—Trump said at a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.” I was alarmed that a presidential candidate would make such a statement, but I dismissed it. I knew Trump couldn’t actually win.

As the campaign proceeded, Trump blacklisted reporters and media that challenged him; actually confined journalists to fenced areas at his rallies, the better to berate and encourage attendees to jeer the reporters; refused to hold press conferences; consistently tagged legitimate news media as liars; and outmaneuvered journalists to keep them from reporting on his post-election meetings. For my two media law sections and my freedom of expression class in fall 2016, student questions and concern culminated on November 29, 2016, when Trump tweeted, “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag—if they do, there must be consequences—perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail.” I was alarmed that a presidential candidate would make such a statement, but now I could not dismiss it. Candidate Trump was now president-elect Trump.

My alarm is not alone. Thomas Burr, 109^th president of the National Press Club, wrote on November 20, 2016, in The Salt Lake Tribune that “[m]ore than 20 press freedom groups—like the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Society of News Editors, Reporters Without Borders, and the Committee to Protect Journalists—signed on” to Burr’s unprecedented “open letter to President-elect Trump, imploring him to stand by the traditions of a protected press pool and to set an example for the other countries in freedom of the press.” Meanwhile, freepress.net asked in its December 15, 2016, email, “Who will protect the First Amendment?”

We can. At least, we can help. As journalism historians and educators we can put in perspective President-elect Donald Trump’s anti-First Amendment, anti-democratic positions. We can fight constitutional ignorance through our instruction, our research, our professional ties, and our public outreach. I learned in my law and freedom of expression classes this fall 2016 of the great unease and conflict students increasingly felt, even in this highly conservative state of Utah, toward Trump’s rights-negating positions. They kept asking me: “Doesn’t he know he’s violating the content neutrality principle, the emotion principle, and the reactive harm principle of First Amendment law, that offense alone is not enough to abridge or punish speech?” “Doesn’t he know that the actual malice standard exists for public officials and figures, that it must be proven, and why it’s essential for democracy?” “Doesn’t he know that the Brandenburg v. Ohio incitement standard means you have to actually evidence intent, imminence, likelihood and unlawful activity to prove actual physical or relational harm?” “Doesn’t he know the First Amendment protects symbolic speech, not just words written or spoken, and that, like it or not, flag burning is the ultimate expression of our constitutional right?” “Doesn’t he know that the First Amendment specifically mentions only one profession—the ‘press’—and why that is?” “Doesn’t he know that without the First Amendment the other nine Bill of Rights amendments are operationally invalid, because we’d have no recourse if those rights are violated?” “Doesn’t he understand democracy?” 

I don’t know what Donald J. Trump knows, or willfully ignores. What I do know is that AJHA members have and can answer—via their teaching, research and professional or public engagement—the who, what, why, when, where and how of these questions. I see an important AJHA goal to not only educate our students, but also our fellow citizens, and perhaps especially those people in decision-making, influence peddling, and enforcement positions in our local, state and federal governments, including President Trump. We can help protect the First Amendment, and must, for “democracy depends upon journalism.” Cry out for me Idealism—a daunting, but worthy, task.