Best Journalism and Mass Communication History Book
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s History Division is soliciting entries for its annual award for the best journalism and mass communication history book. The winning author will receive a plaque and a $500 prize at the August 2025 AEJMC conference in San Francisco. Attendance at the conference is encouraged as the winner will be honored at a History Division awards event. The author also will be invited to discuss the winning book during a live taping of the Journalism History podcast, which traditionally takes place during the reception.
Further details about the competition can be found here: https://mediahistorydivision.com/awards/history-book-award/
The competition is open to any author of a media history book regardless of whether they belong to AEJMC or the History Division. Only first editions with a 2024 copyright date will be accepted. Entries must be received by February 1, 2025. Submit four hard copies of each book or an electronic copy (must be an e-Book or a pdf manuscript in publisher’s page-proof format) along with the author’s mailing address, telephone number, and email address to:
David T. Z. Mindich, AEJMC History Book Award Chair
Temple University Journalism Department
2020 North 13th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19122
If you have any questions, or to submit electronic copies, please email Book Award Chair David T. Z. Mindich at mindich@temple.edu.
Current recipient
2024 Ken J. Ward, Last Paper Standing: A Century of Competition Between the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News (University of Colorado Press, 2023).
Past recipients
2023 Andie Tucher, Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History (Columbia University Press, 2022)
2022 Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield, Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (University of Illinois Press, 2021)
2021 John Maxwell Hamilton, Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda (LSU Press, 2020)
2020 Will Slauter, Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright (Stanford University Press, 2019)
2019 Matthew Pressman, On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News (Harvard University Press, 2018)
2018 Fred Carroll, Race News: Black Journalists and the Fight for Racial Justice in the 20th Century(University of Illinois Press, 2017)
2017 Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2016)
2016 Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
2015 Matthew Cecil, Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate: The Campaign to Control the Press and the Bureau’s Image (University Press of Kansas, 2014)
2014 Jinx Coleman Broussard, African American Foreign Correspondents: A History (Louisiana State University Press, 2013)
2013 Chris Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (University of Nebraska Press, 2012)
2012 Peter Hartshorn, I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens (Counterpoint, 2011)
2011 Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Harvard University Press, 2010)
2010 Hugh Richard Slotten, Radio’s Hidden Voice: The Origins of Public Broadcasting in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2009)
2009 Kathy Roberts Forde, Literary Journalism on Trial: Masson v. New Yorker and the First Amendment (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008)
2008 Bruce Lenthall, Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture(University of Chicago Press, 2007)
2007 Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders (University of Tennessee Press, 2006)
2006 Chad Raphael, Investigated Reporting: Muckrakers, Regulators, and the Struggle over Television Documentary (University of Illinois Press, 2005)
2005 Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (University Press of Florida, 2004)
2004 No award
2003 Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (University of California Press, 2002)
2002 Jeffrey Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic(University Press of Virginia, 2001)
2001 John Hartsock, A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000)
2000 Jeffery A. Smith, War and Press Freedom: The Problem of Prerogative Power (Oxford University Press, 1999)
1999 Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Indiana University Press, 1998)
1998 Patricia Johnston, Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Photography (University of California Press, 1997)
Donald L. Shaw Senior Scholar Award
The Donald L. Shaw Senior Scholar Award will recognize an individual for excellence in journalism history research who has a minimum 15-year academic career and a record of division membership.
The award is named in honor of the pioneering journalism theoretician, distinguished journalism historian, and former head of the History Division, who taught for almost half of a century at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
Shaw is renowned, along with Dr. Maxwell McCombs of the University of Texas, Austin, for the development of the agenda setting theory of the press. Shaw is also known for his studies of 19th and 20th century American and Southern press history. He is author, co-author, or co-editor of 13 books and about 75 scholarly articles or book chapters. His media history work includes examining news about American slavery, campaign news, and sensationalism.
Current Recipient
2024, Linda Lumsden
Past Recipients
2023 John M. Hamilton, Louisiana State University
2022 Carolyn Kitch, Temple University
2021 Jinx Broussard, Louisiana State University
2020 Maurine Beasley, University of Maryland
Jinx Coleman Broussard Award for Excellence in Teaching of Media History
The Broussard Award, presented annually, honors innovative, original, tested, and transformative teaching of media and/or journalism history. Applicants for the award may submit one of the following types of pedagogical approaches, including (but not limited to): entire courses, units, individual lessons, classroom activities, assignments, assessments, and/or teaching strategies.
Teaching ideas should be original, tested, and transformative pedagogies that have been used by the author. In alignment with the Division’s belief in the importance of teaching journalism/media history across the curriculum, submissions can include ideas used either in a course dedicated entirely to media and journalism history, or as part of other courses in media
and journalism. The teaching idea should be transferrable, in that it can used by other instructors or institutions and should help instructors address one or more of the following concepts: diversity, collaboration, community, or justice.
Submissions from faculty and instructors of record (including graduate students) are welcomed, as are submissions from both members of the History Division and non-members. Previous winners of the Broussard Award may submit a different idea after three years.
2024
A.J. Bauer, Alabama
Erin Coyle, Temple
Michael Fuhlhage, Wayne State
John Vilanova, Lehigh
2023
Ira Chinoy, Maryland
Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen, Idaho
Bailey Dick, Bowling Green
Autumn Lorimer Linford, Auburn
2022
Kathy Roberts Forde, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Katherine A. Foss, Middle Tennessee State University
Melita M. Garza, Texas Christian University
Will Mari, Louisana State University
2021
Ira Chinoy, University of Maryland
Teri Finneman, University of Kansas
Kristin Gustafson, University of Washington-Bothell
Donna L. Halper, Lesley University
Robert Kerr, University of Oklahoma
2020
Lisa Burns, Quinnipiac University
Elisabeth Fondren, St. John’s University
Andrew Offenburger, Miami University
Joe Saltzman, USC Annenberg
Pamela Walck, Duquesne University
2019**
Nick Hirshon, William Paterson University
Gerry Lanosga, Indiana University
Kimberley Mangun, University of Utah
Shearon Roberts, Xavier University of Louisiana
Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee
**Note: The inaugural class was recognized as winners of the Transformative Teaching of Media and Journalism History competition. In late 2019, the division’s leadership team renamed the award to honor Broussard, which will apply to all future winners.
Covert Award
The Covert Award is awarded annually to the author of the best mass communication history article, essay or book chapter published in the previous year.
The $400 award recognizes the late Catherine L. Covert, professor of public communications at Syracuse University. She was the first woman professor in Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Journalism and the first woman to head the History Division in 1975. She received the AEJMC Outstanding Contribution to Journalism Education Award in 1983.
Nominations for the Covert Awards are solicited in the spring each year.
Current recipients
2023 Daniel DeFraia, "Into the State: How American Reporters Came to Work for the US Government," American Journalism 40:4 (2023), 469-499, DOI: 10.1080/08821127.2023.2267025
Past Covert Award recipients
2023 Michael Stamm, “The International Materiality of Domestic Information: The Geopolitics of Newsprint During World War II and the Cold War,” The International History Review, 44:6 (2022), 1286-1305, DOI: 10.1080/07075332.2021.2011371
2023 Gerry Lanosga, “‘Behold the Wicked Abominations That They Do’: The Nineteenth-Century Roots of the Evidentiary Approach in American Investigative Journalism,” American Journalism39:4 (2022), 368-391, DOI: 10.1080/08821127.2022.2133024
2022 Elisabeth Fondren, “Fighting an Armed Doctrine: The Struggle to Modernize German Propaganda During World War I (1914-1918),” Journalism & Communication Monographs, 23:4 (2021), 256-317.
2021 L. Amber Roessner, “The Voices of Public Opinion: Lingering Structures of Feeling about Women’s Suffrage in 1917 U.S. Newspaper Letters to the Editor,” Journalism History, 46:2 (2020), 124-144.
2020 Katie Day Good, “Sight-Seeing in School: Visual Technology, Virtual Experience, and World Citizenship in American Education, 1900–1930,” Technology and Culture, 60:1 (2019), 98-131.
2019 Ana Stevenson, “Imagining Women’s Suffrage: Frontier Landscapes and the Transnational Print Culture of Australia, New Zealand and the United States,” Pacific Historical Review 87:4 (2018), 638-666.
2018 Andie Tucher, “I Believe in Faking: The Dilemma of Photographic Realism in the Dawn of Photojournalism,” Photography & Culture 10:3 (2017), 195-214.
2017 Sheila Webb, “Creating LIFE: ‘America’s Most Potent Editorial Force’,” Journalism and Communication Monographs 18:2 (2016), 55-108.
2016 Richard B. Kielbowicz, “Regulating Timeliness: Technologies, Laws and the News, 1840-1970,” Journalism and Communication Monographs 17:1 (2015), 5-83.
2015 Katherine Fink and Michael Schudson, “The Rise of Contextual Journalism, 1950s-2000s,” Journalism, 15:1 (2014), 3-20.
2014 Michael S. Sweeney and Patrick S. Washburn, “’’Aint Justice Wonderful’: The Chicago Tribune’s Battle of Midway Story and the Government’s Attempt at an Espionage Act Indictment in 1942,” Journalism Monographs, 20:10 (December 2013), 1-91.
2013 Kathy Roberts Forde and Katherine A. Foss, “‘The Facts—The Color!—The Facts’: The Idea of a Report in American Print Culture, 1885-1910,” Book History (2012), 123-151.
2012 Kathy Roberts Forde, “Profit and Public Interest: A Publication History of John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima,’” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 88:3 (Autumn 2011), 562-579.
2011 Sheila Webb, “Art Commentary for the Middlebrow: Promoting Modernism & Modern Art through Popular Culture—How Life Magazine Brought ‘The New’ into Middle-Class Homes,” American Journalism, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Summer 2010), 115-150.
2010 Patrick Daley, “Newspaper Competition and Public Spheres in New Hampshire in the Early Revolutionary Period,” Journalism & Communication Monographs, Spring 2009.
2009 Jeffery Smith, “Moral Guardians and the Origins of the Right to Privacy,” Journalism & Communication Monographs, Spring 2008.
2008 Betty Houchin Winfield and Janice Hume, “The Continuous Past: Historical Referents in Nineteenth-Century American Journalism,” Journalism & Communication Monographs, 2007.
2007 Richard Kielbowicz, “The Law and Mob Law in Attacks on Antislavery Newspapers, 1833-1860,” Law and History Review, Fall 2006.
2006 Thomas Mascaro, “Flaws in the Benjamin Report: The Internal Investigation into CBS Reports’ Documentary ‘The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,’” Journalism History, Summer 2005, and Reed W. Smith, “Southern Journalists and Lynching: The Statesboro Case Study,” Journalism & Communication Monographs, Summer 2005.
2005 Susan Henry, “Gambling on a Magazine and a Marriage: Jane Grant, Harold Ross, and The New Yorker,” Journalism History, Summer 2004, and Michelle Jolly, “The Price of Vigilance: Gender, Politics, and the Press in Early San Francisco,” Pacific Historical Review, November 2004.
2004 David Nord, “The Practice of Historical Research,” Mass Communication Research and Theory, Guido H. Stempel III, David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit (eds.), Allyn & Bacon, 2003.
2003 Menahem Blondheim, “’Public Sentiment is Everything’: The Union’s Public Communications Strategy and the Bogus Proclamation of 1864,” The Journal of American History, December 2002.
2002 Nathan Godfried, “Struggling over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD during the 1930s,” Labor History, November 2001.
2001 Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone, “Civic Picturing vs. Realist Photojournalism: The Regime of Illustrated News, 1856-1901,” Design Issues, Spring 2000
2000 Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, “Creating a Favorable Business Climate: Corporations and Radio Broadcasting, 1934 to 1954,” Business History Review, Summer 1999.
1999 Janet Cramer, “Woman as Citizen: Race, Class, and the Discourse of Women’s Citizenship, 1894-1909,” Journalism & Mass Communication Monographs, March 1998.
1998 David Domke, “Journalists, Framing, and Discourse about Race Relations,” Journalism & Mass Communication Monographs, December 1997.
1997 Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Political News and Female Readership in Antebellum Boston and Its Region,” Journalism History, Spring 1996
1996 Richard Kaplan, “The Economics of Popular Journalism in the Gilded Age: the Detroit Evening News in 1873 and 1888,” Journalism History, Summer 1995.
1995 Karen K. List, “Realities and Possibilities: the Lives of Women in Periodicals of the New Republic,” American Journalism, Winter 1994.
1994 Gerald Baldasty, “The Rise of News as a Commodity: Business Imperatives and the Press in the Nineteenth Century,” in Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U.S. Communication History, William S. Solomon and Robert McChesney (eds.), University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
1993 Carol Smith and Carolyn Stewart Dyer, “Taking Stock, Placing Orders: A Historiographic Essay on the Business History of the Newspaper,” Journalism Monographs, April 1992.
1992 Steven J. Ross, “Struggles for the Screen: Workers, Radicals, and the Political Uses of Silent Film,” American Historical Review, April 1991.
1991 David Nord, “Teleology and News: The Religious Roots of American Journalism, 1630-1730,” The Journal of American History, June 1990.
1990 Carolyn Stewart Dyer, “Political Patronage of the Wisconsin Press, 1849-1860: New Perspectives on the Economics of Patronage,” Journalism Monographs, February 1989.
1989 Ronald Zboray, “Antebellum Reading and the Ironies of Technological Innovation,” American Quarterly, Spring 1988.
1988 Mary Kupiec Cayton, “The Making of an American Prophet: Emerson, His Audiences, and the Rise of the Culture Industry in Nineteenth Century America,” American Historical Review, June 1987.
1987 Clayton Koppes and Gregory Black, “Blacks, Loyalty and Propaganda in World War II,” Journal of American History, September 1986.
1986 James L. Baughman, “Television in the Golden Age; An Entrepreneurial Experiment,” The Historian, February 1985.
1985 David Nord, “The Business Values of American Newspapers: The 19th Century Watershed in Chicago,” Journalism Quarterly, Summer 1984.
Sweeney Award
The Michael S. Sweeney Award recognizes the most outstanding article published in the previous volume of the Journalism History journal.
The History Division created the award in 2018 to honor Michael S. Sweeney, who served as editor of Journalism History from 2012 to 2018 and worked to ensure its future by initiating the transition from an independent publication to the official scholarly publication of the History Division.
The finalists are selected by the editor of Journalism History, with the winner determined each spring by the division’s Publications Committee. The winner receives a $200 cash prize.
Current recipient
2024 Edgar Simpson, "Manipulating the Sphere: Mississippi's post-Brown Offensive Against Journalists," Journalism History 49:1 (2023), 4-27, DOI: 10.1080/00947679.2022.2161866
Past Recipients
2023 Paul Myers & Lisa Mullikin Parcell, “Beauty and the Bran: Kellogg’s Campaign to ‘Correct Faulty Elimination’ and Conquer the Cereal Industry,” Journalism History 48:4 (2022), 324-348, DOI: 10.1080/00947679.2022.2125775
2022 Elisabeth Fondren, “The Mirror with a Memory”: The Great War through the Lens of Percy Brown, British Correspondent and Photojournalist (1914-1920).”
2021 Wendy Melillo, “Democracy’s Adventure Hero on a New Frontier: Bridging Language in the Ad Council’s Peace Corps Campaign, 1961-1970.”
2020 Ronald Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Recovering Disabled Veterans in Civil War Newspapers: Creating Heroic Disability.”
2019 Teri Finneman, ‘The Greatest of Its Kind Ever Witnessed in America’: The Press and the 1913 Women’s March on Washington.”
2018 Dale Cressman, “News in Light: The Times Square Zipper and Newspaper Signs in an Age of Technological Enthusiasm.”