J-History Community

The J-History community on H-Net is best summarized as an extension of the existing academic organizations for Journalism History. The members are primarily those who would join the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) History Division or the American Journalism Historians Association. (It is actually co-owned by H-Net and the AEJMC History Division, an unusual relationship for H-Net.) It was founded in 1994, and currently claims about 450 members. It functions as an e-mail listserve and online posting of those emails, an archive of old postings, and it has just a few additional resources such as online book reviews and links.

It is different than membership in an academic organization in that it does not cost anything, it is more open to those who are merely interested instead of limited to professionals, and it is an easier mode of communication that can stretch further in time and space, for example, overseas. Many of those joining currently are tangential to this group, people who might not have reason to pay the modest membership fees for AEJMC, for example, students studying computer assisted journalism research, someone writing a related biography, and academic researchers from overseas.

The enrollment is a bit complicated, as you must fill out two forms and wait for a person to enroll you. Then, material submitted is edited, not posted raw. Each member entry goes through the filter of an editor, and anything deemed too commercial or off-focus does not get sent. Return comments sometimes are not sent to the entire listserve, but rather returned to the individual sender, as happened to one query that I posted. Several people answered me privately.

The content of this online community could be described as primarily academic and professional, not very personal. “JHISTORY is a meeting place for journalism and mass communication historians to discuss academic and professional issues with one another, to send and receive job placement information, and to make contacts with other academics who share research interests.” Much of the conversation in the past few months has been job postings, questions about resources (especially from those outside the main focus, such as students, or foreign researchers), research questions within the field, such as, “I am writing an article about…. What is your quotable opinion on this?”, finding books, invitations to colloquia, to submit papers, and so forth. As described on the Website, “Jhistory has a simple mandate, to send and receive messages relating to journalism history, including: notes and queries about journalism history topics, research ideas, queries about people who are working on similar projects or fields, employment opportunities within journalism and/or history, conferences about journalism history and related fields.” There are also more personal messages, such as the death of a colleague.

Finally, an observation about growth and size: while full details were not posted, and old archives were not actually available, it appears that J-History may have actually become a bit less active than it was at its peak. While they currently claim about 450 members, and that is up from 313 active members in 1999, the number of postings may have actually declined. For example, in October of 1999, they averaged more than two postings per day, a total of 67. In October of 2003, they averaged one a day, 31 for the entire month, and this past October (2004) there were a total of 27 postings. Obviously, this review of numbers is not extensive, nor does it account for other factors, such as high interest questions, but a review of the archives did seen to show a peak in interest around five years ago.

In conclusion, my findings might suggest that J-History is not primarily a “real community,” but rather the online representation of, or communication by, an already existing academic community. However, an important observation would be how the somewhat rigid borders of this academic group has been loosened somewhat by this electronic extension, allowing for more interaction with others outside the primary group. In addition, there are some indications that the bloom of this group is somewhat past its peak.