Media Department Scholars Honored at National Convention

Three scholars with ties to the media department in the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts were presented with awards at the American Journalism Historians Association Convention.

Assistant Professor Dr. Pamela Walck and graduate student Emily Fitzgerald received the Maurine Beasley Award, which recognizes the association’s outstanding paper on women’s history. The pair collaborated on a project about New Pittsburgh Courier reporter/editor Evelyn Cunningham, who died in 2010 after a long career covering some of the biggest stories from the civil rights era. At a time when few women worked in newspapers, she covered the battle over school desegregation in Birmingham, Ala., and the work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X.

Additionally, media department alumna Ashley Walter, a doctoral student at Penn State University and Walck’s former student, won the Robert Lance Memorial Award. The award is presented to the top graduate student paper. Walter’s work examines press coverage of sex-discrimination lawsuits that occurred in newsrooms throughout the 1970s.