LSU Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor John Maxwell Hamilton's book "Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting," published by LSU Press has earned award after award this year.
LSU Provost Hamilton’s Book Raking in the Honors
“Journalism’s Roving Eye” Wins Awards from Journalism Groups
LSU Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor John Maxwell Hamilton’s book “Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting,” picked up two awards this month – earning the 2010 Book of the Year award from the American Journalism Historians Association, or AJHA, and the 2010 Tankard Book Award, in affiliation with the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, or AEJMC.
The book, published by LSU Press, chronicles two centuries of American journalism abroad, from the colonial era through world wars and into the digital age. Hamilton was announced as the Tankard Award winner on Wednesday, Aug. 4, at the AEJMC’s conference in Denver. He will be presented the AJHA award at the organization’s 30th annual convention in Tuscon, Ariz., Oct. 7-9.
“This book is written with clarity and passion, appealing to a general audience while also being intellectually engaging,” said Aimee Edmondson, AJHA book award coordinator and assistant professor in the University of Ohio’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. “Historical studies with such a long perspective are uncommon and welcome. The author intends to provide a multi-dimensional examination of the topic and accomplishes the task admirably.”
Another member of the award’s judging panel commented that the book “goes beyond a collective biography of first-class foreign reporters but places them in a broader social and political history ... Hamilton develops his arguments and analysis based on a rich body of primary materials that were collected from various sources, including 325 published memoirs of foreign correspondents and institutional archives ... with this tremendous amount of materials to work with, the author nonetheless skillfully synthesizes the otherwise separate materials into a convincing ‘natural history’ of foreign correspondence...his analysis is nuanced and multi-layered.”
The AJHA was founded in 1981 and “exists to foster research and teaching of journalism history, provide a forum and be a resource.” The organization gives out its book award annually to published works on journalism or mass media history.
The Tankard Book Award was created in 2007 by the AEJMC for the best book published in the previous year by an AEJMC member that broke new ground. All three winners have been historians. The AEJMC also recently honored the Manship School with it’s Equity and Diversity Award in 2009.
These awards are two of several honors Hamilton’s book has earned this year. It was also awarded the 2010 Goldsmith Book Award by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy and was named as one of Slate Magazine’s Best Books of 2009.
“In charting the highs and lows of this craft, Hamilton reminds readers that foreign news has always occupied a precarious place in the news business and suggests that foreign-news reporting isn’t so much in decline as it is in transition,” said Jack Shafer of Slate Magazine of the book.
“LSU Press is very proud to have published John Hamilton’s fine book, which will stand as the definitive reference on the history of American foreign correspondents abroad,” said MaryKatherine Callaway, director of LSU Press. “The awards the book has already received are indicative of its important contribution to the academic community.”
Hamilton previously served as the dean of LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication before taking over as the university’s provost in June. He has been at LSU since 1992, arriving after more than two decades as a journalist and public servant. He was appointed the LSU Foundation Hopkins P. Breazeale Professor in 1998, and in 2003, he was named the Journalism Administrator of the Year by the Freedom Forum.
Prior to arriving at LSU, Hamilton reported abroad for ABC Radio and the Christian Science Monitor, among other media, and was a longtime national commentator on public radio’s MarketPlace. Among Hamilton’s other accomplishments, he has served in the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Jimmy Carter Administration, on the staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and at the World Bank. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and on the boards of the International Center for Journalists, the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana and Lamar Advertising Corp., a NASDQ 100 company. He has chaired the Knight International Press Fellowships Advisory Committee and has been a juror for the Pulitzer Prize and Scripps Howard Awards. In the fall of 2000, he was a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
Billy Gomila | Editor | Office of Communications & University Relations
August 2010
