Dr. David Mindich, professor and chair of the Saint Michael's College department of media studies, journalism and digital arts, was honored with the top annual award of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). The Presidential Award was presented to Professor Mindich at the annual meeting of the AEJMC held in Chicago.
AEJMC president, Linda Steiner, presented David Mindich with the AEJMC Presidential Award, "for outstanding contributions and dedication to the association." Steiner thanked Mindich for chairing the association's Strategic Plan Committee and cited Mindich's accomplishments, including his three books---/Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism/ (NYU Press, 1998), /Tuned Out: Why American's Under 40 Don't Follow the News/ (Oxford, 2005), and the /Mediated World/ (Oxford, forthcoming), and for his founding of Jhistory, the listserv for journalism historians, in 1994.
Walter Cronkite described /Tuned Out /as "very important....a handbook for the desperately needed attempt to inspire in the young generation a curiosity that generates the news habit."
In 2002, the AEJMC awarded Professor Mindich the Krieghbaum Under-40 Award for Outstanding Achievement in Research, Teaching and Public Service. In 2006, CASE and the Carnegie Foundation named him the Vermont Professor of the Year. In 2011, the New England Newspaper and Press Association gave him its first-ever "Journalism Educator of the Year Award." Professor Mindich earned a doctorate in American Studies from New York University. He is a resident of Burlington.
The August 2012 AEJMC meeting, attended by 2,467 professionals, kicked off a celebration of their 100 years as an association. As described on their website: The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals. The Association's mission is to promote the highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to cultivate the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage the implementation of a multi-cultural society in the classroom and curriculum, and to defend and maintain freedom of communication in an effort to achieve better professional practice and a better informed public.