hi folks!

So it’s been a long while and I’ve been meaning to update my site/you all with our latest news: this fall Ruth and I will be starting at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University together as assistant professors! Here’s Manship announcement about me here. Ruth’s should be out in a few weeks, but basically I’ll be focusing on media law/history, and she’ll be in comparative global comm/j-studies/political communication. Ruth and I hoping to be settled into LSU/Manship by the end of summer, post AEJMC.

While we’ve both enjoyed our time at Northwest University and Seattle Pacific University, respectively, and of course our time in the #PNW, we’re both really thrilled and pretty darn spoiled to have this very rare opportunity together. We’ll be visiting Seattle and the Northwest often, however, so if you don’t see us before we go, we’ll make sure to catch you back there. My mom is here, along with many great and close friends, along with the magnificent mountains and rain, and so it’ll maintain a very special special place in my heart and head. It is, after all, where I’m “from” — having moved around so much as a military kid, I’ve adopted it as such.  Lord willing, in fact, my first trip back will be this fall, for a talk at the Living Computer Museum. I’ll post more details about that later, and/or post about it on Twitter. I should also be back over at least part of the holidays and/or in the late winter/spring for a research trip.

In the meantime we’ve been working on book projects. I now have A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies: 1960-1990, my brief account of the history of the computer in the American newsrooms of the latter Cold War, out successfully (whew!). And I have a sequel under advance contract, still as part of the “Disruptions” series as edited by Dr. Bob Franklin, that’ll look at the adoption of the early internet by the journalism industry in the 1990s and 2000s. I have another, longer book project, based on my dissertation, under advance contract with a university press. That one is a social history of American newsroom culture during the early-to-mid-20th century. I can talk about the latter more later! Ruth has some pretty cool book developments, as well, but I’ll let her talk about those.

I’ll post links to our faculty pages, with our latest other pubs, here soon.

Please feel free to drop me a line at wtmari@gmail.com or wmari1@lsu.edu, or shout out to @willthewordguy, especially if you wanted to see us before we head out and/or once we arrive in Baton Rouge/Louisiana.

If you ever visiting our way, please don’t hesitate to say hello, either. Take care!