Jon Bekken, Ph.D.
Professor of Communications, Communications at Albright College
From Philadelphia, Pa.
From Philadelphia, Pa.
Jon Bekken is professor of communications at Albright College. He previously taught at Suffolk University in Boston, the State University of New York at Cortland, the University of Central Arkansas, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Bekken teaches communications history, free expression, mass media and the public sphere, editing, news writing and reporting, political economy of mass media, Latin American media, and research methods.
Bekken is co-author of The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First 100 Years, co-editor of Radical Economics and Labor and has authored dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters on the immigrant, labor and socialist press, newsboys, labor history, community radio, the retail book industry, and other topics. He has written for and edited several labor and alternative publications and produced public affairs programming on community radio.
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University of California: San Diego
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Michigan
The Albrightian
Faculty Advisor | Albright's student newspaper
Albright College Faculty
Added by Jon
Associate Professor of Communications at Albright College
August 2003 - Present
Associate Professor at Suffolk University
August 1997 - August 2003
General Secretary-Treasurer at Industrial Workers of the World
January 1984 - December 1985
Incorporating an Entrepreneurial Journalism Project into the Editing Course
Communications Professor Jon Bekken presented “Incorporating an Entrepreneurial Journalism Project into the Editing Course” at the AEJMC Best Practices in Teaching Competition, August 2023, Washington, D.C. This presentation focused on his incorporation of an entrepreneurial journalism project into an editing class.
August 2023 -
Presentations
The Art of Agitation: Ernest Riebe, the IWW, and Radical Labor Organizing, A Roundtable on Mr. Block: The Subversive Comics and Writings of Ernest Riebe
Chaired a roundtable presentation at the Labor and Working-Class History Association conference, May 2023. His chapter, “A Newspaper for Workers’ Rights in a Time of Turmoil,” appears in Social Justice, Activism and Diversity in U.S. Media History (Teri Finneman and Erika Pribanic-Smith, editors) published in April 2023 by Routledge.
April 2023 -
Presentations
The Polish Hearst
Remarks prepared for Author Meets Critic Session for Anna Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann’s The Polish Hearst: Ameryka-Echo and the Public Role of the Immigrant Press. Polish-American Historical Association, January 2017, Denver.
January 2017 -
Presentations
Restoring Labor to the Public Sphere
Published in Journalism & Communication Monographs, 2020.
Publications
Spanish Firemen and Maritime Syndicalism, 1902-1940
Christopher J. Castañeda and Montse Feu, editors | Published in Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States, 2019. ABSTRACT: This chapter describes how Spanish firemen and Hispanic anarcho-syndicalists built a strong presence in the maritime industry in the opening decades of the twentieth century. They exchanged publications and developed interpersonal networks to sustain a culture of resistance across the Americas. Hispanic seaman played a major role in the Atlantic Coast maritime trade, primarily as firemen (fogoneros) working on ships sailing out of U.S. ports. Many fogoneros had experience in militant unions overseas, having fled persecution in Cuba or Spain. Firemen, though ill-paid, were central to the operation of coal-fired steamships, providing electricity to the ship as well as powering its engines. This chapter also examines the Strike of 1912.
Publications
Unions of Newsworkers
Tim Vos and Folker Hanusch, editors | Published in International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies, 2019.
Publications
Toward a Democratic Journalism
Published in the American Historian, 2018.
Publications
No Rights for the Working Man: Laboring in an Era before the First Amendment had Force
Mary M. Cronin, editor | Published in An Indispensable Liberty: The Fight for Freedom of Expression in the Nineteenth Century, 2016
Publications
Alternative Journalism
Patricia Moy, editor | Published in Oxford Bibliographies in Communication, 2015
Publications
Radical Economics and Labor: Essays Inspired by the IWW Centennial
With Frederic S. Lee, co-editor | Published by Routledge, 2009 | Includes my chapter, “Peter Kropotkin and Economics for a New Society.”
Publications
Books and Commerce in an Age of Virtual Capital: The Changing Political Economy of Bookselling
Manjunath Pendakur and Roma Harris, editors | Published in Citizenship and Participation in the Information Age, 2002 — Also published in French translation as Citoyenneté et participation à l’ére de l’information. Èditions Saint-Martin, 2002.
Publications
Newsboys: The Exploitation of ‘Little Merchants’ by the Newspaper Industry
Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt, editors | Published in Newsworkers: Towards A History of the Rank and File, 1995.
Publications
The Chicago Newspaper Scene: An Ecological Perspective
Published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 1997. ABSTRACT: This article examines Chicago's newspaper ecology between 1880 and 1930, demonstrating that the Chicago newspaper scene was far more complex than generally recognized. A rich variety of specialized and foreign-language newspapers coexisted with the English-language dailies that dominate historians' accounts.
Publications
The Working-Class Press at the Turn of the Century
Robert McChesney and William Solomon, editors | Published in Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U.S. Communication History, 1993.
Publications
Crossing Borders
A presentation exploring the collaborative relationships between readers and editors, presented at the Research Society for American Periodicals.
Presentations
Bekken Earns Landon-Dalton Service Award
Jon Bekken, Ph.D., of Philadelphia, Pa., has been awarded the Landon-Dalton Se...
December, 22 2022 - Albright College
Bekken Earns Landon-Dalton Service Award
Jon Bekken, Ph.D., of Philadelphia, Pa., has been awarded the Landon-Dalton Service Award for his central role in saving the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication's peer-reviewed journal: Teaching Journalism and Mass Communicat...
December, 19 2022 - Albright College Faculty
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