By Amanda Weber -
Looking back on her undergraduate years, Kristin Gustafson (PhD, 2010), lecturer at the University of Washington, Bothell, says she never planned to pursue a career in academia. It wasn’t until after she spent more than a decade in the journalism field, including work at the Minnesota Women’s Press and the St. Cloud Times, that she realized she had more questions she would like to be answered and returned to school to pursue her graduate degrees.

Today, Gustafson is an award-winning academic: the recipient of the 2011 Gene Burd Urban Journalism Research Prize along with an Honorable Mention Award from the American Journalism Historians Association for the AJHA Margaret A. Blanchard Doctoral Dissertation Prize competition.

“The two groups that have recognized me with these awards represent two audiences I’m speaking to through my research,” Gustafson said. “And so it’s quite an honor to have them look at my work and recognize the value for it, and it gives me encouragement to continue doing research in these two areas.”

Her dissertation, “Grassroots, Activist Newspapers From Civil Rights to the Twenty-first Century: Balancing Loyalties and Managing Change,” examines two Seattle-based grassroots newspapers: The International Examiner, the oldest and largest nonprofit, pan-Asian American publication in the Pacific Northwest, and Seattle Gay News, the third-oldest regularly published gay publication in the United States. Both newspapers sprang up in 1974, in the post-Civil Rights era.

“I looked at them over a 35-year period. It was a longitudinal study that examined how they started, how they grew, what they struggled with over the years, and what patterns and phases they go through,” said Gustafson. She is also interested in how journalists from these newspapers do their jobs and manage their roles of being journalists, community leaders, and social activists.

“A lot of the time when we think about journalists we don’t think about the community they’re from or the activism they’re involved with. You can’t separate that out with these kinds of newspapers because it’s very much part of who they are.”

In 2005, Gustafson joined the Department of Communication and set out to earn her PhD by answering these questions, and in 2008 she received a Huckabay Teaching Fellowship through the UW Graduate School to develop a department course concerning the ideas stemming from her research.

Throughout her time as a doctoral student, she found that her innate curiosity on the topic made the work on her dissertation that much more enjoyable and fulfilling. “Any project that takes a longer period of time, you have to be interested in it, you have to be interested in your question, because you’ll spend a lot of time with the materials,” she said. “Those questions of how and why continued to drive me.”

Gustafson credits her advisors and committee members for providing the support necessary to complete her dissertation. Department faculty Jerry Baldasty, Gina Neff and David Domke all played important roles along the way.

“You never do a dissertation alone,” she said. “Dr. Neff helped me think across disciplines and geography. I first met Dr. Domke when he visited the University of Minnesota, and his work continues to shape how I think about political communication.” And Gustafson said that her chair, Dr. Baldasty, helped her think through questions about journalism history, ethnic media, and news business. “He is a very encouraging and thoughtful mentor. His advice is well-placed and well-timed.”

While she keeps busy teaching in UW Bothell’s Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program, Gustafson also has been working to expand her research and prepare it for publication. In the future she intends to publish parts of her dissertation for use in academic journals. She’s also considering a larger project that would include more in-depth research on the two newspapers, comparing them with other examples, and publishing her work as a book.

Considering the success she’s had up to this point, Gustafson should have no problem accomplishing all of these goals. “By comparing a pioneering ethnic newspaper to a gay and lesbian newspaper in Seattle, Kristin asked questions about how media make communities, and the implications of that process for both news and social movements. We need more people like Kristin doing this kind of research to help inform both journalism and activism,” said Gina Neff.

Jerry Baldasty agrees. “She brings a journalist’s intellectual curiosity and experience to her work, and that has clearly benefited her research. She has become a remarkably talented scholar in this process.”