Celebrating 70 Years – Identifying the Top .004% of the Scholarly Works of the Broadcast Education Association

Edited by: Andrew C. Billings, Department of Journalism & Creative Media, The University of Alabama

I always knew this task would be difficult. For the Broadcast Education Association’s 70th anniversary, it was by job to delineate a maximum of 20 scholarly standouts among the over 5,000 works that BEA has advanced. Finding excellence was easy; delimiting it was hard. The BEA Editorial Boards eagerly and helpfully nominated pieces for inclusion and I asked for input from current and former BEA journal editors. The compilation you find here is clearly excellent, but it would ultimately be both misguided and misinformed to assume there were not many other worthy candidates for inclusion.

Complicating matters a bit more was the fact that two key BEA publications, Feedback and Journal of Media Education, are not part of this Taylor & Francis collection and lack the doi’s for formal inclusion. Otherwise, a piece such as Utsler’s (2001) convergence curriculum or Turne and Hoffman’s (2014) augmented reality piece would have entered the deliberations, among many others.

In the end, we have 20 great works, including many of the most-read and most-cited pieces in BEA history. My work revealed intriguing correlates; for instance, the six most-cited pieces in Journal of Radio & Audio Media all pertain to podcasting. Moreover, the formats of media have changed drastically since 1955 and yet one can witness the evolution, as previous works inform the study of emerging genres and devices in intriguing manners. Anne Morrow Lindbergh once said that “only when a tree has fallen can you take measure of it. It is the same with man.” The articles in this list have also only grown in stature over time. In truth, their full impact is still—sometimes many decades after publication—magnifying.