After working on it for more than a year, in 2001, Aarons, Dane S. Claussen (then at what is now Point Park University), Amy Falkner (Syracuse University), Rhonda Gibson (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and others relaunched the then-GLBT Interest Group of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication (AEJMC). Aarons asked Claussen to serve as the first Head, but he could not because he already was to be 2001-2 Head of AEJMC's Mass Communication & Society Division. David Adams (Indiana University) and Sue Lafky (University of Iowa) served as the first Co-Heads, with Claussen as Vice-Head/Program Chair, and Aarons as Secretary. Aarons, then teaching what he called SOIN (Sexual Orientation in the News) at the University of Southern California, followed that up a few years later by persuading the Accrediting Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (ACEJMC) to add sexual orientation content in its curriculum diversity standard. (For many years, Claussen served as a liaison between NLGJA and the AEJMC's LGBTQ Interest Group as the Interest Group's Teaching Committee Chair and, in NLGJA, Education Caucus convenor, curator of its Educators Toolbox, a Scholarship Committee member, and Chair member, 2005 of its Hall of Fame Task Force.)