Abstract
It seems like yesterday when we prepared the first issue of New Media & Society (NM&S), but the volume number of this issue, 15, is a reminder that ‘yesterday’ was that many years ago. In keeping with the convention to reflect on such moments, we mention a few highlights from the past year, and from the past 14 years and volumes. We then indicate some of the publishing plans for 2013 and Volume 15. Finally, we conclude with a short note on an editorial ‘changing of the guard’.
Last year: 2012
In past annual editorials we have shared basic statistics for the journal. The amount of published material in 2012 has remained about the same as in recent years: nearly 1400 pages spread across eight issues containing 73 Research Articles, 1 Review Article, five Review Essays and 19 Book Reviews. The substantive range of this scholarship, however, does not lend itself to simple categorization. A glance through the contents of the issues published in 2012 suggests the breadth of the spectrum: articles that address forms of social and personal media (e.g., Twitter, YouTube, blogs), studies about computer games, Web 3.0, Facebook, podcasting, internet use by the elderly and youth, new media in political elections and social movements. While most of these topics are not particularly new, the evidence and reflections are recent and informed.
Below is an updated version of the table we have presented in years past and it includes a column of figures for 2012. The number of submissions exceeds 400 manuscripts annually. The rate of acceptance remains relatively constant, averaging 19% per year. The acceptance figure of 8% for 2012 is incomplete (as are other figures in that column) because many manuscripts submitted during that year are still under consideration. The number of internal decisions regarding submissions, reflected in the row ‘Peer Reviewed’, is about the same as for 2011, and is evidence of our more stringent policy regarding internal review prior to soliciting external reviews for double-blind assessment of submissions.
Longitudinal overview of NM&S submissions
The amount of time between submission and completion of the review process, shown in the row ‘Days to Review’, indicates an average of three months between submission and decision regarding publication, a process involving two to three rounds of external review. While this time lapse is substantial, we consider it acceptable, particularly given our policy to solicit detailed reviews of submissions. Unfortunately it is an average, and some manuscripts take longer to review. Finally, the row ‘Registered Users’ in the table reflects the number of persons who have registered on the journal website and constitutes the scholars from whom we solicit reviews of submissions. The figure for 2012 indicates 6402 persons in this group.
Five Review Essays were published during the year and almost a score of individual Book Reviews. The Review Essays generally compare several recently published books. In 2012 NM&S introduced a new category of content: Review Articles. The first of such articles was published in the December 2012 issue. Authors Ignacio Siles and Pablo J Boczkowski (2012) provide a critical assessment of the newspaper crisis and propose a research agenda. We plan to publish one or two Review Articles in 2013.
One of the common measures for ranking journals is the Impact Factor (IF) developed by the Thomson Reuters Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). The most recent IF for NM&S is 1.394, and NM&S ranks 16th out of the 72 periodicals noted in the category Communication in Journal Citation Reports. A journal’s Impact Factor varies from year to year; for that and other reasons the ranking should be interpreted with caution. Still, the reported ranking for NM&S across time suggests both increase and recent fluctuation: 2003: 0.689, 2008: 0.821, 2010: 1.326, 2011: 1.091, and 2012: 1.394. One conclusion from these figures is that the position of NM&S within the broad field of journals in communication and media studies reflects high use by scholars concerned with new media developments.
Two other indicators of use are frequency of downloads from SAGE Journals Online (SJO) and citations recorded in the SAGE database. The section of the SJO website for NM&S provides information on the indicators, ‘Most Read’ and ‘Most Cited’; see http://nms.sagepub.com/. For both indicators, the top 50 articles are mentioned, showing rank order for frequency of downloads (termed ‘Most Read’ on the SAGE website) and for ‘Most Cited’. For December 2012, the most frequently read article (based on full-text views) dates from four years ago: an article by NM&S board member Sonia Livingstone (2008) about teenagers and social networking sites. The most cited article is by NM&S editorial board member, Zizi Papacharissi (2002), about the internet and the public sphere, which was published a decade ago and suggests a long shelf life for NM&S articles. More recently published articles are also noted in the rankings and include a study by Jeffrey A Hall and Nancy K Baym (2012) on mobile phone use, and Limor Shifman (2012) on a YouTube meme.
Shelf life reflects the durability and quality of the scholarship published in NM&S, and that relates to the emphasis we place on substantive assessment of submissions. Like many journals, NM&S exercises a double-blind peer review procedure, but we also expect – and generally receive – extended comments from these scholars. This exchange between persons unknown to each other, sometimes across multiple rounds of manuscript revision, demonstrates a collective commitment to quality scholarship. We are impressed by the level of interaction in this process and appreciate the contributions of those involved to this time-consuming procedure. A special word of thanks to reviewers of NM&S submissions during 2012 prefaces the list of reviewers published in the last pages of this issue.
Highlights across time
Identifying scholarly highlights over a 14-year time period is a very subjective undertaking, certainly when 600-plus articles were published during that time span. These ‘highlights’, then, reflect our personal and, by necessity, incomplete choices. We launched NM&S with a collection of 13 short essays entitled ‘What’s new about new media?’ and the introductory essay by NM&S editor Roger Silverstone (1999) sets the stage for the project NM&S. This essay-style reflection was repeated five years later in a theme issue prepared by NM&S editor Leah Lievrouw (2004), which included 17 contributions. Together, these two issues point to core conceptual concerns and related empirical evidence emerging from new media studies.
Another five years down the road, in 2009, we compiled a special double issue on ‘The Long History of New Media’ where 15 full-length articles were published, all intended to emphasize the historical dimension of new media research. While many of these contributions are excellent examples of historiography, the introductory essay by Benjamin Peters (2009) captures the overriding issue: ‘And lead us not into thinking the new is new: A bibliographic case for new media history’. This project on historiography and new media was itself the product of a long history, including two ICA (International Communication Association) preconferences in 2008 (Montreal) and 2009 (Chicago), culminating in a book anthology with the same title as the NM&S theme issue, The Long History of New Media (Park et al., 2011).
Many theme issues were prepared during the decade and a half, about two per year, and each merits mention in a list of highlights. Here we wish to single out the theme issue prepared by Richard Ling and Heather Horst in 2011, in particular their conceptual introductory essay to the topic ‘Mobile communication in the global South’ (Ling and Horst, 2011), which reflects the quality of theoretical exposition NM&S strives to publish.
At the risk of overlooking the many quality articles published in the 14-year period, we only mention a small number here. To begin, there is the work of Sally McMillan (2002; Downes and McMillan, 2000) in which she develops a model of interactivity that has stimulated extended discussion and theoretical refinement (e.g., Cover, 2006; Kiousis, 2002; Richards, 2006). Philip Howard’s (2002) contribution on network ethnography is exemplary of innovation in research methods, and Kennedy’s (2006)discussion of identity and new media has helped formulate the research agenda related to this theme. Lincoln Dahlberg (2011) undertook a similar theoretical task with another concept, ‘Re-constructing digital democracy’. And, as illustration of solid empirical research, we note the work of Keith Hampton and colleagues (Hampton et al., 2011), which examines a pallet of new communication technologies as they intertwine in personal social networks.
Much has changed in the field since publication of the first issue of NM&S in 1999. In 1999 there was but a small handful of journals concerned with new media; now, it could be argued, every journal in the social sciences and humanities shares such concern, and about a dozen focus on new media scholarship. Scholarly publishing as the main conduit for formal scholarly communication has also undergone transformation, largely due to the open access movement and to widespread availability of tools for producing online-only publications. New titles are appearing at a rapid rate, some of which focus on what used to be called ‘new media’ but now embrace other key words: mobile communication, social media, digital media. The very nature of the scholarly text is taking on a new form in a Web environment: sometimes the formal journal article is coupled to more informal communication such as a podcast; sometimes multimedia components are embedded in articles; sometimes Web interoperability is facilitated through embedded links; sometimes datasets are published almost alongside articles to facilitate replication and secondary analysis (see, e.g., Breure et al., 2011; Jankowski et al., 2012). Such ‘enhanced publishing’ is admittedly in an early phase of development and varies from discipline to discipline, but the days of the journal article primarily as text, illustrated with a few tables and figures, are dwindling. Albeit with caution, NM&S is exploring ways for making the transition to this new publishing environment, some of which are noted below.
Forthcoming: 2013
The above highlights suggest the diversity and quality of the scholarship NM&S has been able to publish in past years. In a sense, the plans for 2013 are a continuation of what we have been doing since publication of the first issue in April 1999. We will, as usual, be publishing Research Articles, Review Articles, Review Essays, and individual Book Reviews. We will also be publishing three theme issues in 2013, the first of which appears in the pages of this issue. Guest editor Maurice Vergeer has brought together seven articles on political communication and the internet. The second theme issue includes four articles about transformations in scholarly communication and is scheduled to appear in May 2013. The third theme issue consists of nine articles on internet studies, is guest edited by Charles Ess and Bill Dutton, and will appear in print in Issue 5 (August 2013). Some of these articles are already available at SAGE OnlineFirst, the site where articles are made available prior to inclusion in a print issue. This year, for the first time, theme issues will be accompanied by podcasts prepared by the authors and guest editors, to be made available at SAGE Podcast and at the NM&S website. This innovation involves a modest fusion of informal with formal scholarly communication forms. Another adaption to Web-based functionalities involves placement of hyperlinks in the online versions of articles. We have incorporated this feature into this editorial and will be urging authors to adopt the practice in forthcoming articles.
Changing of the guard
This editorial marks the last contribution of Nicholas Jankowski as co-editor of NM&S.
Changing tense for the occasion, I have been involved with NM&S since its formulation as an idea in the mid-1990s, through publication of the maiden issue in April 1999, and through preparation of the issues in Volume 14. The early years involved crafting an editorial policy and recruiting authors, reviewers, and board members. Four of us worked closely and intensely during that period, each bringing a different approach to new media scholarship and set of editorial skills. I look back with much pleasure on this collaboration – with the initial co-editors (Steve Jones, Roger Silverstone, Rohan Samarajiva), with co-editor Leah Lievrouw, with scores of board members, hundreds of authors, and thousands of reviewers. As a collective, we created a venue for some of the best scholarship being conducted around new media, under the professional guidance of SAGE staff, particularly Julia Hall, Mila Steele, Caroline Sparrow, and Amit Panda. The collaboration with Steve Jones dates from the very beginning of the project, and more recently with David Park; this collective labor constitutes a high point in my career. Words fall short in acknowledging the gratitude felt, and a simple phrase will have to suffice: thank you much.
As 2013 begins, the editorial custodianship of NM&S has changed, a ‘changing of the guard’ if you will. That acknowledged, we remain steadfast in our effort to publish the highest quality scholarship being produced about new media and society, prepared from a broad pallet of theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, and academic disciplines. We look forward to your contributions to that project.