Changes and Continuity for a Second Editorial Term

This essay accompanies the second issue of Volume 27 of Mass Communication and Society, and thus the second issue of my second term as editor. As we move further into 2024, I wanted to briefly thank everyone who promises to make this second term a success, as well as everyone who has contributed to the robust status of the journal in the past. This includes all of the officers of the Mass Communication and Society Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, from those with the foresight to create this journal almost three decades ago to those currently serving who continue to support the endeavor. Over that period, the journal has grown significantly, now publishing six full issues each year. In 2023, we received more than 450 manuscripts. We published more than 40 outstanding research articles in Volume 26, along with more than a dozen book reviews. All of these are high marks for MCS. All of this is thanks to the dedicated team of associate editors, the hardworking editorial board, and the exceptional reviewers who continue to perform a vital and inadequately rewarded task.

Starting at the beginning of 2024, we have made some changes to our editorial practices and team that should mean continued excellence going forward. First, along with several new members of the editorial board, we are happy to welcome two new associate editors: Elizabeth Stoycheff and Celine Song. They will serve a three-year term alongside returning editors Keren Eyal, Jay Hmielowski, Jinhee Kim, and Patrick Meirick, and book review editor Michael McCluskey. It will be wonderful to have both this new expertise and the continued guidance of an experienced team, and they are the most vital parts of this process.

One reason we were able to publish more in 2023 is that Taylor and Francis has shifted Mass Communication and Society (and many other journals) to a different model that no longer sets page limits, but rather focuses on the total number of articles published. I was able to use this opportunity to help clear some of our backlog, but we continue to have dozens of outstanding articles available online first that will eventually be assigned official pages. Please consider subscribing to alerts to discover that research as soon as it is available. Our team works hard to edit every accepted paper, including careful final review of all statistical analyses, so the official version available online and fully paginated should be the copy of record whenever possible.

Due to the shift away from page limits, we have also decided to eliminate formal word count requirements for articles. We still encourage authors to be concise and focused. The strongest research is clear about its theoretical contribution and methodology, and excessive text interferes with clarity. But some studies require a few additional supporting tables or appendixes, and we were increasingly moving larger portions of papers to online supplements. Our hope is to restore more of that material to the body of the paper that you download (or receive in the mail), while still urging authors to provide more extensive supporting materials, including study materials and datasets, online.

We also have added the option for submission of registered reports rather than traditional articles. This option allows researchers to submit their literature review and proposed study design for review. Papers are provisionally accepted on the basis of that proposal, and then the final version with results is compared with the proposal for compliance and validity. This format, increasingly embraced in psychology and other associated disciplines, helps ensure that we are selecting studies on the basis of valid designs, rather than encouraging authors to chase statistical significance at the cost of meaningful findings. Of course, the journal will continue to accept complete papers as well, and papers that were otherwise pre-registered will be favored when appropriate over studies that are less transparent and that raise questions about “researcher degrees of freedom.”

Finally, we have been fortunate to publish two excellent papers in the Scholarly Milestones category in recent years, representing a review of prominent theories coupled with insights about the history and future of that theory. Both were accompanied by commentaries from relevant scholars. We hope to continue this practice, and authors who have a review paper that they think might fit this area are encouraged to communicate with the editor in advance of submission. All such papers are still subject to the same rigorous peer review standards as the rest of what the journal publishes.

This year promises to be a critical one for the ways that media and society intersect, and I am certain it will also be a strong one for the research submitted to the journal. With these changes in personnel and policies, we look forward to continuing to publish the best version of the best research we receive.

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Notes on contributors

Mike Schmierbach

Mike Schmierbach (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin–Madison) is a professor of media studies in the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State, editor of Mass Communication and Society, and coauthor of Applied Communication Research Methods with Michael Boyle.