Eight years is a long time. Since becoming the Founding Editor of the Forum in 2016, I have been continually impressed, heartened, and buoyed by the important work that scholars, and the occasional journalist, have contributed to this daring venture that asks us to reimagine how we share new ideas, discuss vital issues of teaching and research, and make sense of our field in ever-evolving information ecologies.
The Forum began as a bold experiment. It is now, I hope, an institution. It took courage and foresight to set aside valuable space in our field’s flagship journal for something other than peer-reviewed scholarship and book reviews. I am grateful to the leaders of our division in the International Communication Association and the American Political Science Association for their creative request for proposals, most notably Patricia Moy and Michael Traugott, and for their faith in me to serve as the section’s inaugural steward. I am also grateful to the two brilliant, generous, productive, serious, and fun editors of the journal (and their teams) I have had the pleasure of serving with: Claes de Vreese and Regina Lawrence. I have learned so much simply by observing them.
Serving as the Forum Editor has been a career highlight. It is truly a delight to see what early-mid-late-and-emeritus faculty, innovative graduate students, and busy journalists have done with purposefully simple prompts. Indeed, the best Forum pieces have been the ones where I have gotten out of the way and let you all do what you do best – make creative, theoretically-rich, empirically-supported, and vital arguments about all of the different ways communication has to do with who gets what, when, and how.
Many Forum articles have become some of the most widely cited pieces of the past decade. Work: 1) integrating theoretical insights about the hybrid media environment with computational methods, 2) examining what we learn from qualitative focus group interviews, 3) charting paths forward for misinformation, visual misinformation, and fact-checking research, 4) considering how we should think about place, and 5) highlighting the naiveté of social engineering in tech/social media has earned considerable attention among political communication scholars and those studying in allied fields and has become important scholarship that continues to define our field, fill our syllabi, and be used by journalists to help explain what is happening in our world.
Additionally, the Forum has published symposia about comparative political communication – featuring authors from each continent on which political communication scholarship is conducted – as a clarion call for research across contexts, borders, and languages. More recent efforts have tackled race and political communication (including two pieces in this issue), the importance of historical perspectives in our scholarship, and dissonant public spheres.
We have also published professionally-oriented issues, such as symposia about graduate education and publicly-engaged scholarship. Sometimes, pieces were published as “one-offs,” including articles summarizing foreign policy and political communication scholarship, attention as a valuable resource, and how to conceptualize artificial intelligence as a community of researchers. Other times, Forum articles responded to previous ones. The give and take, pace of publishing, and creativity exhibited by the authors over the years was thrilling and inspiring to me.
I am perhaps proudest of the diversity of scholars – from a wide variety of gendered, racial, ethnic, career stage, international, and methodological points of view – that have enriched our field by writing for the Forum. I tried to purposefully bias myself to publish a majority woman-identifying section of the journal, as well as feature graduate students and assistant professors who shared field-expanding ideas. Of course, it has been a privilege to learn from more seasoned practitioners of our field as well. Indeed, most everyone I asked to write for the Forum said yes – even before people really knew what it was. And almost all who said yes came through with an article … and often on deadline. I am just as grateful to those who pitched me ideas that became thematic Forum sections. To those whose ideas I could not publish, you have another chance now that my term has ended!
Despite the deep pride I feel about my time with the Forum, there are many ways I fell short. While I am blessed with a wonderful network of colleagues around the globe, I overrepresented it in the solicitations I made for the journal. Though I sought scholars who could provide different comparative, regional, and global perspectives, I am sure I over relied on those studying political communication in the United States of America. For every new idea I provided attention for, I myopically left out someone else’s good ideas. Fortunately, the thoughtful Ulrike Klinger has taken the reins and is already off to an incredible start, programming future pieces that will shape our thinking, influence our imagination, and set an agenda for years to come. I wish her the very best, knowing that she is taking on one of the greatest jobs in the world.
As I close my term as Forum Editor, I feel compelled to note that we are doing our important work in a difficult time. As I have experienced firsthand, governments are attacking the research we do, attacking the researchers who do it, and are trying to intimidate (or worse) our field and its professional scholars and students, our universities, and our extramural funders as we seek to report evidence about the verifiable truth without fear or favor, but with nuance, detail, and transparency. Political communication scholars are in a unique position to understand the strategies, arguments, and effects of these efforts so that they can be explained to the public, to news organizations, and to members of governments that are not threatened by having robust debates about what is happening and why in our societies. We are also perhaps uniquely equipped to choose to organize ourselves to combat dangerous attacks on our research while simultaneously improving the transparency, replicability, and overall quality of our work.
It is my hope that the Forum, Political Communication, and our field may continue to nurture, amplify, and defend the work we do, even as we also seek to improve it in accordance with our fidelity to the scientific method.
Long live the Forum in Political Communication!