https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2533-6737
The year 2024 has just begun, and we are excited to continue publishing cutting edge research that further advances the field of digital journalism studies. This year comes with significant changes to our Digital Journalism Editorial Team. This editorial starts by paying a symbolic yet important tribute to our two outgoing associate editors, for their invaluable efforts over the past six years. We then continue by welcoming and introducing our incoming associate editors, as well as the incoming international engagement editor.
A Very, Very Special Thanks Goes to Kristy Hess and Edson Tandoc Jr.
By the end of 2023, professor Kristy Hess and professor Edson Tandoc Jr. formally stepped down from their roles as associate editors of the journal, and instead joined our honorary editorial board alongside former associate editor Scott Eldridge II and founding editor Bob Franklin. Kristy and Edson have been part of the original Digital Journalism editorial team that was formed back in 2017, and which formally took over the leadership of the journal from January 2018. They originally signed up for a period of three years as associate editors, and as we have enjoyed our roles and collaboration very much, they have served the journal for two such periods. Eventually, everything has its time and Kristy and Edson want to free up their roles for other talented and energized scholars that are willing to serve the community, while also freeing up their own schedules for other scholarly endeavors.
When enrolled as Associate Editor, Kristy Hess was an associate professor with a research agenda focusing on journalism, social order, and place-making, with much expertise in local journalism and center vis-a-vis periphery tensions. The founding editor, Bob Franklin, wholeheartedly recommended me to enroll Kristy as an Associate Editor back in 2017, when I was to form the new editorial team. Bob Franklin reported that he had previously worked with Kristy as a special issue editor, and she did an outstanding job. I followed Bob’s advice and we scheduled a Skype talk (years before Zoom and Teams).
We had a great conversation and I immediately felt Kristy had the expertise and character for a great collaboration. Throughout her time at DJ, Kristy has co-authored and co-edited multiple books, published many articles, and now publishes a great special issue co-edited with Agnes Gulyas as the first issue of 2024 in Digital Journalism. Kristy has undertaken leadership for, and currently serves as PI for, several projects funded by the Australian Research Council. During her time at the DJ editorial team, Kristy has been promoted to full professor, resulting in many new job responsibilities.
As Editor-in-Chief, I have repeatedly turned to Kristy when we are editorially processing conceptual articles, theoretically sophisticated articles, as well as a large stream of submissions on journalism, business, and power, including but not limited to the publisher-platform relationships. Over the years, Kristy has been an invaluable resource for our editorial team in maintaining high quality control. Moreover, Kristy has also contributed with positive energy, jokes, and smiles to our DJ editorial team meetings, on Zoom as well as when we all have met at conferences around the world.
Kristy Hess, alongside former Associate Editor Scott Eldridge II, were on the list of recommendations from founding editor Bob Franklin. There were also some other scholars suggested on that list, but I chose to enroll someone else instead. Let us turn to Edson Tandoc Jr. In the spring of 2017 I visited Nanyang Technological University for research and teaching, working on a project led by Rich Ling. While I was somewhat familiar with Edson from before, meeting him at ICA conferences and reading some of his articles, this was the first time I really got to know him.
During my research visit at NTU, we had several research workshops where I learned how Edson worked, and I was truly impressed. In the beginning of the week we workshopped findings from a survey, discussing different papers that could be developed, and who should take the lead. We decided Edson was to lead one of those, and we discussed the paper several times that week. By the time I arrived back in Norway the week after, he had sent me the first draft of our article, and soon after it was submitted to New Media & Society, resulting in acceptance with minor revisions. As a scholar, Edson has exceptional energy and capacity, developing pioneering research into digital journalism studies as well as many, many other areas.
I enrolled him as incoming Associate Editor in 2017, when he was an assistant professor with less than 500 citations in total. In the years to come, he has been promoted to full professor, publishing lots of articles and receiving five times more citations per year. He has served the academic community extensively, taking on roles for ICA and AEJMC, as well as being Associate Editor for multiple journals. Over the years, Edson has been a truly invaluable Associate Editor. His expertise in thematic areas such as audience analytics, disinformation, and role conceptions, and methods such as surveys and experiments, has been very helpful.
With Kristy and Edson stepping down, and Scott having done so earlier, all the associate editors of our original Digital Journalism editorial team have now become honorary editorial board members. And they should remain as such. Their service to the journal and the field has been extraordinary, and have helped place the journal and its research in the very top of communication. I personally feel grateful for having had the opportunity to work with these excellent scholars and Associate Editors, becoming great collaborators and friends. This gratitude is shared also by Associate Editor Magdalena Saldaña, who joined the editorial team in January 2022. In her own words, “Kristy and Edson have been great mentors when it comes to Digital Journalism and scholarly journals in general. Their knowledge and expertise, along with their immense generosity, have helped me navigate the world of academic publishing, while also taking care of my own research agenda. They are both accomplished scholars, but most of all, generous mentors and great friends. Thank you.” Alongside former Associate Editor Scott Eldridge II and founding editor Bob Franklin, Kirsty Hess and Edson Tandoc Jr. will continue to support us and the digital journalism studies community as honorary editorial board members.
Introducing Our New Digital Journalism Editorial Team Members
Moving into 2024, we are starting a new page. For our DJ editorial team we have chosen to recruit both externally and internally. For one of the positions we have enrolled Professor Lei Guo, who received her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in 2014, after which she worked at Boston University, before taking on a professorship in the School of Journalism at Fudan University (Shanghai). Professor Guo has a strong track record in developing award winning research on media effects theories, news and information flows, and computational social science methodologies. She brings important expertise on methods, and from her different fields of research.
We had a very good experience recruiting Magdalena Saldaña from our team of International Engagement Editors to an Associate Editor position. Edson, Kristy and I felt that all three of our current International Engagement Editors are doing really well for the journal, being professional yet very friendly collaborators. Following from this, we chose to open for such a discussion with them, and are thrilled that Jan Lauren Boyles is excited to step into the Associate Editor role. Jan is an Associate Professor and Associate Director at Iowa State University, where she has taken on various important roles for administration and teaching, besides an active research curriculum. She is past chair of the Council of Divisions of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and concluded her four-year term on the association’s Board of Directors in 2023. She has worked for the Pew Research Center in Washington, served as a Google Journalism Fellow and in 2024 will be a Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. She has broad knowledge about methods and invaluable expertise on research focusing on the intersections of news, data/code and civic technology, and is currently underway finalizing a co-edited special issue on code for Digital Journalism. Altogether, we are delighted to welcome Lei Guo and Jan Lauren Boyles onboard as Associate Editors in 2024.
With Jan Lauren Boyles joining as Associate Editor, we got a vacant position in the International Engagement Editor team. We chose to enroll Associate Professor Admire Mare, who is based at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is also a Research Fellow at the African Centre for the Study of the United States, University of the Witwatersrand. Admire Mare has published extensively on digital journalism and social media, and is great at public engagement associated with research. He has served on the ICA Journalism Studies division public engagement award committee. With his expertise and networks, we are truly excited to have him join the team of International Engagement Editors.
Annual Assessment and Renewal of Our Editorial Board
Each year we carry out an assessment and renewal of our editorial board. Some journals have editorial boards overrepresented by very accomplished yet relatively old professors, oftentimes from the global north. At Digital Journalism we strive towards having an energizing, diverse and engaged editorial board. We approach digital journalism studies as a cross-disciplinary field of its own, and thus must enroll expertise beyond journalism studies, to include scholars from media management, computer science, business, political communication, policy and law, and so forth. Parallel to this, we also experience first-hand how scholars submit manuscripts using novel and sophisticated methods, which in turn calls for new sets of expertise in the editorial processes.
The Digital Journalism editorial team takes great pride in our editorial processes, where we always work hard to engage highly qualified reviewers, and additionally make ambitious assessments of manuscripts, providing further feedback when necessary. Our editorial board constitutes our rigorous base, a go-to source we know we can reach out to and rely on in our editorial processes. Each year we ask our editorial board if they wish to renew their editorial board membership, agreeing to be available for at least three reviews, as well as to nominate the article they think is most outstanding. Through this process, we ensure that we have editorial board members who are committed to actively contributing to the editorial processes of the journal, and the field at large. It also gives editorial board members a chance to step down whenever their career path changes, such as with new demanding projects or retirement, or when they feel they have served the journal for a long time and want to free up space for upcoming scholars.
Ending 2023, there was a group of editorial board members that have not renewed their editorial board membership, whom we would like to extend our thanks to. We are indeed really grateful for what you have done for the journal over the years:
Christian Baden
Pablo Boczkowski
Hsuan-ting Chen
H. Iris Chyi
Yael de Haan
Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou
Andrew Duffy
Raul Ferrer-Conill
Jonathan Hardy
Florence le Cam
Mireya Márquez-Ramírez
Jad Melki
Eugenia Mitchelstein
Don Shin
Nikos Smyrnarios
Sergio Splendore
The Digital Journalism editorial team continuously recruits scholars that we feel stand out in terms of their strong research agendas and track records, or impress us with their ambitious reviews and consistent review deliveries, but also scholars who impress by carrying out excellent special issues for journals, or by receiving top reviewer awards from associations in the field. For our 2024 editorial board we have carefully selected and recruited multiple excellent scholars:
Sandra Banjac
Karin Boczek
Sherwin Chua
Patrick Ferrucci
Lena Frischlich
Michael Hameleers
Jannie Möller Hartley
Valerie Hase
Seth C. Lewis
Ori Teneinbom
Henrik Örnebring
We always make assessments of reviewer activities in ScholarOne to identify our most loyal reviewers, and revisit the quality of their reviews. Throughout 2023 there were several scholars who were particularly helpful in doing high quality reviews, several of whom have been invited to our editorial board: Sandra Banjac, Sherwin Chua, and Ori Teneinbom. The most helpful scholar in 2023 who was not yet on our editorial board is Patrick Ferrucci, carrying out a total of six reviews throughout the year. Ferruci thereby qualifies as one of the two 2023 Digital Journalism top reviewers.
Among our most supportive editorial board members (five or more reviews over the past year) we find Matt Carlson, Ryan J. Thomas, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, and Avery E. Holton. The most supportive editorial board member is Ragnhild K. Olsen, with eight reviews over the last year, and who actually entered our editorial board by way of being a top reviewer (which she has been awarded for also by Journalism Studies). Kudos!
Final Notes
We recently celebrated our 10-year anniversary, and we are proud of the accomplishments obtained by the journal in these 10 years. However, we are also aware of the many challenges we still have to address, such as more diversity and representation in our editorial board and the work we publish—challenges that are shared by many (if not all) scholarly journals in our field. We are excited for the new stage Digital Journalism starts today under this new editorial team, and we invite you all to take an active role in it as contributors, reviewers, guest editors, and so on.
[email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2533-6737 Magdalena Saldaña http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1218-0091