Abstract
A journal in its infancy, we surmise, may be granted the license of being a little bold and experimental. Luckily for us, we were not alone in thinking in an experimental mode. Lewis Friedland, a distinguished member of our editorial board, generously agreed to guest-edit a special forum featuring the work of emerging young scholars on matters of trendy interest. The result is our new feature, Trending, which inaugurates in this issue. We hope this forum will continue, and it will regularly showcase the work, or work-in-progress, of emerging scholars around the world.
This issue of Communication and the Public launches another new section—Interviews, which we also hope will become a regular feature. Good interviews bring abstract ideas to life by adding context, nuance, and a human touch. They are an effective form of public communication and merit space in a journal on publics and communication. For this issue, Dr Weishan Miao of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing interviewed Professor Ang Peng Hwa of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore about global and local Internet governance.
The remainder of this issue has four research articles and two book reviews. Book reviews are great to read, but writing them is a rewardless service. We are grateful to our authors in this and future issues for taking the time to write them.
Of the four research articles, Just proposes the concept of affective rationality to reconcile the divide between rationality and emotion in the deliberative paradigm. Huang, Lee, and Lin argue that online and offline participation in civic affairs among college students in China is issue-specific and different across issues. Yarchi, Galily, and Tamir show how a sports fan community in Israel is empowered by the Internet. Last, but not least, Vraga and Tully report an experimental study to show that different messages for news media literacy interventions vary in their potentials.
We hope you will enjoy this new issue, and we are eager to hear your feedback.