Abstract
The year 2025 marks the publication of the tenth volume of Communication and the Public (CAP), ushering in the journal’s eleventh year. This milestone offers an opportune moment to reflect on CAP’s development and achievements since its inception. Over the past year, 2025 has been a period of steady growth and consolidation for the journal, marked by continued expansion in scholarly influence, editorial capacity, and international engagement. We are pleased to highlight several key milestones that underscore this progress (see Appendix 1).
Scholarly Impact: CAP has continued its upward trajectory, demonstrating stable performance in
Submissions: In 2025, the number of original submissions reached 215.
Global Engagement: We engaged authors from
Open Access: CAP remains committed to Open Access publishing, eliminating article processing charges to ensure broader visibility and accessibility for our authors. This initiative not only enhances the dissemination of knowledge but also fosters a more inclusive and resilient academic community.
These accomplishments would not have been possible without the tireless dedication of our authors, reviewers, advisory board, editorial board, and readers. Your invaluable contributions have fostered a vibrant intellectual community and advanced our collective understanding of media and communication across its many dimensions.
CAP in 2025: advancing theory on digital culture, governance, and public life
In 2025, CAP has remained steadfast in its mission to explore the evolving intersections of communication and the public through both academic inquiry and societal engagement.
The eight articles published in the Special Issue “Thirty Years of the Internet in China” offered a historically grounded and conceptually integrative account of China’s internet as a socio-technical, cultural, and political formation. Moving beyond technology-centered narratives, these studies examined digital China through diverse lenses, including environmental public culture (Lv, 2025), scalable intimacy and platform-mediated sociality (Gu, 2025), influencer economies and cultural logics (Xu, 2025), and gender politics in popular digital culture (Liao, 2025). Other articles revisited the evolution of internet governance and policy paradigms (Jiang, 2025), critically reassessed research on digital contention (Liu, 2025), and portrayed the reinvention of locality and rural life through local media and e-commerce practices (Wang & Guan, 2025; Zhang, 2025). The Special Issue demonstrated that the Chinese internet is best understood as a dynamic, internally differentiated process shaped by intersecting logics of culture, power, governance, and everyday social reproduction.
Alongside the Special Issue, CAP’s original research articles in 2025 reinforced the journal’s global and comparative orientation by addressing diverse issues at the intersection of communication and public life. These studies examined media framing and migrant perceptions (Famulari & Major, 2025), self-presentation and agency among disabled athletes on social media (Öztürk, 2025), and unequal civic and political gains from news use in African contexts (Adegbola et al., 2025). These articles also explored the political leadership and affect, pandemic blame attribution, media systems and policy, democratic communication, gendered and populist political messaging, and media trust across varied national settings (e.g., Fuchs, 2025; Matthews, 2025; Pohle et al., 2025; Rushevics, 2025; Sonnevend et al., 2025). Together, these contributions highlighted CAP’s commitment to theoretical innovation, methodological diversity, and comparative insight in advancing scholarship on communication, power, and the public.
Extended mission of CAP
Over the past year, CAP has undertaken a careful revision of its aims and scope to better reflect the evolving intellectual landscape of communication research and the profound transformations reshaping public life. Since its founding, CAP has attracted scholars and readers committed to expanding intellectual exchange and dialogue across disciplinary, national, and cultural boundaries. This commitment remains central to the journal’s mission. The current editorial team has advanced a more expansive and inclusive understanding of the public. The journal considers a wide range of topical areas, including
In line with this renewed vision, CAP welcomes research that advances theorizing publics in the digital era. We encourage scholarship examining the formation of networked publics, hybrid media systems, and artificial intelligence (AI)-augmented public spheres, as well as studies of communication governance and platform power and their implications for public interests and equity. We are particularly interested in work addressing the rise of algorithmic media, including generative AI and social bots, and their effects on public trust and democratic deliberation, alongside historically and culturally grounded analyses of civil society, citizenship, and network societies.
CAP also invites research on media, technology, and public life, focusing on how communication technologies reconfigure public space and social movements. This includes normative and empirical inquiries into the ethics of surveillance, datafication, and AI in public communication; analyses of digital culture and public arts; and studies of the blending of online and offline engagement. Comparative research that illuminates global variations in public engagement, civic practices, and public policy is especially welcome.
Equally central to CAP’s mission is sustained attention to publics, power, and representation. We encourage work examining the intersections of public opinion with misinformation, polarization, and computational propaganda; the digitalization of public diplomacy amid global uncertainty and crisis; and the role of algorithmic media in amplifying or marginalizing voices across class, gender, race, and national contexts. These lines of inquiry reflect CAP’s commitment to understanding how communication shapes public life under conditions of technological change and social inequality.
Looking ahead, CAP is committed to building an inclusive and forward-looking scholarly community dedicated to connecting minds, advancing ideas, and pioneering dialogues across disciplines, regions, and intellectual traditions. CAP seeks to document the changing relationships between communication and the public and shape the conversations and research agendas that will guide the field into the future.
