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‘Television & New Media’ Journal, Housed in Communication Department and Co-Edited by Jonathan Corpus Ong, Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary
The journal “Television & New Media,” housed within the department of communication, recently celebrated its 20th anniversary with a special issue looking ahead at the issues facing the field.
Jonathan Corpus Ong, associate professor of digital media and co-editor-in-chief of the journal since January 2018, says that that he and his co-editor started soliciting submissions in anticipation for the special edition in 2019, and they tailored the issue’s introduction to reflect a world transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The 20th anniversary issue gathers position papers from twenty media scholars about the significant questions and puzzles affecting the field,” Ong says. “The introduction to the issue, written by me and Diane Negra, outlines what media studies can contribute to understanding the pandemic moment – how digital media are important for information and protest, but also for coping and healing.”
Ong and Negra, professor of film studies and screen culture at University College Dublin, Ireland, also took the opportunity of the journal’s platinum anniversary to reflect on its mission of inclusion and diversity.
“The journal continues to advance debates around inclusion, representation and racial justice in our media environments and we want to welcome diverse perspectives on this issue. We have an upcoming special issue on racism and the media later this year,” he says. “We also reviewed the patterns of author submissions to the journal so far and find it promising that the gender ratio of authors follows similar patterns of those who submitted last year.”
In addition to Ong, Shawn Shimpach, associate professor of communication, sits on the journal’s editorial board and provides a forward-looking piece in the anniversary issue, and doctoral candidate Erica Tortolani serves as a graduate assistant for the publication.
In honor of the 20th anniversary of “Television & New Media,” publisher SAGE Journals is providing free access to the special issue for a limited time. All articles, including Shimpach’s “What’s New” and Ong and Negra’s introduction, are available online at https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/tvna/current.