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Welcome to the Winter, 2004 Issue
This winter, the newsletter really lives up to its name,
for we have a lot to report. This issue includes the minutes
from both ICA's and APSA's
political communication division business meetings. We also
have a full report (including
pictures!) of the Political Communication Pre-Conference held
prior to the American Political Science Association annual
meeting in Philadelphia.
Several scholars have begun to send us early research reports
on their projects' progress, so we have instituted a new menu
item in this issue, "New Research,"
to give such reports a permanent home in the newsletter. In
this issue, we include a link to the latest Program on International
Policy [PIPA] report on public knowledge about the Iraq War
and its relationship to the kinds of media people use. It
seems that the quality of news does vary across outlets and
that news quality has an independent impact on audiences beyond
that of news exposure. We also have a report on ongoing research
into British and Australian parliamentarians' use of the internet,
focusing mainly on how these new technologies affect their
work practices and the way they represent their constituents.
Our featured data resource
this month is an archive of internet web pages from various
political sites. Maintained by the Library of Congress, this
site preserves digital material that would otherwise be lost
when sites are updated or disappear entirely from the World
Wide Web. By taking regular snapshots of politically oriented
Web content, the archive offers a unique resource for scholars
interested in citizens' digital information environment.
In our grants and resources
section, we have word of a new visiting scholars program
for researchers interested in taking advantage of the scholarly
resources available in Washington DC. The calls
for papers include a new book series from Rowman and Littlefield
in Communication, Media, and Politics.
Finally, David Weaver, a member of the ICA/APSA joint publications
committee, went to considerable trouble to track down the
committee's bylaws regarding
both the journal and this newsletter. While the bylaws are
somewhat out of date (when they were adopted, the newsletter
only appeared twice a year), we thought we would archive them
on the newsletter's website so that they remain easily available
for future joint publications committees and division members.
Happy new year!
Jill Edy
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