Editorial

This editorial celebrates the winners of the 2021 editions of two awards assigned by The International Journal of Press/Politics: the Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award, which has now reached its seventh edition, and the Jay Blumler Best Article Award, which debuts this year after the sad passing of Professor Blumler, a founder of our field and a good friend of our journal. As the first editorial of my second term as Editor-in-Chief, it is also an opportunity to announce and welcome some important additions to our journal's leadership.

The Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award honors internationally oriented books that advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of the linkages between news media and politics in a globalized world in a significant way. Previous winners are listed at the end of this Editorial.

The winner of the IJPP 2021 Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award is Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism by Allissa V. Richardson (Oxford University Press 2020, pp. 296).

The Jay Blumler Best Article Award recognizes the best article published in the previous calendar year in a print issue of the journal. This award celebrates Jay Blumler's path-breaking contribution to scholarly understanding of media and politics, his support for the development of our discipline, and his generous mentoring of scholars in our field throughout his long and productive career.

The winner of the IJPP 2021 Jay Blumler Best Article Award is “Resilience to Online Disinformation: A Framework for Cross-National Comparative Research” by Edda Humprecht, Frank Esser, and Peter Van Aelst, published in The International Journal of Press/Politics, vol. 25, 3 (2020): pp. 493-516.

Both award winners make timely, insightful, and rigorous contributions to internationally relevant knowledge on the nexus between media and politics. They address key challenges for contemporary democracies, such as racism, disinformation, and inequality, and highlight how citizenship, knowledge, and power are being reconfigured in the digital age. The authors develop rich, nuanced, expansive theories that illuminate new facets of these phenomena and employ a variety of cutting-edge methods to shed light on how they manifest in the world. They employ social science research not only to make valid statements about reality but to help improve that reality based on a clear-eyed view of what politics and media should be as well as what they currently are. I wish to congratulate the authors of these excellent studies for their extraordinary achievements, which wonderfully exemplify the quality, dynamism, and diversity of our field.

The committee that assigned the Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award included Sophie Lecheler (University of Vienna, chair of the Political Communication Division of the International Communication Association), Seth Lewis (University of Oregon, chair of the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association), and me. The Jay Blumler Best Article Award was assigned based on an online vote of all the journal's Editorial Board members, who chose the winner among a shortlist of five articles compiled by the Associate Editors of the journal and me. I would like to express my gratitude to all the colleagues who contributed to the decision-making processes for both awards, and to SAGE Publications for its support.

Finally, this issue of the journal is the first of my second three-year term as Editor-in-Chief. I am grateful to SAGE Publications for renewing its trust in me and the journal's leadership team and I am very happy to announce that our Associate Editors C.W. Anderson, Sandra González-Bailón, and Sophie Lecheler, as well as our Managing Editor David Smith, have all agreed to continue to serve our journal. Of the many decisions I made in my first term as Editor-in-Chief, shifting from an individual to a team leadership has been the most crucial and, in my view, the most beneficial. For this reason, I am also delighted that Danielle K. Brown (University of Minnesota) will join the journal as an Associate Editor and Andrea Carson (La Trobe University) will be our new Book Reviews Editor. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Yannis Theocharis for the excellent work he did in this role for the past three years and for supporting Professor Carson during the transition.

Three years ago, I concluded my inaugural editorial with these words: “a scholarly journal's main asset is the community of authors, reviewers, and readers that discuss, promote, and respond to the research it publishes. The most important task I can accomplish as Editor-in-Chief of IJPP is to nurture and serve its community so it continues to grow, thrive, and address the fundamental issues of our times.” The past two years have tested and challenged our personal and professional lives in ways that most of us had never experienced nor imagined, and have forced us to find new ways to understand the world, fulfill our roles, and support each other. As we continue to cope with the uncertainties and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is my hope and my mission that our journal continues to serve the pursuit of knowledge and the community of scholars who strive to achieve this purpose with professionalism, ingenuity, and, perhaps most importantly, humanity.