Page 10 - Communication Theory and Research

McQuail-(EJC) Prelims.qxd 8/16/2005 11:58 AM Page ix

Preface

The European Journal of Communication was founded in 1985 and its first issue
appeared in the Spring of 1986. The chief architect of and driving force behind
the foundation of the Journal was Jay G. Blumler, of the University of Leeds,
strongly backed by our publishers, Sage. The first editors were Jay Blumler, Karl
Erik Rosengren (University of Lund) and Denis McQuail (University of
Amsterdam), supported by an active Editorial Board and a larger number of
corresponding editors drawn from most of the countries of Europe. It is now
edited by the undersigned and based at Loughborough University and the
University of Ghent.
The publication of this anthology marks the twentieth anniversary of the
Journal’s inception at a time when Europe was experiencing an acceleration in
communication research and an expansion in the number and size of teaching
programmes in higher education devoted to media and communication. The
then aim of the Journal was to expand the opportunities for publication of
theory and research and to make a contribution to the definition and identity of
the field. Its particular role, as reflected in the chosen title, was to reflect the
range of different traditions of communication research (and issues for research)
on the European continent and to contribute to a greater interconnection and
dialogue between the different schools of work. It would also serve to make
research in Europe more widely known to an international audience.
The field of communication was then, as now, open to alternative definitions
and the editors of the first issue identified the central phenomena to be dealt
with as ‘processes of public communication within and between societies and
thus primarily to do with mass media and mass communications’. At the time it
could be argued that the study of communication in Europe was more united by
way of an imported North American heritage than by a shared approach to
issues of public communication. There was, of course, much in the way of shared
experience in the history of media development and similarities of media
systems. It was already very clear twenty years ago that European media as well
as social and political life were undergoing similar changes in response to the
same technological and economic challenges. In the first issue of the Journal, the
editors argued that ‘Europe has provided the cradle for many of the prevailing
forms and practices of mass communication and is also distinguished by a
shared history, traditions of scholarship and, to a degree, social and economic
circumstances’.
Although ‘Europeanness’, as we rather loosely identified it, was important
to the aims and profile of the EJC it was not the primary defining criterion for
editorial selection. This was and remains the scholarly quality of research, think-
ing and writing. But there were subsidiary criteria, especially those to do with
the need to cover a very diverse field of topics and to try to represent the