The ICA Publications Committee has chosen Thomas Hanitzsch to be the new editor of ICA's journal Communication Theory. The appointment was approved at the ICA Board Meeting in Boston on 26 May. His 3-year term as editor of CT will begin with the journal's Volume 22 (2012).

Hanitzsch is currently Professor of Communication at the University of Munich's Institute of Communication Studies and Media Research (IfKW). He worked in the early 1990s as a journalist, before earning Master's degrees in Journalism and Arabic Studies/Oriental Philology in 1999 from the University of Leipzig, and a Ph.D. in Applied Media Studies in 2004 from the Ilmenau University of Technology.

Hanitzsch is also a former chair of ICA's Journalism Studies Interest Group (now Division). He is currently Vice Chair of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA)'s Journalism Studies Section.

Hanitzsch's research, it will come as no surprise, focuses on journalism. In particular, he studies internationally comparative journalism cultures, as evinced in his books Journalism in Indonesia: Agents, Structures, Orientations, and Journalistic Cultures (2004) and the forthcoming Handbook of Comparative Communication Research (2011). (In addition, he coedited the 2009 book Handbook of Journalism Studies; has edited or coedited four other books; and has authored 100 other book chapters, journal articles, conference presentations, and invited lectures.) 

Hanitzsch begins accepting manuscripts for Communication Theory in September. His official editorship begins 1 January 2012 and ends 31 December 2014.

Additionally, the Board has approved the appointment of Elisia Cohen as editor of Communication Yearbook. Her 3-year term begins with Communication Yearbook 37, which will be published in 2013.

Cohen is an assistant professor of Communication at the University of Kentucky College of Communications and Information Studies and Associate Member of the Markey Cancer Center. She received her Master's in communication from in 1999 from Wake Forest University, and her Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. Cohen is a member of ICA's Health Communication Division, and is the outgoing book review editor for the Journal of Communication.

Her main research interests include developing novel content-analytic and surveillance approaches to studying media representations of health risks and disease, using health behavior theory to develop targeted health communication interventions to improve cancer risk communication, and using media-based approaches to creating effective diffusion of cancer prevention innovations. She currently serves as an investigator for the Rural Cancer Prevention Center (A CDC-PRC funded initiative) and the Washington University Center for Excellence in Cultural Communication Research, and works an investigator to lead media planning for the Cervical Cancer-Free Kentucky Initiative (supported by a gift from GlaxoSmithKline).

Her work has been published in Communication Methods and Measures, Health Communication, Health Education & Behavior, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Journal of Health Communication, Newspaper Research Journal, New Media & Society, Tobacco Control, and other publications.

Cohen's Call for Submissions for her first volume of Communication Yearbook, 37, will be forthcoming soon.