This time of year you and your colleagues are undoubtedly busy preparing for another fantastic academic year. As well, a new membership year in ICA is upon us. It is now time to renew your membership for the 2007-2008.

When you renew your membership, this is a time to also renew division membership and to add additional divisions or interest groups. Please look carefully as ICA has a new division and a new interest group. As you may know, the Intercultural and Development Division has split into two divisions, Intercultural Communication and Global Communication & Social Change. The new Interest Group is Communication History. Don't forget to sign up for those during your renewal process if you'd like to join.

We continue to strive for making the International Communication Association your most valuable professional asset. As you know for the past 56 years ICA has served thousands of members-institutions and individuals-as the premier scholarship organization in communication research. We continue to look for ways to improve on the service we offer and the value we present to our members! The past several years we are providing better services than ever before.

Last year we launched ICA's new web site, completely redesigned with functionality for you in mind. But we didn't stop there. Here are a few more reasons we hope you will take into account as you consider renewing your membership. We have taken many of your suggestions and continued to improve on the features provided. I think you will be pleased with some of the results. Here is a rundown of some of the newest features:

MyICA (Members Only homepage)

• Messages from ICA
  • What you missed! - a short list of the latest announcements, calls, offers, news and more.
  • My Message Center - a place where you can check for emails sent from the ICA offices that might have been filtered by mail servers along the way.
• MyICA Account Manager
  • Update my profile - update your email address, mailing address and other contact information, add your personal web address, upload a photo for your profile, change your password and much more ALL in one place! New to your profile is Keywords and Research Interest. Members can now search for other colleagues by research interest using keywords or words found within the Research Interest description box. Enter up to a 200-word description of your current projects. Also new is the ability to indicate an interest in being a reviewer for conference papers, ICA journals or willingness to collaborate on research projects with other colleagues. All of this information can be edited at anytime from this one area and when other ICA members are logged in and click on your name in the directory, they will see all of this information in the new extended profile available only to them.
  • Update My ICA Links - manage the links you will find on the bottom half of your MyICA page. Access to the various directories, ICA governance documents and direct access to all ICA journals and our other publications.
  • Pay Dues Invoice - while we are including the link in this email (and would really be happy if you did it now!) you can always return to access your invoice online later if you aren't ready to do so now. o My Account Summary - ever need a receipt mid-year and can't remember where it ended up? Now you can find the past two years of your past paid invoices here! Just click on the invoice number and print out the next screen including all of the vital information you will need for your records. And you don't have to wait on us!
  • My Event History - a cumulative list of past conferences you have attended.
  • My Past Committees - a list of your past committee participation. Because we have only tracked committee participation since 2002, previous information is not available to us. If you would like us to add something to your profile, feel free to contact me with that information.
• My Sections - lists the sections to which you belong and adds the functionality of being able to add or change those sections!

Introducing Section Forums! Members of a particular division will be able to log in to a forum discussion area for their particular sections. Click on the links on your My Sections list to access each forum. As a member of that section, you will be able to create topics, post comments, make inquiries, and more. All ICA members will also have access to the new Research Collaboration Forum. Want to collaborate? Post a request! As you will see throughout the web site, we post items that may be of interest to you: New announcements, grant information, calls for submissions for both conference and publications from other organizations, links to those organizations and much more. Calls that might be of particular interest to a certain section are posted to that section's description page in the Information box. New information is listed in the News section of our homepage (www.icahdq.org ), on the various Publication pages and also on the Conference pages. If you have something that might be of particular interest to ICA members, don't hesitate to send us the information. You will find our contact information on the web if you click on "Contact Us" on the top right of the web pages. New Publications from ICA! We are excited to announce the launch of our fifth ICA journal. Communication, Culture & Critique, published by Wiley Blackwell with a strong focus on qualitative research, will launch in January 2008. The new Blackwell International Encyclopedia of Communication will be available March 2008 and the first of our handbook series, The Handbook of Election Coverage Around the World, edited by Jesper Stromback and Lynda Lee Kaid will be introduced in May 2008 by Erlbaum/Taylor and Francis. Communication Yearbook 31, also by Erlbaum/Taylor and Francis is available now at a discount to ICA members; find the link on the MyICA page to access that and other publishers discounts for ICA members. The first of our conference theme series publications, Participation and Media Production. Critical Reflections on Content Creation, edited by Nico Carpentier & Benjamin De Cleen is scheduled to publish May 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Press. We value your ideas and your membership. We hope that you will take just a few more minutes to renew your membership. Click on the link below to access and pay your dues invoices. This is the link to log in, view and pay your invoices: http://www.icahdq.org/cgi-shl/Dues.exe/Run:RENEW We appreciate your support. Thank you for being an ICA member! Best wishes for the coming year.