This feature of this issue is the future of political communication research. The five wonderful essays submitted for this feature come from very different perspectives, but raise very important ideas about challenges and opportunites for political communication scholars.
1. Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson discuss media fragmentation and political disengagement. They argue that the media environment allows citizens to choose around news and political content.
2. Catie Snow Bailard challenges us to think about the diffusion of information and communication technologies across the globe and the opportunites for field experiments.
3. Matt Levendusky also considers media choice to be an important component of political communication. He describes how partisan media can have polarizing effects on the electorate.
4. Richard Stanton asks how our teaching and practice in the political communication sphere can be updated. He describes his experimentation with conducting class over Twitter (a twecture!).
5. Dhavan Shah, Chris Wells, Alex Hanna, and JungHwan Yang provide insight from their work with Big Data and delve into how the availability of new datasets can help us learn more about political communication.