Advances in Foundational Mass Communication Theories

Ran Wei is the Gonzales Brothers Professor of Journalism at the University of South Carolina, USA, and current Editor-in-Chief of Mass Communication and Society. His research focuses on new media studies, and has won numerous awards, including the Best Article of the Year award in 2013 by International Marketing Review. His current research focuses on mobile communication, new media, and the processes and effects of media messages in various contexts (political, social, promotional, health and risk) that involve a wide range of media channels and devices (traditional and emerging). He is a pioneering scholar in mobile communication research, and his mobile phone studies are widely cited. He serves on the editorial board of Mobile Media & Communication, and has been a guest editor of Media Asia.

• Introduction: Extending the Deep Legacy of Our Field’s Top Scholars 1. Walter Lippmann’s Ghost: An Interview With Michael Schudson 2. Reassessing the People’s Choice: Revisiting a Classic and Excavating Lessons for Research About Media and Voting 3. Reading Lasswell’s Model of Communication Backward: Three Scholarly Misconceptions 4. Beyond the Four Theories of the Press: A New Model of National Media Systems 5. The First-Person Effect and Its Behavioral Consequences: A New Trend in the Twenty-Five Year History of Third-Person Effect Research 6. A Media Sociology for the Networked Public Sphere: The Hierarchy of Influences Model 7. Studying Journalists and Journalism Across Four Decades: A Sociology of Occupations Approach 8. New Directions in Agenda-Setting Theory and Research 9. The End of Framing as we Know it…and the Future of Media Effects 10. Yesterday’s New Cultivation, Tomorrow 11. A Three-Decade Retrospective on the Hostile Media Effect 12. Diffusion Theory in the New Media Environment: Toward an Integrated Technology Adoption Model 13. Defining Identification: A Theoretical Look at the Identification of Audiences With Media Characters 14. Mass Communication Research at the Crossroads: Definitional Issues and Theoretical Directions for Mass and Political Communication Scholarship in an Age of Online Media