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Editorial Reorganization and Roles

 

Senior Editor(s)

Kairos congratulates Douglas Eyman and James Inman on their new roles as Senior Editors. Under their editorship, the journal has grown exponentially, but it has been difficult for them to find time to pursue additional innovations around the journal's acquisition and production schedules. This is not surprising considering they were responsible for guiding submissions through the review process, editing the Features section, and managing production of the entire journal, among other large and small tasks. They grew to feel strongly that Kairos would benefit from introducing two new co-editors, who would emphasize editorial processes and operations. Turning to Cheryl and Beth was an obvious choice, as they had brought impressive achievement and organization to the CoverWeb section. This change will allow Douglas and James to focus on the innovations in the coming years, such as pursuing non-profit status and implementing long-term projects such as a Kairos bibliography.

In addition to focusing on these larger projects, Douglas and James will continue their successful long-time collaboration by providing guidance, expertise, and institutional memory on broad issues to the journal. They will be responsible for promoting the journal in large-scale ways to both current and new audiences and will work to actively increase the national and international reputation and recognition of the journal. We are excited that the journal has four leaders now, and the result will be a better (and more kairotic) Kairos.

Editor(s)

Cheryl and Beth are pleased to be the new editors of Kairos, taking on the responsibility of the journal’s daily operations such as providing editorial leadership and vision, oversight on projects like the Kairos Awards, and especially continuing their work with authors and editorial board members to publish excellent webtexts in Topoi, the new title for the merged Features and CoverWeb sections.

While some of the editor responsibilities are new to them, Cheryl and Beth bring the experience of having edited the CoverWeb section for the last five years. In that time, they streamlined their section’s publication process by creating internal procedures for effectively communicating with authors as well as among themselves in online environments, working with the editorial board, copy- and design-editing webtexts, training assistant editors, and following production timelines. The amount of documentation they built as CoverWeb Editors—as probably any of the Kairos section editors have—is testament to their organization and communication skills necessary to run an online journal. As they tell it: We smile at the fact that we’ve only talked on the phone a handful of times and have only met in person three times: a Kairos pizza party in Muncie during C&W 2001, right after we were hired; a Kairos party at the Irish bar next to the Palmer House during CCCC 2002; and a tête-à-tête to discuss upcoming CoverWebs—our only f2f work meeting—at CCCC 2004 in New York. Cheryl had to laugh when her department head recently said that no important work should be done via e-mail. While that may be true of the work of department heads, that rule has never applied to Kairos, where all of the work gets done in e-mail, instant messenger, and other information communication technologies. Such online communication practices have prepared us well, and we’re proud of that. The collaborative techniques that we have built for managing an online journal section now apply readily to our work with the whole journal.

Some of the changes we discuss, such as the revised peer-review process, were ideas that we had been tinkering with in our corner of the journal long before we took on the role of editors. But the promotion itself was a huge and welcomed surprise when Douglas and James extended the invitation to us in late February of this year. They kindly listened to our often too-quick succession of e-mails full of ideas and questions, provided feedback on all of them in detail to help us craft the ideas into do-able features of the journal, and helped us move ahead with those that were viable.  We are excited to be sharing our vision of the journal with readers and are excited, too, about more changes in the works, which we’ll discuss briefly at the end of this column. 

Section Editors

We must note that the vision we have for the journal represents an overall perspective, but it should not suggest that, as editors, we are responsible for the many delightful changes happening in each of the journal sections. The section editors are to thank for innovations happening in Praxis, Reviews, Interviews, and News over the years. Each of the main sections of the journal is edited by experienced and enthusiastic individuals who have been encouraged to engage in innovative reimaginings of the areas for which they have been responsible. In fact, several of those sections present a new vision for the next ten years in this issue. Section editors have a high degree of authority and autonomy, and it is the synthesis of the section editors' work with the activities of the co-editors and the editorial board that provides the journal with such a rich tapestry of varied media and genres. Although there have been changes in what those sections are over the years (the current Praxis section, for instance, has evolved from the originally-titled 'Pixelated Rhetorics' and later 'Interactions' sections; the News section moved from a bi-annual publication to a daily-updated community blog called Kairosnews, an innovation of then news-editors Charlie Lowe and Clancy Ratliff), the overall success of those sections is due in large part to the exceptional efforts of their respective section editors. We thank them for all of the hard work they’ve invested to make Kairos an outstanding journal, and we invite you to read the section introductions written in celebration of the 10th anniversary issue. (Praxis, Reviews, Interviews)

We are also pleased to announce that this issue brings two new editors for the Reviews section, Laura McGrath of Kennesaw State University and Joddy Murray of Washington State University – Tri-Cities campus. They join Gail Corso in capably editing that section. We are sorry to say, however, that as new folks join us, some will leave: Rich Rice, long-time Reviews co-editor has decided to step down from his staff position. But he’s stepping up into a new role: We are grateful that he has joined us as an editorial board member, to continue adding his insight and wisdom to Kairos publications.

Assistant Editor(s)

Readers may have noticed that our masthead, with staff names, has shrunk a little. Partly in preparation for a new design, to be revealed in the Spring 2007 issue, we have streamlined the staff names listed on the main journal page to reflect only those of section editors. However, this list of 14 people belies the fact that our staff numbers are actually more than double that and include a number of assistant editors for each section and for the journal as a whole.

There has been a lot of hiring over the last year, and we are pleased that many of these new staff members are graduate students – both early in their degree programs and those who have graduated to their first tenure-track jobs this fall. Praxis has hired several new assistant editors (AEs) who will help Joyce and Colleen to solicit, review, and copy-edit texts for the newly revamped section. CoverWeb hired three AEs in January to join another longtime AE; all of them have moved to help Cheryl and Beth review and copy-edit Topoi and special-issue texts. These AEs also assist the editors with journal-wide projects, like the Kairos Awards.

Because there are quite a few AEs on staff, we have placed their names and affiliations prominently on the intro page to each section. Often they don’t get the recognition they deserve because readers and authors aren’t aware of the extent to which they affect the publication of a webtext or issue. So, here, we draw your attention to them and these too-brief job descriptions because, without these AEs, we doubt that the journal would be as successful as it is. Kairos started with graduate students, and we continue that tradition—if not always in editor positions at first (as Kairos has “grown up” a little since 1996), then in assistant editor positions—where without divulging all their secrets, the AEs have quite a full workload and are responsible for much of the quality you see in the journal. Beth and Cheryl believe, as we’re sure the other sections with AEs (Interviews, Praxis, and News) would agree, that the best professional development that we can offer to junior scholars working on Kairos (and who often already have impressive publication records) is to train them in all of the work we do and to help them understand how editors enact Kairos’ mission through our editing and publication work. (See, in fact, the webtext that Leah Cassorla—former CoverWeb AE of three years and now Kairos AE — has written for this issue on how the journal impacts graduate students’ professional development opportunities.)

Before we leave the staff-changes portion of this text, we’d like to thank a few graduate students who have helped us over the last year. Cheryl would like to thank the online technical communication Masters students in her Advanced Editing class this past spring, who were asked to use Kairos, and the anniversary issue specifically, as their class project. They brought an outside (non-Kairos-reader, non-rhet/comp) perspective that gave much insight to how we train AEs and manage specific parts of the publication process. Next, high praise and many thanks go to Susan Baxter, also at Utah State University, who spent the last year culling through the back issues to find all citations and references in the webtexts (Features, CoverWeb, and Praxis) published herein. Susan collated an impressive 71-page, single-spaced bibliography, made even more impressive in our opinions because most of the webtexts in the last 10 years didn’t have separate works-cited pages. Based on her work, we’re implementing a searchable bibliography database, which we’re hoping will be ready by the Spring 2007 issue. Also based on her work (and on the digging and searching she had to do to find citations in many of the texts), Cheryl and Beth started requiring (whenever the design would allow it) separate reference pages on all CoverWeb texts, a feature that will be carried over to Topoi and other sections, when feasible. Finally, to facilitate Kairos’ listing in citation indices (most of which require standardized citations), the major sections of the journal will start requiring all submissions to be formatted (when the design allows) in APA style. We’ll have more information on this change in a later Logging On column. In the meantime, Susan is finishing up her thesis analyzing how Kairos’ credibility is affected by the kinds of citations its authors use, a study we very much look forward to reading.

 

Overview

Kairos 11.1

Vol. 11 Iss. 1 Fall 2006