The editor of an academic reference work certainly needs a profound overview, more a generalist than a specialist perspective on the field, and I can only hope that my talents sufficed for this. But, at least as much, the editor needs managerial skills, because such a work is anything but a one-man show. As I have indicated in the Introduction, this book is the joint product of the whole scientific community of communication – and in this definition I explicitly include people whose job is not to do research themselves but who have, in very different functions, contributed to the content.

My first thanks go to the more than 500 authors who have already contributed to the International Encyclopedia of Communication (IEC), the great majority of whom volunteered to abridge and update their entries for this concise edition (CEC). We all know that contributing to reference works is not the prime publishing task of academics today, but the majority of our authors already had such a high reputation that they could afford to let the next peer-reviewed journal article wait a while…

Almost all of the authors and the headwords of the entries they contributed were picked by the 30 area editors who already were the editorial backbone of the IEC. And I should not forget to thank the two Advisory Editors of the IEC, Jennings Bryant and Robert T. Craig, for their continuous stewardship in this whole project of ICA–Wiley Blackwell encyclopedias.

Over the ten years that we have cooperated, Elizabeth P. Swayze, Senior Editor for Communication and Media Studies at Wiley, and I have developed not only a fruitful and effective working relationship but a deep personal friendship, both built on trust, reliability, and mutual appreciation of our competencies. For this project, two other people at the Wiley office in Malden, Massachusetts, kept us on track and always gave excellent advice: Julia Kirk, Senior Project Editor for our field, and Tiffany Mok, in charge of all major reference works. On a side-note: when we started the IEC many years ago, Tiffany was an intern – she has built a remarkable career since then.

My closest ally at the Dresden office has been Anne Hennig, a graduate student in communication, who has probably been the only person who has always had a complete overview of where we were in the editorial process, of which authors were lagging behind, or where the editor himself had dropped the ball. Six weeks after we had sent all entries to the publisher, Anne gave birth to twins, another pressure on the whole project that forced us to keep to the timeline. Anja Obermüller, a junior lecturer at our department, as well as Isabelle Freiling, Johanna Haupt and Sonia Robak, research assistants, helped with proof-reading.

What we had to proof-read had gone through the hands of Felicity Marsh in the UK who organized copy-editing and Alec McAulay who did most of this job – in an amazingly fast and thorough manner. Thus, the CEC is not only ‘international’ in terms of its authors but also its whole production team.

Last but not least I would like to express my gratitude to a handful of people who did not directly contribute but made my contribution possible. My secretary Katrin Presberger competently organized my professional life in critical periods, and all the other colleagues at the Institute of Media and Communication at Technische Universität Dresden had to make up for contributions that, at times, I could not give. My closest friend and estimable colleague Thomas E. Patterson, professor at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center has, as always, given a major intellectual input into everything I do, academically and in life in general.

Finally, I am deeply grateful to my wife Eva and our now teenage son Tom who both had, once again after the ‘IEC times’, to live with a diminished family life…