It is a great honor and joy for me to welcome you to read this first volume of Journalism & Mass Communication Educator in 2013 under my editorship. I took office on October 1, 2012, following in a long line of great editors that includes Dr. Dane Claussen, who just completed a remarkably successful editorship of nearly seven years. The past few months have been a transition period, marked not only by my inheriting previously accepted manuscripts but also by Dane’s magnanimous mentoring.My intent as editor is to be as helpful as possible to scholars wishing to publish their research and to affirm the primary mission of this journal in addressing the professional needs of the journalism and mass communication educator and administrator on both secondary and collegiate levels. I will accept commentaries and invite a variety of commentators to opine in a provocative-and perhaps even controversial-way on different topics. If you have strong opinions and wish to share your thoughts about certain aspects of journalism and mass communication education in a well-written commentary, please feel welcome to send your opinion piece to me. Please also let me know of any breakthrough pedagogical or administrative ideas and projects that you think may interest JM encouraging efforts to improve instruction through the development of innovative materials and techniques, sound instructional designs, and improved evaluation methodologies; and enhancing the status of teaching in the university and beyond. Papers should be submitted by April 1 via All Academic on the AEJMC website: www.aejmc.org. For more information, please email Dr. Linda Aldoory at laldoory@umd.edu, or Dr. Jennifer Greer, at jdgreer@ua.edu.Today’s journalism and mass communication education discipline, similar to education itself, is in constant ferment. We are coping with digital technologies that have revolutionized the discipline and with the challenge of how best to prepare students for a professional or entrepreneurial world that we cannot accurately predict. Other changes that affect us include the changing nature of higher education where state funding for public universities has dwindled to a fraction of what it once was and where massive open online courses are now searching for a revenue-generating business model and are likely to compete with traditional schooling. Faculty includes large numbers of fixed-term, contingent, or adjunct faculty, often with full-time contracts, who are teaching a growing percentage of courses. Adjuncts rarely are members of- or often even cognizant of-the AEJMC and are usually not expected to engage in scholarship. And key administrators frequently are selected for their promise of fundraising ability, a key administrative criterion and duty.Shared governance, criteria for personnel decisions, dwindling public esteem for professors, cuts in many institutions to compensation and benefits, the role and influence of advisory boards, the constant demands on faculty to keep pace with revolutionary change, faculty workloads, student preparedness for college-level work, changing student expectations, resource allocation, dual emphases on undergraduate and graduate education and training are but some of the countless issues adding to the current challenges.