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With profound regret we have to record the death of Colonel Charles Edward Cassal, F.I.C., who passed away on Dec. 22nd at his residence in London. The sad news has only reached us at the moment—when we are going to press. We hope to publish in the January issue an appreciation of his life, his remarkable abilities, his high minded and lofty nature, and the beneficent work which he achieved in the interests of the profession which he so conspicuously adorned. Colonel Cassal was the founder of “The British Food Journal,” and, in addition to his multifarious official duties, he occupied for fifteen years the position of Editor of the Journal.

This chapter starts by defining authenticity and then addressing the role that the concept has played in political communication research. It then examines authenticity as an issue in conventional politics before discussing more recent engagements with the concept, notably with regard to campaigns, populism and voting preferences.

In light of the phenomenon of blogging in the 2004 US presidential campaign, this article aims to examine blogging during the 2005 British general election campaign. The article seeks to establish how widespread blogging was, the extent of bloggers' partisanship, what issues blogs were concerned with, what the purpose of the messages posted by the bloggers were, and what if any impact blogs had beyond the immediate community of users.

These questions were addressed through a content analysis of over 300 blogs and 1,300 posted messages, by additional searches of the Lexis‐Nexis newspaper archive, and via the use of internet poll data on blogging.

The research showed that blogging in the UK is in its infancy. There were few bloggers posting messages about the campaign and few people accessed blogs regularly. Most of the comments posted focused on campaign issues and were observational. While some of the bloggers exhibited an overt partisan identity, most did not. There was also some evidence of partisan networks, with blogs of a particular partisan/ideological position hyperlinking to others with a similar outlook. However, unlike the 2004 US presidential election campaign, blogs had no impact on the campaign news agenda.

Despite extensive research it is difficult to ascertain whether the sample of blogs examined in the research represented the entirety of the election campaign blogosphere. Nevertheless, the findings provide important insights into the evolving online election communication environment in the UK.

The study is the first to examine systematically the blogging about the general election campaigns in the UK.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the theme of this special issue, “Advances in e‐democracy: engaging citizens and electorates”.

An overview is provided of developments in e‐government before providing a summary discussion of the papers that are presented in this issue.

While governments around the world, not least in the UK, have been enthusiastic about the use of information and communication technologies to provide better citizen access to government and public services, there is still much to be learned about how these online services can be effectively implemented and will be taken up.

This paper provides a primer for the remainder of this issue which combines research reports from academics working in the e‐democracy field and from practitioners in government and commercial service suppliers.

This article assesses a rational-choice model of bureaucratic behaviour - the bureau-shaping model - as an explanation of budget-making in British local government. The bureau-shaping model is essentially a reconstructed rational-choice model of bureaucratic behaviour in liberal democratic states, which emerged from critiques of its rival budgetmaximising model. The explanatory power of the bureau-shaping model is significantly superior to the budget-maximising model. However, the explanatory power of the bureaushaping model is limited because, as a supply-side model, it cannot explain how budgets are demanded and controlled by political sponsors, who in turn are constrained politically. Budgetary decision-making takes place in a political arena where both supply and demand are mediated; a supply-side model, at best, can explain only half the budget-story.

This monograph contains abstracts from the 2005 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, 6‐7th September 2005

As technology enables the rapid spread of mis- and disinformation, a critical challenge for scholars and practitioners involves building student’s news media literacy (NML), a subset of media literacy education centered around journalism. This paper aims to offer a case study of secondary civics classrooms that use NML lessons and current events in their curricula, providing an empirical account of teaching techniques being used to support students' dispositions and practices.

This multiple case study investigates three secondary classes taught by two teachers. Data collection methods included observations, field notes and interviews with the teachers. Discourse and actions were analyzed by probing the participant structures and means of classroom management.

The findings highlight instructional techniques used by both teachers which consisted of instructionist and constructivist approaches, with informative shifts observed between the two. The teachers used instructionist methods when transmitting declarative knowledge (such as key definitions), and constructivist methods when working with students to consider more abstract concepts and developing news stories.

The demand for NML and associated pedagogy is increasing given awareness of the rapid spread and problematic influence of mis-and disinformation. There is a critical need for describing teachers’ implementations of these pedagogies, given calls for enacting NML into public policy despite limited awareness of the ways they actually unfold in classrooms. The current project shows how instructionist and constructivist frames prove helpful for understanding instructional practices, and for contemplating anticipated designs of NML pedagogy in classrooms.