As well as my day job, I am an editor of the Historical Association’s members’ magazine, The Historian. It’s an interesting thing to do, and brings me into contact with all sorts of people – not just academic historians, but also our members who write for us too. We produce four magazines a year, and each edition has two main editors. My edition is usually the autumn one, as it fits in well with my schedule because most of the active work has to be done from Easter to October. That means that, with my co-editor Nikki Clarke and the amazing HA publications officer, Martin Hoare (who is a star of the brightest and shiniest order), I am currently putting the finishing touches to an edition themed on media.

Like most of our editions, the issue contains four feature articles linked to the theme. So we have Helen Birkett writing on medieval news, who shows that even then people could be surprisingly well-informed about what was happening; Nina Lamal exploring the role of diplomats in shaping early modern news; Thoralf Klein explaining how the telegraph allowed rumour to become news during the Boxer rebellion; and Utsha Roy looking at the BBC’s Eastern Service and how it adapted its editorial policy to maintain a foothold in the Indian subcontinent through British withdrawal and partition. Another themed article is our Update, where we look at the recent historiographical developments related to a particular topic. I wrote this one, on the developments in early modern histories of news, and in particular, the intermediality of news formats as well as the impact of computational techniques such as network analysis on the study of news transmission. In our interview, Carolin Gluchowski talks to Heidi Tworek about her award-winning book News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945, which traces German attempts to challenge British and French dominance over global news networks.

We also have a feature on weather forecasting by Anne Lawrence-Mathers – not strictly speaking a media article, but certainly closely related! Another feature is by Stephen Bourne on the trailblazing black artists who appeared on the BBC in its early years. It’s been lovely working with Stephen again, as he wrote for one of the magazines I worked on some years ago. Another regular contributor to the magazine is John Davis, who has written an Out and About and book reviews for us. This time, he has contributed an article on National Society elementary schools – a perfect example of how our magazine blends work by established academics with submissions by our members, who often only have their passion for history as a qualification.

I’m also proud to say that we regularly print articles by entrants into the HA’s Young Historian competition – not because they have won, but because they are there on merit. They go through exactly the same review process as any submission, and are only accepted if they meet our standards. This edition contains two of these articles. One is a Real Lives piece by Anne Andrews about her great-grandfather, a volunteer radio operator in World War Two, and the other an Out and About by Ellie Harrison about Quakerism in the Chiltern hills. Our Doing History by David Gordon Scott and Joseph Cozens revisits the 1826 Weavers Uprising and Chatterton Massacre. This is a particularly fascinating article, I think, because it shows how revisiting official evidence can overturn established narratives about the past. Finally, we have a bumper selection of reviews to help readers select books for their Christmas gifts or wish lists.

It’s always a joy to work on an issue of The Historian, and this edition is no exception, unless you count the fact that being so close to my own area of expertise, it’s been a particularly interesting set of articles to edit.