By Menachem Wecker
According to his Wikipedia entry, Sterling has authored “numerous books on electronic media and telecommunications” and “a host of research and bibliographic articles.”
But unlike many other celebrities and scholars catalogued in Wikipedia, Dr. Sterling, professor of media and public affairs and of public policy and public administration, is not only the subject of an encyclopedia entry, but also an editor of encyclopedias.
The 3,000-page, six-volume Encyclopedia of Journalism, which was recently published by SAGE, is Dr. Sterling’s fourth edited encyclopedia. In addition to editing a three-volume encyclopedia of radio, a CD-ROM encyclopedia of electronic media and a one-volume encyclopedia of military communications (ancient times to present day), Dr. Sterling has also authored monographs on telecommunications and on the history of American FM broadcasting.
As editor of the journalism encyclopedia, which is his largest to date and took about five years, Dr. Sterling decided what to include and what to reject (“as important and often harder!”), helped identify authors (he wrote 50 of the entries himself) and read and edited every word (more than 1.25 million).
Dr. Sterling brought 10 faculty members and graduate students at the School of Media and Public Affairs into the project. Many of the “further reading” references to the entries recommend publications by GW faculty.
Of the 360 entries in the encyclopedia, Dr. Sterling has trouble picking a favorite, but he is particularly intrigued by the sections that discuss the “difficult present and hard-to-predict future of news media,” he says. “I often joke that if we do this again, it will be in half as many volumes.”
Although some would say an ink and paper encyclopedia is anachronistic in the age of Wikipedia, Dr. Sterling says that the information in his new encyclopedia – which he stresses is available electronically – can be relied upon.
“We have no notion of who writes Wikipedia or who – if anyone – edits or checks content,” he says. “A formally published work has a host of editing and checking and is the work of many minds.”
Further reading: “Professor Sterling Edits Six-Volume Encyclopedia” and “Professor Christopher Sterling’s Encyclopedia of Journalism Receives Honorable Mention.”