[Note: This is a re-formatted manuscript that was originally published in On the Horizon, 1996, 4(1), 2-3. It is posted here with permission from Jossey Bass Publishers.]

We begin Volume IV under new colors. In December 1995, ownership of On the Horizon was transferred to Jossey-Bass Publishers. Jossey-Bass immediately updated the design, changed our publication schedule to bimonthly to coincide with the calendar year, and assumed responsibility for marketing and invoicing. In addition, they join Sun Microsystems and Cisco, Inc., as corporate sponsors of Horizon Home Page, our Web site.

I am delighted to be an editor in the distinguished family of Jossey-Bass educational publications. This transfer enables me to focus exclusively on content; no longer will I also have to twist colleagues’ arms to buy subscriptions. More importantly, publication by an established publisher not only increases the visibility of On the Horizon, enhancing its status, but also, with much greater marketing capability, entices top-notch writers, guaranteeing its future.

What attracted Jossey-Bass to On the Horizon? According to Susan Lewis, director, journals and periodicals, it was our niche in periodical literature where we focus on signals of change in the macroenvironment and ferret out their implications for education writ broad (that is, education as a social institution, pre-kindergarten through graduate and professional schools, including lifelong continuing education). Most educational periodicals focus on a particular segment of education and on the industry environment, with relatively little attention to the macroenvironment.

Another attraction was the cutting-edge quality of our articles and the combination of the newsletter with a listserver and a Web site, which allows us to elicit potential articles from a worldwide audience of educational leaders and to obtain their comments on these articles. The Web site, Horizon Home Page, allows Internet users easy access to a number of services: past issues of On the Horizon, a futures planning database of Horizon-type articles, text discussion strings from Horizon List archived by author and subject (many of which respond to articles published in On the Horizon), a description of upcoming conferences, and an educational on-ramp providing links to useful information databases around the world. These services highlight to a world-wide audience the usefulness of a subscription.

As always, we invite you to actively participate in our mission. On the Horizon articles take two forms: abstracts of one or more articles, books, or Internet postings that have implications for education or essays on emerging trends or developments that may affect the future of education. A unique feature of abstracts or essays in On the Horizon is that authors speculate on the specific implications of these “signals of change” in the macroenvironment (the social, technological, economic, environmental, and political [STEEP] sectors) for educational leaders. Abstracts and essays must be brief (800 to 1,000 words); our readers are busy people who want to get to the bottom line quickly. Your reward? The opportunity to articulate your thoughts, ideas, vision to a worldwide Internet audience and to publish an article in a Jossey-Bass publication.

Please submit your article to me via the postal service or via e-mail (addresses at the bottom of the masthead). If your article is accepted for publication, we will also need a summary of the article, your picture, and a biographical sketch for insertion on our Web site in the section announcing the issue in which your article will appear. (We do not have sufficient space to provide biographical information in the newsletter, but we will make this information available to readers via Horizon Home Page beginning with this issue.)

If you have not yet done so, consider subscribing to Horizon List and submitting your article through the list for review and comment by Horizon List participants. Your article will be archived on our Web site (URL: http://sunsite.unc.edu/horizon) in the Horizon List section and inserted in the futures planning database section. To subscribe to Horizon List, send the following message to listserv@unc.edu: subscribe horizon . Do not put a period at the end of your last name; also, do not type anything on the subject line.