The AAG Council has completed and approved its plans for revisions to the structure of the Association’s two major journals, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer. The changes detailed below will take effect with the 2001 numbers of the journals, the beginning of the next cycle of editor appointments.

The council has mandated that the Annals publish items of all appropriate kinds and lengths (articles, maps, notes, book reviews, comments, etc.) that represent the very best thinking in American geography. Each Annals issue should, to a reasonable degree, encompass the breadth and depth of intellectual activity characteristic of contemporary American geography and related specialties, including: human, physical, and regional geography and combinations thereof; analytical and descriptive methods; qualitative and quantitative analysis; graphic and visual representation of geographic phenomena and processes; issues that arise in the practice of geography; and philosophy and theory. The audience for the Annals is the entire domestic and international community of scholars and practitioners in geography and related specialties. The Annals should publish the work of all geographers, from the most junior to the most senior.

Each issue of the new Annals will consist of five sections devoted to:1) Environmental Sciences; 2) Geomatics and Visualization; 3) People, Places, and Societies; and 4) Synthesis and Synergy. A fifth section, with its own editor, will contain book reviews. Each topical section will have an editor who will have authority to accept or decline long articles, shorter papers, reports, technical notes, etc. A Managing and Production Editor located at the Meridian Place AAG office in Washington DC will bear primary responsibility for the logistics of manuscript processing and book review, copyediting, and assembling and coordinating the publication of each issue of the journal, in collaboration with the editors and the journal publisher.

The Annals page size will be enlarged in order to accommodate higher quality graphics, illustrations, maps, and photographs. The establishment of a color fund that will help defray the cost of four-color illustrations is being explored, as is the possibility of increasing the publication space in each issue or of publishing six issues per annum. On occasion, in addition to the regularly scheduled issues, a special issue of the Annals devoted to a particular topic.

The Association will seek as Annals editors five accomplished individuals who share the AAG Council’s vision of an accessible, decentralized, representative, and collaborative Annals--individuals committed to intellectual entrepreneurship that ensures that the very best work being done in the subfields for which they are responsible appears in the Annals.

The Professional Geographer (PG) will be the Association’s forum for timely debates on geography's contributions to contemporary issues in the environment, society, and the interplay between them. The PG will publish succinct, innovative and policy-relevant articles on geographic theory, data, methods, practice, and perspectives, as they bear upon current domestic and international issues. The PG will inform the profession on contemporary domestic and international issues, present the geographical perspective to a wider audience of academicians and practitioners, and educate students about the professional aspects of geography. By exploring the most recent developments in geographic understanding of current issues, the PG will simultaneously convey geographic insights to non-geographers and expand the perspectives of geographers and their students regarding applications of geographical knowledge and techniques. The PG will publish articles written by geographers at all stages of their careers, as well as by scholars and practitioners in related specialties who wish to exchange ideas with the community of geographers. The PG will also include reviews of newly published books and other publications of interest to its intended audience.

The page size of the PG will remain unchanged, and the journal will be published four times per year as in recent years. The PG will be edited by a scholar appointed by the AAG Council. A Managing and Production Editor located at the Meridian Place AAG office in Washington DC will bear primary responsibility for the logistics of manuscript processing and book review, copyediting, and assembling and coordinating the publication of each issue of the journal in collaboration with the Editor of The Professional Geographer and the journal publisher.