Strategic content creates opportunity for your organization. It motivates the right people to reach out to you. Catalyzes them to work with you, hire you, publish you, hear more of your insights. It’s valuable stuff.
Content strategies? Well, they must be valuable too — because organizations routinely pay tens of thousands of dollars for them.…
Most researchers can’t stand marketing — that is, until they need it.
To distribute a vaccine quickly to 80% or more or the U.S. population, we’re going to need some kick-ass marketing. Not just a campaign with celebrities and Anthony Fauci doing PSAs, but customized approaches that target the obstacles specific audiences face and put up to vaccination.…
One of science communications’ worst habits is to assume that, once we’ve done some research on a better way to communicate, it should be no problem for the rest of the world to put that better way to use.
“We know how to do this!”…
No one makes New Year’s resolutions anymore (probably for the best). Now everyone seems to have switched to making New Year’s predictions — definitely for the worse. The prediction space is crowded and polluted. But you’re a research-based authority with smart stuff to say about the year ahead.…
Recommended: the essays “Story vs. Narrative? And Why It Matters?”and “How to Break From the Past and Innovate” by Guillaume Wiatr, principal and founder of the consultancy MetaHelm. (H/T: List member Frank McClung.)
Money quote from the first: “People will pay for a story, but people will die for a narrative.”…
I wrote on Tuesday that you probably shouldn’t start a Substack. But not for the reasons that everyone else is busy dumping on Substack, as the new blogging or the new Medium or the new paywalled magazine — i.e., another new thing that won’t last.…
TL;dr: If you have to ask, probably not.
For the uninitiated: Substack being the email newsletter platform to which many famous and semi-famous journalists (from Glenn Greenwald to Emily Atkin to Andrew Sullivan to Dave Roberts) have fled as the traditional media economy evaporates under economic and cultural pressures, and that some of those writers are making a good living using.…
The data scientist Youyang Gu (who runs the site covid19-projections.com) now projects that, given an unproblematic vaccine rollout as well as uptake by a majority of Americans, the US will achieve herd immunity (which he defines as 60% of the population) and a “return to normal” by early to mid-summer 2021.…
The science-media industrial complex is broken. I’ve been writing to you about it for nearly two years. Nutrition studies and COVID-19 have exposed it. Clickbait-y studies far too tempting to be true are published in volume, publicized at high volume, covered by the press at maximum volume and walked back only with the most massive of pushbacks.…