You can’t say you weren’t warned.
Here are some excerpts from a recent Digiday interview with an anonymous young journalist now working at a tech company, headlined “’Not on me to save the media industry’: Confessions of an early-career journalist leaving the industry”:
…I saw your recent announcement that you were leaving your job at a legacy news publication?
Why do some scientists commit scientific fraud?
If you’re a scientist, “How would I know?” is probably your smartest answer here. But your real answer is probably something like “ambition,” “ego,” and/or “they’re not good enough scientists.”
Here’s what interests me: All of the above answers (including “How would I know?”)…
Economist Brad DeLong calls his Substack a “weblog-like newsletter.” On it, he publishes early drafts of forthcoming columns he wants to publish on Project Syndicate. The drafts are a premium for his Substack subscribers — but he’s also soliciting feedback and challenges to improve the draft before he finalizes it.…
I don’t say this bluntly often enough:
Public expertise isn’t “an expert who’s also good with the media.” Or “is good at giving talks.” Or “is good at Twitter.”
It’s not an aggregation of performance skills. Those skills are of course very useful if you’re trying to communicate with non-specialists.…
Here’s a rule of thumb for public expertise that almost nobody talks about: Share your expertise consistently — at a regular frequency that produces anticipation for your insights in the communities you’re trying to reach.
As with most rules, you only find out how important this one is when you violate it.…
Everything changes…except for NGOs clinging to vanity content metrics instead of using data and analytics to really understand whether the reams of content they put out are having any impact.
But maybe even that’s changing now, too, says Stefan Byrd-Krueger, my guest on the latest episode of Science+Story: The Podcast.…
The problem with being an introvert and thinking you have a fairly decent sense of humor is that you end up seeming like no fun because you’re standing off to the side not laughing at things many other people find funny.…
In his essay “How to make writing less hard,” the journalist Oliver Burkeman relays Steven Pinker’s suggestion to write, as Burkeman puts it,
…as if you were pointing something in the environment out to another person – something that she would notice for herself, if only she knew where to look.
Science is forever worrying and declaring that people are losing trust in it, even though levels of public trust (and lack thereof) in scientists and scientific institutions have remained remarkably steady since the early 1970s, at least in the United States, and this information is available to all the worriers/declarers.…
I keep coming back to a point Gemma Derrick alluded to during my recent podcast interview with her on “grimpact”: The idea of “science communication” contains a structural incoherency, in that science traditionally offers a) caveated “yes but” answers instead of the b) definitive “yes or no” answers most non-scientists crave (and, let’s face it, need).…