Insights

You’re a researcher. You’re looking to extend your impact by writing for decision makers and other non-specialists — maybe op-eds, maybe other kinds of pieces. You know you’d benefit from an editor.

What’s the most important skill or quality that person should have?…

I’m going to guess your answer would be “no” if you’re a research communicator or science writer/journalist. Which would make the new piece “The Myth of the Impartial Machine” from Urban Institute’s Data@Urban team required reading, followed by recurrent night frights as you realize you have no idea how to detect ML or AI bias or know whether you’ve promoted or covered studies with such bias…which probably means most of the studies you deal with, given the spread of machine learning and predictive algorithms in research today.…

When researchers do public scholarship (the application of research to a contemporary problem for non-specialist audiences), they have one advantage over all the hot takers and nearly everyone else out there:

They know what they’re talking about.

And they have one disadvantage:

By the time the hot takers (like locusts) have finished with a topic, it’s close to burnt over in terms of public attention.…

The consultant David C. Baker said something to me a few years ago that I wanted to believe but didn’t quite see: “The next 10-15 years in marketing will be about individual people…The brand needs to be represented by individuals.”

He was correct, of course.…

Which questions are your audiences asking that you or your organization can answer better than anyone else?

That’s the essence of library content strategy, which I wrote about yesterday.

If you want to move from just being another publication that competes with every other publication (almost all of which have resources that dwarf yours), you need to absorb this strategy into the bones of how you communicate and market as a research organization.…

Blogging is dead; everyone agrees. (Except for successful bloggers.)

And yet, the publication legacy of blogging remains the dominant content paradigm of our time — generating one-off content about a variety of topics rather than concentrating and going deep on a few.…

This is, maddeningly, once again the question of the moment in the United States.

I’ve written before about the crazy great opportunity for research-driven organizations to curate the literature on questions of public importance such as this one — to tell us what the best of our knowledge has found works and doesn’t.…

You never want to do this in America in the wake of a weekend of two mass shootings:

At a time like this, you never want to belittle your audience’s fear, frustration, anger, panic & despair.

And a time like this, you especially don’t want to wield data in a way that says people are just being deceived by their limbic systems about what’s really important, and you have the answer.…