Insights
Rachel Bitecofer Breaks the Rules
Here’s one way to break the rules in research:
- Be a woman in a male-dominated field.
- Have a big, easy-to-explain framework that purports to explain and predict what legions of your fellow researchers (and pundits) have struggled to explain and predict for decades.
What is Research ‘Authority’?
It isn’t just citations, and it isn’t just where you’ve been published, and it isn’t just about being fresh and accurate and right. Those might feed into it. But first: It’s who you can talk with and why they listen to you.…
Read MoreDelivery = Originality
The leaders today in delivering insights from research, to read between the lines of a new essay by Jason Mlicki of the marketing firm Rattleback, are by and large not researchers.
They’re consulting groups such as McKinsey and BCG. Journalism such as The New York Times series The Privacy Project.…
Read MoreThe ‘Informed Public’
The global communications firm Edelman every year puts out a huge survey of public trust levels in institutions that always gets a ton of headlines. As always, the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer is stuffed with fascinating data and takeaways. This year’s headline: “despite a strong global economy and near full employment, none of the four societal institutions the study measures — government, business, NGOs and media — is trusted.” In addition, only one of these groups (business) is seen as competent.…
Read MoreBeyond the Deficit Model
It’s now an article of both evidence and faith among science communicators that the information deficit model of communicating science (the idea that you, a non-scientist, have a deficit of information or knowledge about something and I, the expert, am going to give you enough information to remove your deficit) doesn’t work.…
Read MoreNerds vs. Trees
There should be a German word for the special despair researchers feel when an idea they’ve debunked takes off in the mass imagination.
For if we had such a word, we’d be using it right now to describe the pain and frustration researchers feel at the Trillion Tree Initiative.…
Read MoreTuesday Teardown: The Word is Plastics
Q&As bury your treasure. Your research-based treasure — your ideas, frameworks and solutions — that we need to solve wicked problems.
But sometimes — especially if the platform is high-profile enough — a Q&A might provide an essential push to a researcher’s public authority as well.…
Read MoreIs Donald Trump the First Data Viz President?
Elijah Meeks of the Data Visualization Society makes an interesting case for it — asserting that, while the country has had data-driven presidents, it “has never had a president that cared more about the appearance of data than the data itself, until now.”
Meeks isn’t being snarky here; he wants to know what Trump means for the way we consume data now.…
Read MorePitch Beyond News Pegs
The law professor Katie Rose Guest Pryal is writing a new series for The Chronicle of Higher Education (full disclosure: my wife is the Chronicle’s executive editor) on how scholars can write effectively for the public. The first two installments are good primers about how to figure out whether you’re ready to do public writing and what you’re going to write about.…
Read MoreReactive, Promotional, Strategic
There are three approaches researchers and their comms support (if they have it) can take to creating thought leadership — three gears, if you will.
As with gears (speaking as a long-time devotee of manual transmissions), you should know which one you’re in, why you’re in it and whether you’re going to stay there or shift up.…
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