Public expertise on the pandemic from officials (e.g., WHO’s Maria Van Kerkhove) and official bodies (e.g., WHO, CDC, FDA) has pretty much sucked. Most people agree with this statement.
Most also agree: These officials and official bodies must do better!
What if “doing better” isn’t possible for official expertise?…
Every public expert faces the same question: What am I going to talk with non-experts about?
The wrong answer is “What I’m an expert in” — at least, as expressed by the list of the topics in which you are indeed an expert.…
A think tank here in DC sends out an “rapid reaction” email featuring its experts’ take on various events in the news.
The key word: “various.” One alert might cover the coup in Sudan, another China’s hypersonic missile test, a third the latest federal elections in Germany.…
It’s a researcher’s nightmare: You give a talk about a problem, and it’s a great talk — except for one thing: Your audience of important decision-makers, who started texting and scrolling through their email about five minutes into your talk, doesn’t just want to hear so much about problems.…
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?
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.…
Here’s one of the most familiar narratives in science:
We knew that! We’ve been saying that for years! Why didn’t you know that?
It’s the story of a subculture — a scientific field — so insular that it thinks it’s sufficiently communicated a piece of knowledge to the rest of the world, only to discover (after years, maybe even decades) that the rest of the world didn’t get the message at all.…
You’re probably already familiar with how most researchers summarize their new research on Twitter — they basically Twitterize their papers, with screenshots of the abstract, key figures and a more or less accessible summary of the methods, findings, and discussion. Here’s a representative example.…
Researchers, research funders and research communicators — almost all of them start with the same assumption: The only social impact research can have is positive. (It’s research, after all!) We can scarcely imagine research having negative social impact, much less having to plan against our research having negative social impact.…