Traffic to The Conversation — that written-by-academics-for-everyone-else site that’s always been a port of last resort for expert opinion content — is way up since the beginning of the pandemic, says Columbia Journalism Review.
“Way up” = 81 million page views in April for all The Conversation sites plus republication by other sites — double that of April 2019.…
Like most of you, I’m horrified, ashamed and frustrated by many of the events of the last eight days — much less the last three months — in the United States.
Is this a turning point? we might ask.
Not if the last 50 years — Watts 1965, Newark 1967, Miami 1980, LA 1992, Cincinnati 2001, Ferguson 2014, Baltimore 2015, Charlotte 2016, etc.,…
“You were warned.”
What an arrogant, infantilizing, alienating, counterproductive communications tactic.
Well, we feel guilty and stupid now, so of course we’ll absorb your wisdom more attentively next time. Count on it.
Manu Lall and Paulina Concha of the Columbia Water Center published an op-ed this week for The New York Times, alerting us to the tens of thousands of dams in the United States that are in danger of failing, as the two in Central Michigan failed last week.…
Every client I work with quickly reveals their safe words.
No, not like that. Not “pineapples.”
At first, my clients use these safe words to mean: this content angle we’re developing is probably too risky. It’s tickling a tripwire for their audiences.…
In complicated times, what distinguishes experts from valuable experts?
Most often: their ability to transcend their discipline and pull from other disciplines. To give more than uni-disciplinary advice.
Tyler Cowen makes the point beautifully. In 1990, he argues, economists advising an Eastern bloc country on how to privatize couldn’t simply present plans based on economics alone and expect to succeed.…
Friday’s essay (“The Wrong Kind of Serenity”) prompted a lot of feedback — some of it defensive. Eliciting the defenses was one of my goals in writing it. But the defensive feedback revealed one element of resistance I didn’t specifically factor into “The Wrong Kind of Serenity”: how researchers might in fact be too busy to intervene in debates they should intervene in … if they think about intervention as writing yet another takeout for a peer-reviewed journal.…
It’s that middle part of the prayer that many scientists and researchers gloss over.
People get stuff wrong. That’s not the worst thing.
The worst thing: when experts who know that people are getting things wrong keep their knowledge to themselves.…
Take a look at these eye-popping stats, from journalist and technologist Frederic Filloux’s recent essay, “COVID-19’s General Blindness is Also a Journalistic Failure”:
I’ll double down on something I wrote last week: Don’t predict, describe.
Especially: Describe trends and tell us where/what they will lead to.
Right now, expert predictions are, at best, thought exercises that verge on entertainment. At worst, they’re horoscopes: almost always wrong, almost always without accountability, almost always hiding one or more key and very debatable assumptions.…
Boy, do we have an authority void right now when it comes to reliable, timely, actionable information about COVID-19. How to fill that void? Three options:
1) Wait for a centralized authority to get its act together. Good luck. As Matthew Karnitschnig searingly puts it in his Politico piece, “The incompetence pandemic”:
…From Beijing to Brussels, from Rome to Washington, London and beyond, politicians haven’t just failed to rise to the occasion, they’ve engaged in a dangerous game of parsing, obfuscation and reality-denial that has cost lives and delayed a resolute response.