What Does Public Expert Content Look Like?
What does content done by a public expert look like? Isn't that just content written for the public by an expert?
I wouldn't have a business if the answer were “yes.”
Look at this Aaron E. Carroll analysis in The New York Times of a 2018 meta-analysis in The Lancet that concluded any amount of alcohol consumption increases your risk for all sorts of bad things happening to you.
Carroll’s piece is wicked good. But it also did good—right when it was needed most. That’s because it:
Explained in plain, forceful language the framing you should have about an issue that you care about (or didn't know about but are glad you now do);
Has a strong argument and a clear, unique point of view;
Started with a real-world problem, not a new report or research finding (or the real-world problem new research itself created, in this case);
Delivered insights and solutions backed by data, analysis, evidence and real-world examples; and
Most importantly, delivered all that in a timely fashion to make an impact on the debate—or start one.
If you read The Lancet study and asked, “Is a glass of wine a day really going to kill me?” Carroll has given you the answer. And a way to think about all such studies going forward.
Right when you needed it. +
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Public expertise is just this: The timely application of expertise to a problem people care about in terms people can understand, use, remember and share.
Here’s one passage from this piece that hits it out of the park, about The Lancet study’s methodology:
“Consider that 15 desserts a day would be bad for you. I am sure that I could create a chart showing increasing risk for many diseases from 0 to 15 desserts. This could lead to assertions that ‘there’s no safe amount of dessert.’ But it doesn’t mean you should never, ever eat dessert.”
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You could imagine saying that at a party to your friends and dropping the mic. That’s amazingly good communication — not just amazingly good research communication.
Now, public experts also do research, and publish it. Research content is written by an expert for a community of experts. It takes the form of a peer-reviewed article or a technical white paper or a long, discursive report. The arguments are commonly muted, the POVs tame, the recommended actions pallid.
Public expertise is just this: The timely application of expertise to a problem people care about in terms people can understand, use, remember and share.
And if you’re not a researcher, you have to fight the language of expertise and conventions of research content’s formats to figure out what the point is — or wait for a science journalist to explain it to you.
Had Carroll published a piece of research in response to The Lancet metastudy, or even a letter to The Lancet…well, it would have taken a while to be published. In the meantime, most people would have thought—based on The Lancet study and all the coverage it got—that a glass of wine a day was a bad idea.
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Again: Research content communicates new research (or a response to it) within a community of experts for those experts.
Public expert content communicates what the expert knows—the new research, yes, but also the wider knowledge of the literature and its application to the world—to the much wider community of non-specialists that can benefit from that knowledge.
So: Relying on research content to do a public expert’s job is…a really bad idea.
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If you're an expert who wants to reach non-experts with impact—like Carroll—you need to be a public expert. +