Not A Journalist, Not An Academic, But A 'Journademic'

I shared an article on my Twitter feed today whose title alone seems to have struck a chord. Whereas most of the articles I retweet seemingly receive little attention, this one resulted in a string of new followers. It was called “Why Academics Need to Think Like Journalists.” It’s a simple piece that, upon further inspection, seems to be a sales pitch for a service to help academics reach “influential audiences.” The few tips it provides were not particularly helpful to me, but the article lingered in my mind all day.

It’s not that I disagree with the article’s basic premise. Pushing academics to write for real people and come up with sexy titles is great. Many of us are very much attempting to insert ourselves in the “social story.” We recognize that certain academic publications do more to pad our CVs and fill dusty bookcases than influence public opinion through compelling narratives. Perhaps it is true that not enough of us think this way, but the reward structure, as it currently stands, makes thinking like a journalist a luxury. Nevertheless, your call to action is right on target. But what if, wise journalists, the spotlight it similarly directed in your direction? 

   

Journalists, it seems to me, could learn a thing or two from academics. Unlike journalists, academics constantly ask: How do we know what we think we know? We are steadfast in our convictions yet work to ensure that our claims can be supported with rigorous research. Without belittling the power of individual experience, we question the application of a single observation to a larger population. When we as academics get something wrong, there can be significant consequences. I wish I kept a running count of how many online articles from journalists have completely misrepresented issues in higher education finance. But it doesn’t seem to matter: the article gets clicks, the comments section fills with heated debates, and the journalist moves on to the next story.

And let’s not forget a final but crucially important point missing in this conversation. Whether or not a piece of scholarship is read or immediately understood by the public is not, by itself, a metric of quality. When Einstein’s theory of general relativity was confirmed with experimental data, there was phenomenal press coverage. Very few people understood the theory, and many journalists blatantly mocked its abstruse language and equations. Einstein wrote a book that was designed to explain his work in more accessible language, but he struggled to respond to a litany of journalists begging him to sum up his theory in a sentence. While I agree that academics publishing work that never reaches the hands of those who most need it makes little sense, we must also admit that there is intrinsic value in producing knowledge, irrespective of the medium through which it is ultimately communicated.

What I would like to see even more than academics thinking like journalists and journalists thinking like academics is something closer to a true a hybrid. A journademic, if you will. This is not entirely invented out of thin air. I’m inspired by writers like Ida Tarbell, who wrote extensive, painstakingly researched pieces for McClure’s Magazine (no relation). Along with writers like Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens, Tarbell helped invent investigative journalism and took on major issues of the day, including wealth inequality and corruption. I’ve been encouraged to see long form journalism become marginally popular again, after years of listicles and, ironically, blog posts. However, I would love to see a whole movement of hybrids arise, channeling the muckracker spirit.

The ingredients for this movement are already sprouting. There is a growing population of people who are trained as researchers yet find little enticing or attractive about traditional academe, with all its exclusivity, competition, and bickering. And there are those who have PhDs that, due to a range of structural problems and through no fault of their own, could not find steady employment as professors upon graduation. Although some people do not believe “alt-ac” (short for alternative academic) is a solution to these structural problems, there is reason to be optimistic about the potential of people who can write fantastically well, are sensitive to social justice concerns, and approach problems with the conceptual vocabulary and methodological maturity of an academic.

What we need now are courageous publications and organizations who are willing to fund journademics. If academe is too rooted in the status quo and journalism is beholden to clicks and thinly disguised product placements, how can we promote writing at the intersections? I’m short on answers, but hopeful that such platforms exist and will readily support any that emerge.