In the past six months, I have had countless conversations with academics about getting the press to pick up their research. They've spent years and years studying and writing about a particular topic and then only five people end up reading their papers. There are a lot of reasons for this gap between academic writing and journalism. The articles are hidden behind a paywall. The academic writing style can be daunting to read. Academics don't know how to reach out to the press.
I fielded so many questions from professor-friends about this topic that I tried to convince an editor-friend to become a consultant for academics looking to publicize their work. She thought about it for a fraction of a second and then said no. She said that she hated to hurt people's feelings and she thought that most academics have unrealistic expectations about their research. "If I will write it, they will come." Uh, no.
Let me just share some advice that I've handed out lately.
1. If you've written a book, then turn the first chapter into an article. Take out the jargon, the methodology section, the literature review, pomposity, all of the charts, and make it fun. Then send an e-mail to the editors of the mainstream magazines that publish articles aimed at the educated audience. The e-mail should include a snappy subject line, two or three paragraphs that sum up the article, and a short bio. If you don't hear back from the editor in a day, then he/she isn't interested. Send it somewhere else.
2. Get the names of the reporters and writers who write about your particular topic. Send them the paper. In the e-mail, tell them why your research is important and how it fits into a hot topic. Nobody is going to write an article based entirely on your research. They want your research to boost an article about a hot topic.
3. Let me repeat myself. Find out the names of writers and bloggers who write about your topic. Follow them on Twitter. Send them your research, because the paywall won't let them find it otherwise. For example, I love writing about political-sociology, parenting, autism, education, and public policy. If you have reseach in those areas, I will write about it. I don't write about all areas of political science. I won't do voting data or foreign policy, but there are plenty of journalists who do. Find them.
4. You have to work as your own publicity agent. Well, everyone does these days. My twitterfeed is full of people pushing their writing. That's cool. I read a good chunk of those articles and RT many of them. All this networking takes time. You can't just set up a twitter account and make your first tweet be about your research. You have to build your network first. Show good will by RT-ing other people's work. You have play nicely in the sandbox.
5. If your research is very, very narrow, then you have to tell the journalist how it fits into the bigger picture. You might have to include references to other papers and books. You want to make it as easy for them as possible.
More thoughts from John Sides.
Apt. 11d 
Take out the jargon, the methodology section, the literature review, pomposity, all of the charts, and make it fun.
The methodology section is the fun.
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One of my journalism professors said that the problem with a lot of academics who try to write for the mass media is that they are terrible, boring writers.
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It’s very hard to have a specific article or book mentioned by journalists, but it is much easier to let journalists know they can go to you for quotes when they have a story on your topic. Blogging is really useful in that regard because journalists do searches when they have a story, and they want experts who are following current events.
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Yes, Greg, totally agree. But blogging takes up a lot of time. I’m only doing it, because I’m a compulsive writer. I’m not sure that I would tell anybody with a full time job to do this.
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This is fantastic advice, Laura. I’m a journalist who’s lurked here for a looooong time and only occasionally commented. (I was behind that call you got from the WSJ about the quote ostensibly from… Marx, was it? … during the financial crisis.) Anyway, academics: Listen to Laura because she is right.
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I would second and third the point about being your own PR person on twitter and facebook. Promote, promote, promote. Believe in the worth of your article/blog post/photo.
Twitter is for being clever and witty to draw people to pounce on your link. Facebook you can expand a little when describing what you have written. I’d do both – often they are two different communities with a bit of the old Venn diagram overlap.
And like Laura said, intersperse your own tweets about your writing with RT’s and responses to others. It’s a community that you are building step by step. No one wants to follow someone who is only saying “look at me, look at me”.
If you are blogging, see if there are conferences in your area of interest to attend. If not, organize some meet ups in your area. More community building, but this time face-to-face.
Add some humanness to your tweets/facebook updates/blog posts. Yes there are a zillion out there but you can distinguish yourself by providing not only topnotch original content but some personality.
And if you decide to blog, you can do three posts a week and keep it to that. One can be a curated post of links with the other two being original content.
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How does this apply to historians?
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There are plenty of venues/journalists that write about history. Look in the culture section of newspapers and magazines.
michaela, yes, I remember that interview with the nice guy from the WSJ. And I remember your comments here, too. 🙂
Sandra is right that this advice can be applied to everyone. I don’t read my RSS feed anymore. I get 90% of my reading via twitter through self promoted links or recommendations from the people that I follow. And she’s right that there has to be a balance of what you put out on twitter. I did unfollow someone for too much self-promotion. Oh, she was awful. I don’t use Facebook for promotion stuff. Half the people on there are cousins or people that I don’t remember from high school. They don’t read much.
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How does this apply to historians?
“The Crimean War. Learn these lessons, or you are doomed to repeat it! And really, the potential repercussions from just a single repeat naval battle between France and Russia in 2012 HAVE to be worse than the effort it would take to read my article.”
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GREAT advice, but I wouldn’t expect anything else from you. 😉
I’m DYING to put my research out there… it probably wouldn’t be part of news articles, or anything, but I would at least like to make the data I collected for the dissertation available in a website (database of Brazilian writers in English translation, database of Brazilian authors — throughout all of Brazil’s history — divided by gender).
I just don’t want to have to pay for the website myself, so it would be go to do it through the university, but I don’t know how exactly that would work, etc. But I’m always thinking about this.
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(first sentence was supposed to go, “I would expect nothing less from you” — the original comment disappeared after I clicked something wrong & got taken to a print page).
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There is a site in Australia that’s doing this. You might be interested in it. http://theconversation.edu.au/
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Very thoughtful. I would distribute it among my colleagues. Thanks and regards…
http://www.carbonated.tv
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