In his final Bloomberg View column, Ezra Klein opined on some of the challenges of translating the products of academic research to journalists and, thereby, disseminating them to a wider audience. He's absolutely right that the relationship between researchers and journalists is or could be a symbiotic one. Nevertheless, there are some structural limitations, only some of which he identified, to what traditional translation and dissemination models can do.
As a practical matter, for research to be broadly communicated and made relevant, academics and journalists need each other. Academics know what's known or knowable in their area of expertise. Just keeping up to date takes considerable time, rendering most researchers too busy to fully keep track of what's policy relevant as well. Meanwhile, journalists know what's currently policy relevant, but, in general, do not possess a deep knowledge of potentially related research literature.
Recent experience has demonstrated that academic bloggers can help translate between the two worlds in novel ways. Klein lists a few, prominent blogs with academic contributors that have helped infuse policy discussions with evidence from the scholarly literature. Of course my work and that of colleagues on this blog and at The Incidental Economist has done just that in the area of health policy.
It's worth exploring why blogs are able to play this translation role better than any prior medium or technology. They key, as I've written before, is timing.
Journal articles often mistime the issues ... That’s not their fault. It’s baked in the cake. It just takes too long to prepare manuscripts for publication. The policy debate changes at a pace on the order of hours or days. It takes weeks to months to put together a journal issue (years, in some cases, if you include the time to review and revise manuscripts). Blogs can help here, by resurrecting journal content just when it is needed.
This is only part of the story, though. Even if the journal publication process could be reformed to be much faster, it still takes considerable time to propose, fund, conduct, and document research. Consequently, there are very few deep, policy-relevant questions that can be posed and thoughtfully answered at news-cycle timescales. Some other means of connecting the scholarly archives to the current debate will always be necessary and valuable. Right now, academic blogs play this role quite well.
Therefore, I'm not sure what Klein had in mind when he wrote,
[I]t would be better if academics didn’t have to blog, or know a blogger, to get their work in front of interested audiences. That would require a new model for disseminating academic work -- one that gets beyond the samizdat system used for working papers on the one hand, and the rigid journal publication system on the other.
Maybe his forthcoming Project X will show us a new way. Still, I cannot imagine there will ever be any way that doesn't involve subject-matter experts calling relevant work to the attention of journalists at just the right time, something blogs can do quite well.
What's needed is not less of that type of work, but more. Whether it's by blogging or sharing key insights via Twitter or other social media, academics can play important translation roles. The infrastructure is already there.
What's not is the right reward structure. If we want and need more expert input, if the hard work of translating academic literature to journalists when it's most likely to make an impact is of value to the research community, then those experts and that hard work must be professionally rewarded. If it is not, an awful lot of good work, conducted at great expense, will remain where it has been: buried in obscure, largely inaccessible journal articles. That is and would be a shame and a tremendous loss.
[Editor’s note: Austin Frakt, Ph.D., and Aaron Carroll, M.D., M.S. blog for AcademyHealth as part of our ongoing effort to raise awareness of health services research and increase its application in policy and practice. Their contributions to this blog are supported by the AcademyHealth Translation and Dissemination Institute, which is working to identify and support new and innovative approaches to moving knowledge into action, which includes testing new technologies and media as well as evaluating the potential application of approaches from related fields. Learn more about the Translation and Dissemination Institute on our website.]