Defining and moving towards academic journalism

While journalism is heading into the doldrums with increasing clamp downs on press freedom, self-censorship, dumbing-down articles for 'quick-take' journalism and widespread use of artificial intelligence, there is a new breed of journalism that is rising from this environment.

Academic journalism is an emerging genre where writers use the skills and intellectual tools from the academic world to research and create pieces of work that explain issues that are important to a general audience, community and society. Put another way, academics whether current or former university faculty members are finding a new outlet for their work to disseminate ideas beyond the restrictive boundaries of academic publications.

The final products of research are not academic journal articles, information is conveyed to the public via more popular writing styles, in mainstream and online media but also in radio, television, film or through other innovative information platforms including short-form and long-form podcasts. The structure of such pieces is a report of research, concluded with opinions based on the results of the research.

Today such journalism can be found in the independent media. Many academic journalists have their own websites, YouTube channels, Substacks, or other mediums such as Rumble.

The growing number of contemporary academic journalists include Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College history professor on Substack called Letters from an American with millions of subscribers, Glenn Greenwald a Pulitzer-Prize winning, former constitutional lawyer who also runs a Substack, Rumble and YouTube and Victor Baker Hansen, a war historian turned political analyst.

In the United Kingdom the historian David Starky, literature and social theorist and Germain Greer, British philosopher and writer Kathleen Stock and physicist Brian Cox all have significant media presence.

Academic journalists are scholars, writers and scientists who apply their expertise to broader public issues. They come from many disciplines. In science and technology, biologist Richard Dawkins, psychologist Steven Pinker and physicists Brian Greene and Carlo Rovelli are prominent. In politics and social policy political scientist Francis Fukuyama, historian Anne Applebaum and French economist Thomas Piketty have all provided media discourse that has sparked global debate.

Some public intellectuals who have gained notoriety include Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and Slovenian cultural critic and philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Both are known for using the insights of their primary field of research for social media commentary on much wider issues of public interest.

Even among the highest echelons Nobel Laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz write daily on economic policy and global trade in mainstream and social media. Perhaps the grandfather of academic journalism is a comrade of one of the writers on The 4^th Media, Noam Chomsky who turned from linguistics to social analysis.

The role of academic journalists through social media challenges that of organisations like the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), founded in 1831 which became the British Science Association (BSA) in 2009 and its counterpart American Association for the Advancement of Science founded in 1848. Even the British Royal Society, the Royal Society of Arts and their counterparts across all fields of intellectual engagement struggle to be relevant.

There are several key areas where academic journalists make a significant contribution. One obvious and important area is in 'explainer articles' which help distil complex ideas into informed and authoritative summaries for a general audience.

Academic journalists also play an important role in providing a critique and challenge of conventional wisdom and in emergency responses where issues emerge quickly and require detailed, immediate clarification. We saw this during the Covid era with Dr John Campbell, who became a world-famous source for daily, informed information on the virus.

Above all, academic journalists play a role in proposing new ideas and helping disseminate them for wider discussion and even in provocation of debate and discourse on issues of social, importance. This is a counter response to an environment where many issues, such as the transgender debate, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), religious discourse and even less sensitive issues such has environment and climate change, have been virtually banned from discussion in many universities.

Writing for popular magazines and using alternative media is shunned by many academics who believe it is a betrayal of academic rigour and the conventional view that academics should only be writing articles in peer-reviewed SCOPUS journals or academic publishing houses.

Nonetheless academics are increasingly turning to the alternative of academic journalism as a counter to 'cheque book' journal publications and processes for by-passing peer review of articles before publishing which is running rife and where so many academic journal articles are being retracted and withdrawn because of fraudulent data or results or even worse academic misdemeanours.

In addition, not many university faculties appear to realize or acknowledge that students want to be taught by 'public intellectuals' with names they know and can access easy through the popular media. This public profile is a huge value-adding feature of academic journalism and has profiling benefits for members of faculty and the universities themselves far beyond H-index scores, rankings, ratings and citations indicators.

The key contributions in academic journalism come from the basic skills that academics master. These include language and comprehension, learning from the rigours of historical research, using primary data and organising and analysing evidence as an academic would. Speaking a second language allows one to think in different paradigms. Having the discipline of a scientific training provides focus and rigour that few people have. Academic journalists master this.

Academic journalists write about issues the legacy and even popular media do not want to cover. Mainstream journalists would often not consider the details and nuances an academic journalist will write about.

Academic journalists tend not to repeat what others have already done. They are innovative on the subjects and issues they research and report. In this way, academic journalists produce novel and original content.

This is why many successful academic journalists now get higher views that some legacy media outlets and why academic journalism will be a genre that will develop as the main publication route for teaching and research.