Category: Media Engagement

What kinds of experts do journalists turn to most often?

Last week in an effort to answer that question, Informed Opinions emailed several hundred editors, producers, hosts, columnists and reporters.

Looking to make our experts database more useful – and gain some insights for a conversation we’re having with the Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council of Canada – we listed all the disciplines cited on SSHRC’s site, and invited our media contacts to identify the ones they called on most frequently.

The exercise was very subjective, of course, and many of the 11% who responded qualified their selections with comments about their particular beats or the built-in biases of their jobs. Others pointed out that the discipline is invariably less relevant than the capacity of the expert to provide cogent and accessible analysis, cite examples and make connections – in other words, live up to the vaunted title of “a good talker”, as they say in the broadcast biz.

But we still found the results revealing.

Not surprisingly at a time of worldwide fiscal restraint and ongoing concerns about global financial meltdown, economics topped the list. Criminology, however, was a close second, and its prominence can’t be explained in the same way, since crime rates are actually falling. We suspect the inherent drama and conflict of crime news, in conjunction with the federal government’s crime legislation, are at work here.

Political science and environmental studies tied in third place – both predictable, given the impact that politicians’ decisions have on us all, and our collective concerns about sustainable energy sources and the impacts of climate change.

We were surprised, however, by the fact that law was comparably low on the list, given the number of law profs we’ve trained who have gone on to publish commentary, relatively little of which related to criminal issues.

If you’re a journalist and would like to receive future news or queries about our work diversifying the source pool, please connect with us via our homepage or on LinkedIn. And if you’d like to offer feedback on this issue, the original, complete list appears below.

Anthropology
Archaeology
Archival Science
Classics, Classical & Dead Languages
Communications and Media Studies
Criminology
Demography
Economics
Education
Fine Arts
Folklore
Geography
History
Industrial Relations
Interdisciplinary Studies
Law
Library and Information Science
Linguistics
Literature and Modern Languages
Management, Business, Administrative Studies
Mediaeval Studies
Philosophy
Political Science
Psychology
Religious Studies
Social Work
Sociology
Urban and Regional Studies
Environmental Studies

In the middle of delivering an op ed writing workshop recently to a very engaged group of United Way staff and volunteers from across Ontario (organized through Sean Moore‘s fabulous Advocacy School initiative) I was reminded again of the value of a second pair of eyes.

It’s not that I don’t know this already: even though I’ve been writing op eds and columns for more than 20 years, I confess to the people I train that I never submit anything for publication without running it by another set of eyes first. (Fortunately for me, my significant other is a fine writer who is quite willing to flag bits that are confusing or use unnecessarily obscure language. And I frequently perform the same task for him.)

But in the workshop, my explanation of the critical starting point for writing an op ed — identifying the central argument or thesis — wasn’t sufficiently clear to some of the participants. Then Janice Manchee, United Way’s National Director of Labour Programs and Services, rephrased my instructions and encouraged her colleagues to:

“Think about what you want people to believe after they’ve read your piece.”

I recognize brilliant advice when I hear it. And in fact, when teaching basic communications strategy, I often stress the value of explicitly articulating the purpose of a letter, meeting or op ed — expressly in terms of the desired outcome — before starting to craft the message itself. This seems obvious once you say it, and good communicators often do this unconsciously.

But even for those who are naturally effective in both their written and spoken communication, it’s sometimes really useful to craft into words the precise outcome you want before you start. The act of writing it at the top of your page as a reminder can help you focus your argument and gauge which of the many threads you could include are likely to offer the most compelling support for the case you’re trying to make.

One of the most useful exercises we do in the workshop is to annotate previously published op eds. If the argument being made isn’t clear, participants sometimes have a difficult time identifying the commentary’s thesis. (Which suggests that it’s unlikely that the writer actually achieved her objective.)

Other pieces are aided by a headline that effectively sums up the argument in a few words, such as: “More voices needed on national food strategy” or “Vigilantism no fix for gender violence”.

But when writing a short form newspaper commentary, it’s best not to rely on an attentive and perceptive headline writer to grasp and summarize your point in a few words that conveniently fit into the available space. Because your argument is likely to be much more effective if you write the piece in such a way that everyone who reads it will be clear about what you think and why.

“Yeah, but I’m not Eddie Greenspan.”

That’s what I thought last December when Globe and Mail op ed page editor, Natasha Hassan claimed to a room full of Osgoode Hall profs that her paper’s online commentary hub was an enormously influential platform. Most participants in Informed Opinions workshops, if they submit an op ed to the Globe, are much more interested in seeing their labours published in the actual newspaper, as well.

To make her case, Natasha cited a recent piece by internationally recognized defence lawyer, Eddie Greenspan, which he’d resisted giving her for online use only, sharing my belief that it wouldn’t actually net much of a readership. Instead, she told us, he got a great deal of response, not just from Canadian readers, but American as well.

But — not having represented Conrad Black, Garth Drabinsky or Robert Latimer (let alone hosted my own CBC radio series) — I doubted this as a representative example.

And then on the day of the Alberta election, I was proven wrong. I had submitted a piece to the Globe three weeks earlier, arguing that a neck-and-neck race between two strong female leaders made it more likely that matters typically marginalized as “women’s issues” might merit more attention. I didn’t immediately hear back from Natasha and was too busy to follow up or offer it elsewhere. But a few days before the election, she offered to publish it online. Given its imminent expiry date, I agreed. But I wasn’t optimistic.

To my surprise, however, the piece generated two additional interview opportunities. Sun TV emailed the morning it appeared, and a reporter from the Calgary Herald called later that week, both wanting to hear my views on related matters.  So that was the first lesson: Natasha was right about the profile achieved by online commentary.

The second lesson concerned the Sun TV request. Because I get most of my news from print, radio and online sources, my only exposure to Sun TV had come via Youtube. Like many others, I had cringed through the sorry spectacle of attack dog Krista Erickson treating dance icon Margie Gillis like she was a convicted felon.

My colleague Claire, who fielded the Sun query, confessed to the producer by email that she was reluctant to recommend I make time for the interview, given this infamous episode. He wrote back assuring her that Caryn Lieberman, the anchor who would be speaking to me live from Toronto, was a professional.  And she was.

“No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine.”

“Tap-dancing child abuser. That’s what The Sunday New York Times from March 8, 1993, had called Vivi.”

“But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction.”

Are you intrigued by one or all of these sentences? Does your mind immediately respond “Why not?”, “Did she deserve the label?”, “Well, what are you going to speak about, and why are you departing from the assignment, anyway?”)

These opening lines by, respectively, Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey), Ann Brashares (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants), and Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own) do a good job of engaging readers’ imagination, and inciting a sense of wonder. (And, courtesy of Stylist, you can peruse a subjective listing of literature’s other “finest first words” here.)

Sometimes in an attempt to establish the relevancy of the topic they’re addressing, aspiring op ed writers will start their pieces with an unassailably true declarative statement that everyone will recognize as such. (“The population is aging.” “Wait list lines are too long.”)

This is not a good strategy. What’s the incentive to read further when the opening line tells us something we already know? “News” is, ahem, new.

In contrast, beginning with a provocative, contradictory or counter-intuitive claim is much more likely to pique curiosity and encourage people to keep reading — if only to find out how the hang you can justify your opening line. On the Resources section of the Informed Opinions site, we’ve devoted a page to offering examples of different approaches to the lede. (For more examples and an explanation of the spelling of “lede” — no that’s not a typo — see earlier posting.)

Last week at an intellectually stimulating but relatively staid scholarly event, a minor controversy broke out.

Harvey Weingarten, President and CEO of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (who gave one of the best presentations I witnessed during the day), discouraged the scholars in the room from imagining that the news media would be remotely effective in delivering the researchers’ policy-focused messages to government.

Jatin Nathwani, one of the distinguished Ontario Research Chairs whose work was being feature at the COU- and York University-sponsored symposium, rose to challenge the assertion, telling all assembled that his own media commentary sometimes resulted in civil servants pulling him aside months afterwards to say, “thank you — your expressed opinions were very useful…”

As a weekly columnist for the Vancouver Sun for a few years in the mid-1990s, I also experienced first hand the influence that could occasionally be exerted by a 750-word public memo disseminated through a daily paper boasting hundreds of thousands of readers. Within days of writing on the unfortunate long term impacts of a local hospital pushing freely-supplied infant formula at new mothers, the hospital changed its policy.

Although I take Dr. Weingarten’s point that researchers who have compelling information of relevance to policy-makers should employ a variety of strategies in trying to relay their message, the truth is that every high level political and government office in the country pays attention to what’s on the comment pages of major dailies — appreciating that those pages are read by opinion-leaders; often seed broadcast interviews and letters to the editor; and help shape public perception of an issue.

So using the news media to help spread the word about the policy implications of your research may not be a sufficient condition for success in shaping policy, but it remains — in at least some cases — an influential one. 

Should she or shouldn’t she?

I was chatting on the phone a few weeks ago with a woman who is listed in our Experts Database. She had written an excellent piece of commentary about First Nations and non-aboriginal Canadians that appeared in the Toronto Star, and was wondering why, since the article appeared at the height of the Attawapiskat media fray, she hadn’t received any feedback, comments or debate. When I asked her if she’d shared her article with her network, she confessed that she doesn’t use any social media.

Adding Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media to your to-do list might seem like a slog. But if you’ve taken the time to write, and successfully publish media commentary or a blog, and would like to increase its impact and readership (and your influence!), these tools can be invaluable. Here’s why:

• They help you build a network and connect with others working in your field or area of research that you may not meet otherwise.
• By retweeting, using hashtags and linking to external sites you can start a conversation or debate on Twitter with a “Twitterverse” of over 100 million people from across the globe.
• Sharing the link to an article you wrote, your personal blog or your research will increase the accessibility of your work and the likelihood that it will be seen and appreciated by a wider audience.

At Informed Opinions, we use Twitter regularly to spread the word about our events, share the commentary that it published by our grads, and pass along other information that we find interesting. By adding hashtags to our posts, we expand our reach well beyond our own followers to millions of Twitter users. We share details, stories and photos of our successes, events and latest news on Facebook, and build professional relationships with people and organizations on LinkedIn.

Our goal is to encourage and train expert women to participate in public discourse. While our workshops focus writing newspaper commentary and saying “yes” to media interviews, we hope that women will take advantage of all the available platforms and tools to broaden the reach of their ideas and knowledge.

It hardly seems fair: you spend years in school, mastering the impenetrable jargon necessary to earn the degree or qualify for the professional designation.

And then someone (ok, that would be me — backed up by thousands of journalists and plain language advisors across the country) tells you to lose the language that demonstrates your expertise.

The thing is, it’s a tragic waste of time and energy to provide commentary about critical issues if the analysis isn’t accessible to the people you’re trying to reach. And the specialized vocabulary used by lawyers, scientists and professors of all disciplines is often completely incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t share the education.

I understand the reluctance to  “dumb down” one’s writing; nobody wants to be seen as lacking intellectual heft or gravitas by her colleagues.

But given the serious potential consequences of all sorts of complex situations, we desperately need those delivering important insights to be able to communicate in a way that’s clear to as many people as possible.

I became a regular newspaper columnist while working to complete a master’s degree. My editor, who really wanted to avoid sending readers of his page into eyes-glaze-over mode, occasionally had to remind me to save the references to systemic oppression and hegemony for my thesis. Fifteen years – and countless other editorial interventions since – I’ve become much better at policing my own language.

But I still have someone else read every piece I write in draft form before I submit it for public consumption. (It wasn’t in the marriage contract, but he’s very obliging.)

Television’s day may be waning, but it served me well in the late 1990s – both generating attention to issues I cared about, and enhancing my status among the students I taught.

Hired to teach writing and presentation skills to recalcitrant turf management and accounting students (who had chosen their career paths in part so they could avoid having to write and speak), I had to work overtime to convince them that the skills were valuable. They were skeptical and frequently unmotivated.

But one day I entered the classroom to an excited chorus of “Ms. Graydon, we saw you on TV!” Suddenly I had new cred.

I was still serving as the President of Media Action (then called MediaWatch), Informed Opinions’ parent organization. And occasionally I’d give media interviews on some aspect of the portrayal and representation of women in the media. Such appearances elevated me considerably in the eyes of my students, counting for much more than my graduate degree, corporate experience or list of speaking engagements.

I was reminded of this today reading a blog post by former tenure-track prof, Julie Clarenbach, who writes about some of the challenges that female scholars still face.

Because academia relies on a narrative of merit, there is often a cultural assumption that academia is an equal playing field. And because of this, lots of smart, talented women have blamed themselves for the ways the system has undermined and devalued them.

She then lists a number of tendencies and conditions that contribute to women feeling unequal in universities, including the observation that

Women have a more difficult time projecting and owning authority in the classroom.

I don’t know if this is, in fact, true (never having taught as a male, I didn’t have a basis of comparison), but I do know that media exposure definitely enhanced my authority with my students. The implied endorsement by a source that also delivered MTV, hockey games and their favourite sit com was pretty powerful.

Giving media interviews or writing op eds (that sometimes lead to media interviews) won’t address all of the barriers that Clarenbach cites on her blog, but such activities don’t hurt.  (In fact, I sometimes joke that I owe the past 20 years of a varied and interesting career to the profile I’ve gained as a result of commentary writing and the exposure it inspired.)

Something to think about…

Scholars accustomed to sharing evidence-based analysis grounded in research and purporting to be fact sometimes express discomfort with the idea of expressing the kind of strong opinion favoured by op ed page editors. They might benefit from the example offered by CBC Televsion’s intrepid attack dog, Terry Milewski.

Profiled in the Globe and Mail last week, the veteran reporter volunteered that he feels a similar tension when asked to stand-up reports with CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge.

“More and more we’re doing our work live, and invariably the first question you’re asked is “What do you think?” And the trick is to say, “Well, there are those who say”, or “Some critics believe that” or “On the one hand there are those who think…”

A similar approach — offering evidence both for and against a particular proposition — can permit academics to acknowledge ambiguity, provide nuanced context and offer the very useful “to be sure” counter argument to strengthen the case being made.

But at the end of the day, comment pages are a place where people expert in their fields are expected to come down on one side of the fence or the other. Because if you — as one who is “smarter than the average bear” and therefore has a particularly informed opinion – don’t know what to think, how are the rest of us to come to any conclusions?

What if you don’t have time to write an op ed but one of the issues you care most – and know lots – about is in the news?

Write a letter to the editor, instead; you only need to come up with 250 words. (This means, of course, that you’ll have to pick a precise focus, but getting practice at making very succinct arguments is enormously useful for anyone wanting to influence busy people.)

Last week, repeatedly inconvenienced by the postal strike, grumpy about having to pay more to send material by courier, and disinclined to scour the news coverage to learn more about what was at dispute, I was nevertheless arrested by a letter to the editor that provided some persuasive context to the bigger picture.

Writing in the Globe and Mail, Jim Young – like Governor Andrew Cuomo (see previous post) – put two values in opposition to make his point:

Thesis 1: In a fragile economy, companies must attract the most effective executives. To this end, they must be competitively rewarded (million-dollar salaries), lured by generous benefits (million-dollar bonuses), encouraged to stay (golden parachutes, gold-plated pensions).

Thesis 2: In a fragile economy, companies must become ever more competitive. To that end, workers must accept more competitive (lower) pay, more market-oriented (reduced) benefits, and more realistic (eliminated) pensions.

Since both theses are diametrically opposed, if either is sound, proven and effective, logically, the other must be faulty. Why then do we continue to apply this duality of reason to corporate compensation models? If rewarding executives is effective, surely rewarding workers will be equally so. If we really can’t afford to compensate workers and remain competitive, the lead in that direction should come from the top.

Mr. Young’s clear, rational appeal makes a compelling case for rethinking the indefensibly massive gap between many CEOs’ and workers’ salaries. (The ratio at Canada Post is no doubt much less stark than in the corporate sector, where the trend has increased significantly in recent years.)