The Public Face of Scholarship

I've posted my paper for the Harvard bloggership conference on SSRN: The Public Face of Scholarship (it will also appear on the bloggership site). Here's the brief abstract:

The web enables scholars to engage in several types of what I have called "amateur journalism." Of particular interest is scholars' ability to effectively leverage their expertise in commenting on matters of public interest. This form of expert engagement has the potential to reshape the relationship between academic experts and professional journalists and change the tone and content of public discussion.

My abstract is deliberately brief because it's a short article – go read the whole thing. Also, I have a blog, so I can describe it there, meaning here, in more detail, which I'm about to do. Read the blog, read the paper or, better yet, read both.

The paper is a spinoff from my general project on blogging, From Bricks to Pajamas. There I discuss blogs as a form of what I call "amateur journalism," and the regulatory implications of this analysis. In the conference paper, I talk about bloggership as a special form of amateur journalism.

I distinguish four types of academic blogging: free-form self-expression; a form of informal scholarship I call "blogicles;" self-promotion; and, my main concern in this article, "publicly engaged academic posts" or "PEAPs." Academic blogs can combine all four, or focus on one or more.

PEAPs let academics leverage their expertise into the public debate. As in my other paper, I focus on the relationship between this form of amateur journalism and professional journalism.

This gets me into a discussion of professional journalists' incentives, drawing on some of the recent economic and empirical literature. I see this literature as dividing professional journalists' incentives into two general categories – market-based, or demand-side; and journalist bias, or supply-side. I then speculate on how PEAPs may alter both types of incentives.

Some may be tempted to see PEAPs as a version of public intellectuals, and therefore to think about Richard Posner's book, Public Intellectuals, A Study of Decline. Although I don't get into Posner's book in detail, and I haven't thought this through, PEAPs may be the opposite of what Posner was describing, and a partial solution to the problems he discusses.

Posner criticizes a few big names who each seek a big effect on the public debate, despite being ill-trained for their tasks. PEAP writers, by contrast, don't seek important individual roles in the debate – their effect, if any, will be collective. Moreover, PEAPers don't get beyond themselves – they revel in their specialization, which is what gives them an edge over the professionals.

So maybe blogs will reverse the "decline" of public intellectuals by returning them to their niches. Or maybe PEAPing will be so intoxicating that it will populate the world with an army of public intellectuals who leave scholarship, and their comparative advantage, behind.