[Air-L] Taylor Lorenz ?

[Richard Forno]

> On Feb 20, 2025, at 12:08, Morten Bay via Air-L <air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
> 
> There appears to be a general reluctance toward using academics as expert sources among American tech journalists - in contrast to almost any other beat in journalism.
> I honestly don't get why podcasts and YouTubers don't avail themselves more of this. Particularly our community is brim-filled with people like Dr. boyd who express themselves clearly and compellingly about sometimes quite technical concepts.

Perhaps it depends on the reason/discipline/topic?  Speaking for myself, I'm pretty much the go-to person for media enquiries at my uni for stuff related to cybersecurity/warfare, privacy, and technology policy stuff and get enquiries fairly regularly  -- but admittedly, had a modest media presence for 20ish years beforehand.  

That said, as a professor I get more 'current events' contextualizing - type requests than longform podcast interviews, but I've done a bunch of them as well, including just last week.  But still, doing effective science/risk communication to the public, regardless of medium, is a responsibility I take seriously as a longtime (former) industry professional and current professor. (But there are some places I refuse to source, give quotes, or go on TV for on principle, and have told my uni PR folks as much.) 

After 15 years in academia now, you're right that many journos don't necessarily KNOW about faculty qualified to discuss topics. Why? Both as a function of academia generally but moreso probably (outdated) tenure expectations, we're trained/conditioned to only publish in academic venues with limited readership and/or public visibility and that only those venues matter for 'serious' scholars.  Few if any journalists/media sites are going to know of Dr X from their work in the Journal of Existential Contextualization or their well-received remarks at the Fifth International Conference on Hallway Cookie Comparisons.  However --- if you also speak at an industry/government venue or publish op-eds or on your blog/professional site and you'll likely raise your chances of getting noticed by journalists downt he road.  (Of course, that might not be 'acceptable' activity for many tenure committees, which is an indictment of their 'standards' in the modern day, but I won't go there now.)

As folks from the internet humanities, I agree we are ideally suited, and hopefully trained, to be effective public communicators about things within our area of expertise.

> From side-hustling as a tech journalist myself, I have come to suspect it has to do with the fact that many of the younger tech journalists currently dominating the discourse are actually not trained as journalists, but came up through blogging and social media.
> 
> This means that they don't know the value of leaving the expertise to the experts in reporting. They want to be the experts themselves.

Very true.  So many younger journos (not just tech, but generally)  have no idea about the internet or technology pre-2001.  It's staggering how many folks treat TOPIC$ or ISSUE$ or EVENT$ as a 'new' thing when in all likelihood it's happened before. So part of my time is often spent providing background context to the journo to help them frame the current item in a broader context, usually with me by ending with "meh, we've seen this before, no big deal."  *sigh*

On a semi-related note, speaking of the media, my personal crusade is to get journalists to link to primary documents in their articles.  As Morten says, they (mostly their companies, not them personally) want to be the gatekeepers of public knowledge and perceived 'experts'.  To wit: when I ask reporters why they don't include links to reports/studies they're writing about, the answer often is that their paper "doesn't control the destination link, and if it gets broken down the road, it looks bad for us."  (I don't buy that one bit...)   It's beyond infuriating to this critical mind.  :/

Grrr, argh.

-- rick

-- 
Dr. Richard Forno 
Teaching Professor, CSEE
Director, Graduate Cybersecurity Programs
Assistant Director, UMBC Cybersecurity Institute
Affiliate Scholar, Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society