'The Real Reason Nobody Reads Academics'

Appreciate the mention:

The Real Reason Nobody Reads Academics, by Ezra Klein: New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently ignited a bit of a firestorm with a column asking why academics are irrelevant to public debates. I’d turn the question around: Why aren’t journalists better at taking advantage of academic expertise?

The most efficient arrangement would have academics communicate directly with the public. Thankfully for journalists, they don’t. ... It would be a disaster for our profession if academics became good at communicating what they know.

The relationship between academics and journalists should be a happy symbiosis. The two sides are perfectly designed, in strengths and weaknesses, to support each other. ...

The good news is the chasm is closing. Academics have increasingly turned to the blogosphere, opening a window on academic conversations that were formerly out of view. In political science, for instance, the Monkey Cage is a minor miracle. In economics, Mark Thoma at the Economist’s View is tireless in tracking discussion across the profession.

Still, it 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. If academia was easier to keep up with, I think a lot of academics would be surprised to learn how many journalists care about their work, and I think a lot of journalists would be happy to find how much academic research can do for their stories.