Bret Devereaux

Taking a moment to celebrate ACOUP hitting its 3,000,000th page view. I recall shortly after I started this I was gently chided by a more senior academic who I had asked for advice to remember that we don't do this "just to get followers" which was a fair and good point. 1/12

And there's certainly truth to that - we're not here to be internet famous, but to make an impact which fits in to a largely scholarly agenda. At the same time, you can only make an impact if people read what you are writing. 2/12

And people here has to be actually the public; too many 'public facing' scholarship initiatives are really thinly disguised conversations within the field. We talk to each other on twitter or in the Chronicle or wherever and call it 'public outreach' when it isn't. 3/12

One way to really reach out is to get on an existing public platform. I write with at least some frequency in places like FP trying to show how my training in ancient history can be valuable when thinking about modern issues. You can reach a lot more people that way! 4/12

But of course those platforms are limiting! They have house styles, and word-limits and topics they focus on. It limits what you can do. That's part of why I find ACOUP so liberating - I can write what I want to write, at the length I want to write. 5/12

That kind of stuff - more a lesson than an argument - is a hard sell for an editor at a newspaper or magazine. And I write at a length and depth that you just aren't going to get on most platforms. Standard op-ed columns tend to have word-limits around 1200 or so. 7/12

And few academics are sufficiently famous to be able to ignore that and do whatever they like and get it printed. My average post runs around 5,500 words and that includes Firesides, Gap weeks, etc. The really substantive posts, I'd guess, average closer to 10k words. 8/12