*Everyone* should try to hire Tressie but... What she and I do—critical, social-science informed analysis of society as it interacts with rapid technological change—is only recently recognized as a valid field and still very little support for good public writing on the topic.https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/964196499268579328 …
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You'll notice we are both academics. Doing the research that grounds this writing is part of our job, and I suspect she is also using day job income to pay for housing. And writing because ... it feels like the right thing to do. This has some consequences.
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The problem with freelancing isn't just poverty. The attention economy online rewards ... the hot take. The under-researched, quickly written piece. Plagiarism. Faux edginess. Even doing outrageous things for attention. If it clicks, it leads.
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At the moment, I'm a "contributing opinion writer" at the New York Times. (I had no prior knowledge of or involvement with the recent editorial board hiring debacle—totally different area). It's an amazing perch to have. I work with great people. Love it. It's still freelancing.
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I could neither write with the depth I try to write, nor afford to do so, without my academic day job, and even with that, public writing is... a sacrifice of time, attention, sometimes career advancement. I am lucky that I work at a great institution with amazing support for it.
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But I'm mostly a one-woman operation.. because fundraising and grant-writing also takes time. I write because I think we need better understanding of it all, to shape it. It's still a personal cost. And I say this as one of the best-situated and luckiest people in this area.
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There are a great number of awesome academics who work in this field. The work they produce is awesome. It's what makes writing by academics in this area so much better than most everything else out there. We all depend on each other's work. That's the nature of academic study.
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However, public writing is yet another expertise to acquire and it is an enormous amount of work to do well and it is not going to happen.. without more resources devoted to supporting the endeavor. A few of us are a combination of lucky and somewhat self-sacrificing. Not enough.
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So, just like many things, the resources devoted to supporting an endeavor shape what's possible and how. I don't know what the right model is, but it is way, way past time that the tech/society beat/analysis gets the kind of support the importance of the topic demands.
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There is good work being done out there, but in very few outlets by not enough people. We need more, and it will not magically happen. /fin
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