As a long-standing fan of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science website, I was interested to read Dr. Goldacre's recent pieces of advice to old media. I reproduce point 5 below:
"Employ more editors, and fewer journalists. The lesson of this site is that journalists are not good at mediating the knowledge and understanding of experts. Instead, give us unmediated expertise. Do not write about the expert: get the expert to write for you, and get an editor to make it read better, if you need to. Editors are the unsung heroes of print media, not journalists. Understand this: unless you’re a voice, a Charlie Brooker, we don’t actually care if you think you can write “like a professional”. Online we can go straight to people who actually know about stuff, and they can usually write just fine. Give them to us, or we will enjoy them without you."
'I can do that', I thought. After all, I know something about the structure of geological basins, and something about petroleum geology. It will have the added benefit of making me keep up with current research. So this is my attempt at giving the world my 'unmediated expertise', for what it's worth. Watch this space.
Playground example of gravity-driven deformation
9 years ago
2 comments:
excellent. every single discipline has at least five interesting stories, and nobody cares if they're new, in fact we prefer the older, better, truer ones.
Cheers!
I'm feeling my way a little with this, and I'm not sure just what would be interesting to non-geologists, so any comments (favourable or not) are appreciated.
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