Professors, PR and the public

July 22, 2009 · Posted in PR, Social Media · 5 Comments 

I’ve been thinking about a comment that I made on Gideon Burton’s Academic Evolution blog. In a post titled Scholar or Public Intellectual? I briefly talk about the sometimes uneasy relationship between higher ed pr professionals and academics and then state:

If PR can continue its turn towards authenticity and engagement and story-telling, and if academia can embrace its role in creating and disseminating knowledge, then I think we could get something really good going. Part of that means, of course, that academics are going to need to speak for themselves and PR people are going to need to be less gatekeepers as curators, connectors and consultants.

I wonder how that really would work and if it really could. I may get to some methodologies in later posts, but what I want to do first is pinpoint where my optimism lays. I think it comes down to this:

a) some academics are genuinely interested in playing the role of public intellectual or (because I think that term is a bit too laden with meaning) at the very least in using their expertise to help create a better informed citizenry.

b) some higher education public relations professional find helping bring that expertise to the public (and in a form that at least a portion of the public finds understandable and somewhat palatable) to be a very satisfying experience.

c) some of the general public finds scholarship that is translated (which doesn’t necessarily mean watered down) in to approachable forms/narratives interesting, illuminating and worth spending a bit of time with.

Given those assumptions — and yes, it gets sticky when one moves from the abstract to real world specifics — it seems to me that the media relations driven method of publicizing the work of scholars has been somewhat ineffective. In general, the news cycle and the needs of editors/reporters choose what research is of value and interest and how much of the news hole to devote to it. What’s more, it is told solely in narrative format without references to prior work and without conversation and often without much context (and generally forgotten the next day). The exciting thing about social media and about the concept of open scholarship is that good academic work packaged with the help of pr pros no longer needs to live or die (or be completely misinterpreted in some cases) by newspaper and TV news editors. The difficult thing is to figure out how to find the specific publics and match them with the scholars that share a mutual interest and finesse what the role of pr pros should be in that exchange. I have some ideas percolating. Hopefully they will soon be in expressible form.

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