Having to summarise years and years of work into one sentence can be frustrating, even painful. Yet that is often what academics face when trying to get their research noticed; journal articles are structured to prove validity, prioritise analysis and evidence, and justify methodology... dense work which can often be illegible for non-specialists. We see this all the time as PR specialists for business schools and universities, where our job is to translate that complexity.

Journalists, on the other hand, often need clear, compelling stories that can be grasped quickly and communicated to their audience. This tension between detail and digestibility lies at the heart of why so much important research never reaches the wider public. Couple this with technology, where the use of AI in academia is bringing along its own risks, and it’s easy to see how the job of a professor has never been more challenging.

Business Schools and Universities are under growing pressure to demonstrate impact, even as newsrooms shrink and journalists are asked to cover more with less. That’s why there’s great value in hearing from experts like Freelance Journalist and Lecturer Chris Stokel-Walker, who kindly shared his thoughts with me for BlueSky Education's latest one-to-one Q&A.

Please tell us about yourself, your background, and your current role

I am freelance journalist, author, and presenter specialising in technology and its impact on society. I have written for publications including WIRED, The Economist, The Guardian, Fast Company, The Washington Post, and many more.

Additionally, I’m an academic myself, lecturing on journalism at a university level. I have one foot in academia and so encounter a lot of colleagues' research.

In A Recent LinkedIn Post you said academics need to “cut the crap” if they want media coverage.

What do you mean by that, and what common mistakes do you see researchers making?

One of the frustrations that I have both as an academic who sees lots of colleagues doing really interesting work, and as a journalist who wants to pick up that interesting work and kind of disseminate it to a broader audience, is that the way that academics are encouraged to think about and present their work in academia, because of just generally the way that academic publishing works and academic research works, isn’t always compatible or useful for the best way of public understanding of their research.

Too often, I see potentially world-changing work that is never destined to go any further than a conference presentation and a paper that is referenced by peers in the academy. Some academics are happy with that being the case, but a lot of their research can be much more impactful. And so I’m always keen to try and make it possible for that to be the case, and that often just involves slightly tweaking the way that they talk about it so that it reduces the friction that journalists have to have in trying to translate and understand their work.

I would say that the majority of academics know that their work is important and impactful, and they do a lot of work in researching it and publishing within academia, and they often have a frustration and a confusion as to why their work isn’t necessarily picked up and spread further by the media. Because ultimately, the media, rightly or wrongly, are the gatekeepers through which this work can be interpreted.

How can academics and researchers strike the balance between simplifying for the public and staying true to the depth of their work?

The answer that I always give to this is it will always depend on the individual, your level of comfort and how willing you are to simplify in order to make things comprehensible. I always think that it is important, and it’s the reason why I write for publications that cherish ensuring scientific accuracy. I know there are publications that will overly simplify. You only need to look, for instance, at the multiple front-page stories from the Daily Express about how your bacon can kill you versus how bacon can save your life every other day.

This is a challenge. To me, the decision comes down to the individual academic as to the extent to which they are willing to try and meet the audience halfway. I would always suggest that they should try some parts, to get to this kind of middle ground, because ultimately, why are you doing this research if it’s not to have an impact on society, right? The more people who engage with your research, the more people they can touch and change and affect for the better.

I think without training, it’s very unhelpful, because ultimately, you’re asking someone to try and speak an entirely different language. There are, for instance, in scientific research, some science communicators who take these complicated concepts and are very adept and skilled at explaining them in a way that is understandable while also remaining honest to the underlying literature and research. Getting the word out about research is important to show that universities aren’t just ivory towers, and that the researchers within them are connected to their communities. The challenge is asking researchers to do this without giving them any training or time or budget, which means you’re asking them to do yet another thing on top of the already significant time and budget constraints. That is difficult, but not insurmountable, provided that you kind of understand how to make it work.

You’ve written about the role of AI in PR, pitching, and media engagement, saying that it is always obvious when AI has been used. Can you explain what you mean and how academics should approach AI in their comms?

It has to be used with caution. My advice would be to use it as a first pass to try and act as a collaborator, to bounce ideas off in terms of how can I communicate this very complicated concept that I research, which is chock full of academic jargon that frankly confuses even my peers in the academy, never mind the average punter on the street. Maybe use it as a way of trying to tease out a simpler way of explaining things.

But the risk with that is AI is kind of just a massive smoothing machine. And by that, I mean it kind of takes off all the edges, makes everything incredibly bland. So homogeneity of language, but also the use of analogies, messaging points, it will always tend towards the mean. And this is not interesting in journalism. If what you’re doing is just switching out overly complicated academic jargon that is incomprehensible to a reader, to replace it with overly simplified, bland prose that is understandable but not interesting to a reader, then ultimately you’re just doing different sides of the same coin. Really, you need to be able to communicate honestly, authentically and engagingly with an audience to try and get that coverage.

AI prose has a kind of certain smell to it that is a little bit off-putting and just doesn’t seem quite right. The best journalism is read because it has idiosyncrasies and human interest. So trying to use it as a first pass might help, but I would always be cautious about using it alone.

Finally, is there anything else you’d like to tell academics?

Just that I understand that this is really difficult and hard to do. The reason why I set up training is that there is not just a gap in terms of how academics are communicating, but there is a gap in terms of institutions’ ability to provide insights on how to communicate, because everybody is working so hard to do stuff that they often don’t have the time to devote to actually understanding what journalists want. There are often elements of second-hand whispering, of thinking you they know what journalists want, not actually knowing what they want, and then trying to communicate that.

Author: Alexandre Lopez

Having studied at top institutions including Sciences Po, City University of Hong Kong, Oxford Brookes University, KIMEP University and having completed his Masters at the University of St Andrews, Alex’s insider knowledge means that he genuinely understands the inner workings of universities and higher education institutions. Alex has won awards for his academic writing and is fluent in both English and French, and proficient in Spanish.