Why didn't we team up with a journalist?
Aaron Swartz asks why I didn't add a journalist as coauthor to Red State, Blue State, perhaps in the manner that Steve Levitt collaborated with Stephen Dubner.
The short answer is that nobody asked me. Like just about every other researcher who writes a book for a general audience, I was hoping for my new book to become "the next Freakonomics." If Dubner, or some other journalist, had called me up and said he wanted to write a book with me, I certainly would've given it serious consideration!
The other factor was timing. I came up with the idea for the book in summer, 2007. It came out in summer, 2008. There was barely time to get it published, let alone find coauthors. All would've gone smoother had I thought of writing the book (or if a journalist had suggested to me the idea of writing the book) a year earlier. Then it could've come out in early 2008, and maybe we'd be having this discussion two months before the election.
The way things should work is that brilliant statistical analysts like Dr. Gelman should write books like Red State, Blue State -- objective analyses of the real world -- and then quantitatively adept journalists should review them and use the books' insights as the basis for articles aimed at educated audiences.
The problem, though, comes in the phrase "quantitatively adept journalists." How many of them are there, really?
April 23, 2009 4:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
"and then quantitatively adept journalists should review them and use the books' insights as the basis for articles aimed at educated audiences."
I think the goal of every grad student is to get past the drudgework of generating and publishing research, and become a synthesist. Grand Old Person. Critique everybody else's work. Kinda like reporters want to be pundits rather than go around and finding things to report.
May 11, 2009 3:59 PM | Reply | Permalink