About Science+Story
Hi — I’m Bob Lalasz. I’ve been a research communications strategist for over 25 years, at places like The Woodrow Wilson Center, Population Reference Bureau and The Nature Conservancy and for the last eight years running my own firm, Science+Story. I’m pouring all of that experience into this Substack to look at one of the most undertold stories in science — the growing number of researchers and scientists trying to be experts in public, to change behaviors or influence policy or introduce new ways of seeing, to bridge the gap between their expertise and the rest of us. In the sea of low trust we all swim in today, I think the stories of these public experts are the story for science and research today — as well as for all of us who want a society that bases important decisions at least in part on evidence and expertise.
When I started my career, the science was the story. The researchers themselves were often the challenge — making sure they didn’t condescend to their audience, didn’t use jargon and didn’t fly off from their messaging into Caveatland. We never entertained the possibility that science itself would be seriously questioned.
Today, that questioning is table stakes. Yet so many scientists and researchers (and their communications staff), even the ones who are/were good on Twitter, remain stuck in decades-old communications paradigms — thinking they can rely, for instance, on a bedrock of public faith and goodwill in science and research. The domain experts who clung to those assumptions during the pandemic found out otherwise. We should take their experience as a warning, not an anomaly.
The project of Science+Story is to reexamine these assumptions and to help build new, effective ways of being a research-based expert in public. In a world that’s not just low-trust but that lionizes individual brands, the way back to trust in science and research is going to be predominantly through the work of individual public experts. Unfortunately, science and research communications research and best practices have little to say about that work — about how to attract and grow an audience for your thinking, about content strategy, about assessing media opportunities and new platforms, and about juggling not just your time but the very different mental postures and sets of skills of a researcher vs. a public expert. We’ll tackle all these topics and more here.
The mission of this newsletter (and the podcast that will accompany it) is to build some knowledge for other research-based public experts to rely on. Even though Substack’s business model is subscription-based, these resources will always be free. Having said that, please do subscribe and reply to any email to let me know what you think.
