TradMedia & The Age of Expertise
Why more and more experts are going direct to their publics—and vice-versa.
Shawn Willsey is a geology professor at the College of Southern Idaho, which also sounds like an identity you’d give the “obscure academic” character in your hobby screenplay. Willsey has also written a couple of books—Geology Underfoot in Southern Idaho and Roadside Geology of Idaho (written with Paul Link and Keegan Schmidt)—that probably aren’t on your nightstand, either.
But then there’s Willsey’s YouTube channel.
A YouTube channel on which, in his modest words, he posts “a variety of engaging videos to help folks understand geology from a variety of locations in throughout the western US and beyond.” Including frequently posting explainers and livestreams on the latest seismic and volcanic activity in Iceland, which has been a big deal lately, ICYMI.
The Iceland focus partially explains why 93,000 people subscribe to the channel, and why some of his videos have gotten around 1 million views.
I say “partially explains” because it’s not a given that 1 million people will watch your video just because you are a geologist trying to explain what’s going on as lava threatens to engulf a town in Iceland.
You also need to be very good at explaining. Which Willsey certainly is.
The Age of Direct Access to How Experts See and Process the World
Watch any Willsey video and you’ll quickly see what I mean. He keeps things moving; he doesn’t get bogged down in detail and jargon. He’s refined a direct presentation structure and style that tells a strong narrative about the Iceland eruptions through striking visuals, accessible analysis and just enough key science.
The first video of his that I saw was one of his most recent, but I didn’t feel as if I’d missed much if anything; I was easily able to jump in and follow the analysis and data and understand what Willsey thinks is coming next. And make no mistake: Willsey knows “what’s coming next?” is what his audience wants from him. (As of now, a new lava eruption early in March, he says.)
Some would call this “science communications”—but that radically sells short what Willsey is doing here. He’s allowing you in a very immediate, accessible way to experience how an expert sees and processes the data, the images and the science. He’s giving you direct access to his expertise.
Willsey’s allowing you in a very immediate, accessible way to experience how an expert sees and processes the data, the images and the science. He’s giving you direct access to his expertise.
But even being a great explainer isn’t enough to gather a committed and growing audience. You need to be explaining on a platform where your audiences can find your insights and share them with others. And you need audiences that have the habit of seeking out experts on their own to go deeper into a story—far deeper than conventional media are taking them.
Which, of course, describes not just why Willsey’s successful, but why tens of thousands of other public experts are now reaching their audiences in ways and with sustained dialogue they never dreamed possible. We’re in a new age of direct-to-public expertise, alongside (and, increasingly, supplanting) traditional media as the curator of expert opinions on what’s happening.
Expertise isn’t dying. Instead, experts are coming out from under the media thumb and translating their expertise into accessible content published on platforms (Substack, YouTube, podcasting, X and its competitors) that reach audiences directly, without intermediation. And audiences that care about these topics are finding the content and subscribing directly to the experts for more content.
You Are a City-State in the Information Space
This direct-to-public expert playbook is a radical rewrite of the public expert playbook of even just 18 months ago, which relied on a Jack “The Shining” Torrance level of obsessiveness with using pitching and cultivating media using Twitter, in hopes that media would quote you or publish your op-ed or somehow eventually express your ideas, even (and often) if without attribution.
The shift has happened in part because the accelerating evaporation of traditional media and especially journalism has left a media landscape, per The Ringer’s Derek Thompson, of extremely small and extremely large, where the survivors are either “city-states” (individuals or small collectives doing newsletters and/or podcasts) or “empires” like the New York Times. Everything in the middle (from your local newspaper to CNN) is failing. That’s terrifying if you’re a journalist; often lamentable from the standpoint of citizenry. But you can’t solve those problems. You can only take advantage of the opportunity it’s presenting.
You as public expert are a city-state, and one with potentially powerful impact on the civic discourse. You have the virtues of highly concentrated expertise and specialization as well as your powers of analysis and your opinions and style. That’s a package few media giants can challenge or will bother to.
But to have impact, you need to produce content that applies that package of virtues to a set of issues that a) you care about and b) others care about as well (or find out that they care about once they see what you’re doing).
That could be volcanoes in Iceland, a la Willsey. It could be what the latest evidence says on best practices for childbirth and childrearing, a la Emily Oster. It could how you should be thinking about using AI in your organization, a la Ethan Mollick, or the latest epidemiology, a la Katelyn Jetelina, or US fiscal policy, a la Claudia Sahm, or jazz and pop criticism, a la Ted Gioia.
I laughed when I read Ezra Klein go on the other week about the death of the music criticism site Pitchfork, and how that death epitomizes “what’s been lost as we’ve moved from an internet built around curation to an internet built around algorithmic recommendation.” When I read Ted Gioia, I think: He is so good, so smart, so accessible, so useful—why do I need Pitchfork? I’ll just go right to the expert.
‘Consumers Are Increasingly Picking the Expert’
The venture capitalist and podcast Jason Calacanis sees this generalist-to-expert dynamic as a defining media trend:
Calacanis estimates that 20-30 percent of tradmedia traffic has already been taken by expert city-states. Rafat Ali, the founder of Skift, which covers the travel industry, goes considerably further, arguing that mainstream journalism’s lack of expertise (when compared with the rise of public expertise) has made it culturally obsolescent over the last decade:
I agree with the way Matt Yglesias frames this problem for journalism in his recent essay “The two crises in the news business.” The structural crisis for journalism jobs, he argues, isn’t one of declining public literacy and appetite for information. It’s one of competition—including from public experts:
"The loss of these jobs is a disaster for journalism careers, but they're so painfully and utterly gone in part because their loss clearly isn't a disaster for the reading public. People can still find out about movies and world affairs. They're surely better-informed than ever before…The internet has dramatically increased competition — both among news outlets for audience, between news outlets and things that are not news outlets for audience, and between news outlets and everything else for ad dollars. This has been good for both readers and advertisers, but bad for news producers, including journalists." (emphasis mine)
Stop Worrying about the Future of Media. You are the Media.
Journalists (and conventional science communicators, who are utterly dependent on the media for impact) have become really good at worrying about the future of journalism—it’s a question they’ve been asking for 25 years without reaching much of an answer.
In the age of expertise, that question is at best secondary, and the model it was based on is evaporating. There’s a new model for you to embrace—one that requires a new skill set and a more direct relationship with the audience you want to influence. Your primary tasks as public expert are to
Identify your audiences;
Address questions they care about and that you have strong, evidence-based perspectives on;
Create accessible content for them on platforms where they can access that content directly, subscribe to your future content and share it with others, building your audience for you;
Rely on strong narratives, compelling visuals or audio, the most relevant research, crisp points-of-view and a minimum of jargon.
It’s not easy, especially for busy researchers. And Shawn Willsey makes it look much easier than it is. But it’s a much better bet than the old Jack Torrance media-first playbook.