Thank you, guys. I too very much enjoyed this conversation.

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Exactly.
It is the role of mediators as actors between academic and non-academic knowledge-spheres and the dynamics of implied transformation processes that keep me going for quite a while now.

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That was me as far as I m capable of your language.

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I only hope that, as an ethnographic encounter should, it points to some interesting issues, in this case the relationship of academic research, not so much to popular media (we are not talking Oprah here) but instead to that segment of the print media which caters to the folks that Robertson Davies (in a marvelous little book called A Voice from the Attic calls the clerisy, the self-consciously intellectual, both literati and policy wonks. In the USA these are people who read such periodicals as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books , American Scholar, Harpers,The Atlantic Monthly,Foreign Affairs, or Scientific American (sorry if I’ve left out anyone’s favorite). Arguably, an anthropology that hopes to be relevant to public debates has to appeal to these people. It should also appeal to wider publics, but if it doesn’t influence to this crowd, its chances of wider influence are slim.

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The New Yorker isn’t pseudo-academic. It is non-academic, but on the whole better researched and by far better written than any academic journal I know.

Wtf? Oh man, instead of spending years in the malarious tropics and submitting my findings to the J. Royal Anth. Inst. I should have just drawn up that cartoon idea I had for the New Yorker! Boy do I feel silly. Or maybe I should have done an interview with a real academic over coffee at Starbucks, and published that…

You are being a nob with a capital S. The problem with identifying so strongly with a magazine is that any time someone calls it a newspaper, you are going to feel all that dirty ink and newsprint on your hands, sullying your rep.

In fact I think most of this ‘debate’ has been the fault of the New Yorker, or rather people’s reading of it. The piece as written is light in tone, funny – intended to ammuse as much as inform. It is, in other words, nothing like academic writing. For this reason the article is very good, and does something different from what Bryant Simon’s study will eventually do. They fulfill different roles, and in the same way that criticising someones academic work based on a magazine profile is unjust, so too is comparing the writing skillz of that mag vis a vis an academic rag.

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That isn’t to say that there’s nothing useful in academic journals, simply that the prose is typically appalling and the fresh ideas far rarer than people like to pretend. (Those are my prejudices.)

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There are similar pseudoacademic magazines in germany and similar mechanisms at work within reception of those aka the content that is published in there.

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How would you know that characterizing The New Yorker as “pop media” would grate on the sensibilities of someone for whom being a New Yorker reader is a marker of belonging to the intellectual or at least highly educated class. Which is, of course, on my part a bit of intellectual snobbery.

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“a defensive maneuver that says “our journals are us, the rest have nothing going for them but being for the uninitiated.”

Despite of not having noticed to be defensive, I can’t follow. What I tried to maneuver your attention on are differences in writing that touch style as well as content in dependancy on adressed audience.

“Lumping it together with the likes of, say, Hustler(Pornography) and The National Inquirer(A tabloid famous for scandal and sensationalism, whose concern for accuracy is essentially non-existent) is stereotyping of the grossest sort.”

Probably that would be that way.

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http://orangemcm.twoday.net/

Is this not you?

Re “pop media”: This seems to me a far too facile characterization, a defensive maneuver that says “our journals are us, the rest have nothing going for them but being for the uninitiated.”

Note the Wikipedia entry’s remark that,

Within the journalism profession, The New Yorker’s fact-checking and copyediting teams have a reputation for unparalleled rigor. Lastly, the The New Yorker is noted for its peerless stable of writers, journalists, contributors, and critics, all in the top of their fields.

.

Lumping it together with the likes of, say, Hustler(Pornography) and The National Inquirer(A tabloid famous for scandal and sensationalism, whose concern for accuracy is essentially non-existent) is stereotyping of the grossest sort.

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“Just clicked through to your blog and realized that, since you are German, there is no particular reason why you should know that The New Yorker is one of the USA’s most famous magazines.”

Still, it is ‘pop media’.
Admittedly a ‘magazine’ is not a ‘newspaper’, but both do not adress an academic audience and therefore hardly represent an academic work to other academics, especially to those of the same or a kin discipline, in an adequate way.
Second, ad hominem, I googled on the author of discussed article and what stuck in mind were texts on football.
Now, probably author’s name is very common in the US.

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