Take Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus, sparking a protest which led to a Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional. Parks was a seamstress in her day job, but in her spare time she was involved with the civil rights movement. When Parks sat down on that bus, she wasn’t acting completely spontaneously: just a few months before she’d been attending workshops on effective communication and civil disobedience, and the resulting boycott was carefully planned by Parks and the local NAACP. After she was arrested, they used widely distributed fliers to launch a total boycott of buses in a city with 40,000 African Americans, while simultaneously pushing forward with legal action. This led to major progress for civil rights.

There are many ways to communicate ideas. One is social advocacy, like Rosa Parks. Another is more like being an individual public intellectual, who can either specialise in a mass audience (like Carl Sagan), or a particular niche (like Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist who wrote about global health). Or you can learn skills in marketing and public relations and then work as part of a team or organisation to spread important ideas.

Why are communication skills valuable?

In the 20th century, smallpox killed around 400 million people — far more than died in all the century’s wars and political famines.

Although credit for the elimination of smallpox often goes to D.A. Henderson (who directly oversaw the programme), it was Viktor Zhdanov who lobbied the World Health Organization to start the elimination campaign in the first place — while facing significant opposition from the members of the World Health Assembly (the proposal passed by just two votes). Without his communication skills, smallpox’s elimination probably would not have happened until much later, costing millions of lives, and possibly not at all.

So why has communicating important ideas sometimes been so effective?

First, communicating ideas is a way to have an impact on a large scale. Ideas can spread quickly, so communicating ideas is a way for a small group of people to have a large effect on a problem. Ideas can also stick around once they’re out there, meaning your impact persists.

If you can mobilise two people to support an issue, that’s potentially twice as impactful as working on it yourself.

Technology has magnified these effects even further. More than ever before, normal people can launch a social movement, lobby a government, start a campaign that influences public opinion, or just persuade their friends to take up a cause. When successful, these efforts can have a lasting impact on a problem that goes far beyond what the communicators could have achieved directly.

Second, spreading ideas that are important for society in a concerted, strategic way is neglected. This is because there’s usually no commercial incentive to spread socially important ideas. Moreover, the ideas that are most impactful to spread are those that aren’t yet widely accepted. Standing up to the status quo is uncomfortable, and it can take decades for opinion to shift. This means there’s also little personal incentive to stand up for them.

Third, communicating ideas is an area where the most successful efforts do far more than the typical efforts. The most successful communicators influence millions of people, while others might struggle to persuade more than a few friends. This means that it’s a high-risk strategy in the sense that your efforts might very well come to nothing. But it’s also high reward, and if you’re an especially good fit for communicating ideas, it might well be the best thing you can do. (Read about why we think more people should dream big if they want to do good.)

We think there are many high-leverage opportunities to use communications skills to help address the global problems we’re focused on today.

The problems we highlight are unusually neglected, so often few people work on them or even know they’re problems. This means that simply telling people about these problems (and effective solutions to them) can be high impact by increasing the number of talented people who might want to help. (Indeed, that’s part of our own strategy for impact!)

More specifically, communicators can help do things like:

• Encourage the consideration of ideas about the way AI might shape this century.
• Put concern for nuclear security back onto the political agenda.
• Spread important values, like moral concern for nonhuman animals and distant future generations.
• Mobilise efforts to prevent a pandemic much worse than COVID-19.
• Stand up for technology agnosticism to tackle climate change, especially for approaches that are unfairly unpopular (e.g. nuclear energy) or unknown (e.g. hot rock geothermal) or unsexy (e.g. decarbonising the cement industry rather than electric cars).
• Spread the ideas of effective altruism, as well as adjacent ideas like improving judgement and decision making (as in the example of Julia Galef below).
• Provide AI researchers and policymakers with the understanding required to successfully navigate the challenge of AI alignment.

Spreading important ideas like those above might not only have immediate benefits in terms of getting more people to work on these issues — it also helps to advance society’s understanding of these ideas, moving the discourse forward, making important ideas more mainstream, and eventually shaping policy and social norms.

You can see more information on the best solutions to the global problems we focus on in our problem profiles.

Another advantage of learning these skills is that they can be applied to almost any pressing problem. Almost all organisations have some need for marketing, public relations, and other external communications, and almost all problem areas have ideas that would be useful to spread. This gives you a lot of future flexibility.

Moreover, although some versions of this skill set are mainly useful in the social sector and for having an impact (e.g. how to run a direct action campaign), there are skills in this area that are highly paid and make you generally employable, such as marketing, sales, or public relations. Similarly, building an audience as an individual communicator often opens up a wide range of future career opportunities within your audience. So, learning these skills can give you backup options if you decide to step back from doing good for a while or earn to give.

A word of warning: it seems fairly easy to accidentally do harm if you promote mistaken ideas, promote good ideas in a way that turns people off (e.g. by being sensationalistic or dishonest), or draw people’s attention away from even more important issues. So, be careful about communicating ideas without much input from others, and, if you’re building communication skills, you may also need to build especially good judgement about which ideas to communicate and how to best communicate them.

What does building communication skills typically involve?

Content creation skills

One path we recommend to readers is to become a content creator. This often includes:

• Journalism
• Social media content creator
• Writing books
• Public intellectual

Less often among our readers it might involve:

• Film/TV/documentary director
• TV or Radio presenter
• Actor or musician

You’ll want to focus on the medium that’s the best fit for you, with the goal of building the most valuable audience you can for spreading important ideas.

Content creation careers often involve the following steps:

1. Honing your craft. Typically, a content creation career starts with learning your medium and then learning how to communicate effectively with a certain target audience (usually starting small, like with Twitter or a blog).

   Being really prolific helps a lot. If you’re able to make loads of different videos, or write 100 articles to pitch to various media outlets, that will substantially increase your chances of success. So if you’re blogging once a month and it’s not working out, see if there’s a way you could write a lot more.

2. Building an audience. If you’re working in a large organisation — for example, as a journalist — the idea is to build career capital so you can move somewhere that has a large audience.

   If you’re pursuing a career where you work more individually — for example, as a social media influencer or writing books — you’ll need to build an audience yourself. To do this, create lots of material to develop an audience to grow your future impact.
   You can probably jump around between working in large organisations and working individually — focus on finding opportunities where you’ll learn the most.

   In this stage, you shouldn’t necessarily be focusing on impact right away, but rather anything that builds your reach and credibility. Lots of digital platforms provide high-quality data that you can use to get rapid feedback on your content — so you can, for example, A/B test strategies.

   Bear in mind, the goal is not just to reach the largest number of people possible — it can be more impactful to have a niche but influential audience. You want to aim to build the biggest impact-adjusted audience you can.

   Credibility also often requires expertise, so you might also want to use this time to build that expertise by learning about the ideas you think are most important. (One great way of doing that — while practising your content creation skills — is learning by writing.)

3. Promoting the most important ideas. Once you have an audience, you can increasingly focus on figuring out how to use it to have the most impact. This usually involves thinking carefully about which ideas are (i) important (i.e. impactful if people know and act on them), (ii) neglected (i.e. not well known by your target audience already), and (iii) relevant or interesting to your audience, so that they’re more likely to be inspired to help with them.

The specific skills, qualifications, and approaches you’ll need to build will depend on the audience you’re trying to influence. If you’re aiming to communicate ideas to ~100 policymakers who specialise in a certain topic (like Viktor Zhdanov), the strategies you’ll use will be very different from someone aiming to communicate to the population in general (like Rosa Parks).

Some example approaches:

• Subject matter expert: trying to become known for being the point person on a particular topic — works best for more technical or niche audiences
• Translation: taking expert positions and making them accessible to a larger audience (e.g. science journalists, nonfiction authors) — sometimes works best for niche audiences (such as when translating technical research for policymakers) and other times works best for wider audiences
• Mass-media presenter: speaking to a large, mainstream audience (e.g. TV personalities, many journalists) — works best for creating mass buy-in for ideas

We’ve worked with some readers who have succeeded as individual creators, but it’s important to bear in mind many of these options are seen as glamorous, which makes them competitive.

For instance, a recent poll found that the most desired career path among Gen Z is Youtuber. And less than 1% of YouTube channels have over 100,000 subscribers.

If you enter one of the more competitive areas, like film, the competitive pressure can often mean you have to spend a large fraction of your career creating the most commercially viable and popular content rather than focusing on the most important ideas.

While we’ve worked with several readers who have become journalists, these other paths are often seen as glamorous careers, which makes them very competitive — so we typically recommend them less often.

However, if you think you might be able to succeed at getting to the top of one of these paths (and especially if you’re already on track), it’s often worth continuing. After getting established, it’s often possible to then devote, say, 20% of your time to projects that you think are socially valuable. You’ll also likely gain connections with many others who have large audiences, helping you spread important ideas indirectly.

Organisational communication skills

Another option is to learn skills like the following, and then work as part of an organisation or team who are spreading important ideas:

• Marketing
• Public relations
• Sales and negotiation
• Social advocacy and campaigning
• Visual design
• Copywriting and editing
• TV/film/radio production
• Publishing

The structure of these careers are similar to those focused on organisation-building skills, so see that profile for more specific advice on getting started and evaluating your fit. If you’re focusing on a niche audience of policymakers, then this skill set also blurs into the “policy influencer” roles covered under policy and political skills.

Briefly, you’ll want to start by working with a team who are outstanding at these kinds of skills.

That might involve joining a team that’s already working on an important problem, but it’s more common to first work at an organisation that doesn’t have much positive impact but can offer you mentorship and feedback. For example, you could learn digital marketing by working at a top startup or agency.

Once you have skills to offer, two options include:

• Find a job with a team who are spreading important ideas. This could look like working at an advocacy nonprofit, joining a political campaign, or being head of public relations for an author.
• Join an impactful organisation and work on their communications, public relations, or marketing strategies.

Communicating ideas alongside another job

Some jobs make communicating ideas their central focus, such as those we listed right above.

But it’s also possible to learn to spread ideas well in any job by:

• Being a sensible advocate for good ideas in conversation and refining your views over time
• Engaging with and recommending articles, books, podcasts, and the like to family, friends, colleagues, and others in your circles
• Posting ideas and articles on social media

You can also communicate ideas as a side project. For example:

• Run a podcast, blog, or Twitter feed with a significant following.
• If you’re an academic, do media appearances or write books aimed at a popular audience part time (i.e. be a ‘public intellectual’).
• Run a meetup, like an effective altruism group, and create materials for it (e.g. talks).

It’s possible to build skills for communicating ideas while you’re in a normal, stable job which gives you space to pursue projects like these on the side (although, if you want this to become your core skill set, we’d generally recommend eventually making building these skills your primary career focus, which can be hard to do if it’s a side project).

The careers that put you in the best position to spread important ideas (and learn to do so effectively) are those that let you:

• Build a platform (e.g. anything that makes you well known in your field)
• Get influential connections (e.g. working in government or policy)
• Gain credibility (e.g. being a respected academic)

Being super successful at anything that’s slightly public facing (for example, roles in academic research, or in government, or founding a business) can also put you in a good position to spread important ideas, even if communicating ideas isn’t a core part of the role. If Ariana Grande came to us for career advice, we wouldn’t recommend she quit music and become an AI safety researcher. Rather, we’d discuss how she might use her platform to spread important ideas that might appeal to her fans.

We haven’t worked with Ariana, but we have worked with an Olympic tennis player, Marcus Daniell. He decided to use his position — and especially his connections — to set up High Impact Athletes, which encourages professional athletes to pledge a fraction of any prize money they win to high-impact charities.

Communication also doesn’t need to be through nonfiction. For example, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality popularised ideas about the importance of agency and how common biases affect our ability to make good decisions (though using fiction to get across important ideas without manipulation is a rare skill).

Community building

Communication careers are defined by their focus on spreading ideas on a big scale, but it’s also possible to have a similar impact on a more person-to-person level as a community builder.

Some community building involves running events and organising others — similar to organisation-building roles. But at its core is the specific skill of building connections with others.

Community building often works well as a part-time position. For instance, Kuhan was a student at Stanford when they came across 80,000 Hours, and realised the importance of reducing existential risks. However, they also saw there were no organisations on campus focusing on that idea. So they founded the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative, which runs courses and conferences about the topic to build a community of students aiming to work on these risks.

Example people

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance

Some signs that you’re a good fit for building skills for communicating ideas include:

• You find it relatively easy to develop content in some medium. For example, you might find it very easy to write — whether that’s marketing copy or academic reports or popular articles. Similarly, you might find it fairly easy to make videos. Bear in mind that almost everyone finds writing and other creative work difficult. If you’ve found in your life that you can do this for a few hours a day and actually finish some work, you’re doing well.
• People tend to think you communicate clearly in that medium.
• You consume lots of content in your medium — for example, if you want to be a writer, you often spend all day reading blogs or articles.
• You are verbally fluent and have good social skills — but there are many exceptions. For example, someone can be nerdy and awkward but make an amazing blogger.
• You might need some basic quantitative skills — at least enough to be able to understand data about your work.
• You feel like you’ll be motivated by people seeing the work you’ve produced.

If you’re doing something like public relations in an organisation, then the advice in our organisation-building skill profile may also be applicable.

How to tell if you’re on track

Once you’ve started exploring communicating ideas, you’ll want to ask yourself: “How generally successful am I by the standards of the communication track I’m on?”

For instance, if you’re trying to become a journalist, are you on track to land a job after several years of trying?

Check our career reviews to see if we have a career profile covering the specific pathway you’re interested in. (Though we regret we haven’t yet written profiles on many of the common media careers.)

If you’re focusing on content creation work, some good signs that you’re on the right track are:

• You’re producing lots of content.
• You get good feedback on your content, relative to people who have spent a similar amount of time on it (don’t forget that most public communicators have honed their craft for years, often long before they were famous).
• You find it easy to connect with your target audience (through at least one medium) and convince at least some of them of new ideas.
• You’re starting to build a following or career capital that might lead to a following in the future.

It’s hard to generalise about what levels of following are ‘good’ at different stages. Here are some extremely rough guides for what might be promising after 2–4 years for different media:

• You’re often able to get 100,000 views per video on YouTube or 100,000 likes per video on TikTok.
• You have a podcast with over 1,000 subscribers, and a typical episode you release gets 3,000 downloads (though podcasts are especially hard to launch if you don’t already have an audience).
• As a blogger, you have a newsletter or Substack with over 5,000 subscribers.
• You have 10,000 followers on Twitter.
• If you’re aiming to get published in mainstream media outlets, you have had content in more than two major publications (e.g. The Guardian, Vox).

As a reminder: you don’t necessarily need to be writing about important issues at the early stages — what matters is that you will bring in more of these issues in the future.

How to get started building communication skills

You can start building a communication skill set by studying anything — or doing any job — that will let you practice writing, public speaking, or creating any other type of content.

If you’re not able to do communication in your main work responsibilities, you can practice with independent work on the side, such as blogging, tweeting, media, podcasting, tiktoking, etc. It can even be possible to write a book alongside another job. (Though for anyone doing independent public work, make sure you avoid publishing something unintentionally offensive, as this could affect your career prospects for a long time, even if the offence is the result of a misunderstanding.)

Having a portfolio of content can help you if you want to get into most communications roles, including ones at large organisations (like marketing or PR).

Content creation skills

For aspiring writers, we recommend getting into the habit of writing regularly — ideally every day (even if it’s only a few hundred words) — and posting your writing publicly on Facebook, Twitter, or a blog.

For spoken content, you should practise in any ways you can — for example, give presentations in your professional area, join your local Toastmasters group, make video blogs, or start a podcast.

Whatever your chosen medium or platform, try to create something regularly, and then actively try to learn from what you’ve done — think carefully about measurable goals you might want to achieve, and see whether and why you meet them.

What content should you produce?

Content that’s great can achieve far more reach and impact than content that’s merely good. People tend to produce much higher quality content when they’re naturally interested in a topic and working in a medium they genuinely like.

So we’d encourage you to look at examples of successful content, or find people doing what you want to do, then paying attention to where your intrinsic motivation leads you rather than just focusing on strategically selecting the ‘best’ topic or media type.

It can be worth doing some strategic thinking — for example, you might look at how the recommender algorithms work on various platforms and what kinds of content they are more likely to boost.

Which medium should you choose?

It may take some time to find the medium that’s the best fit for you. Someone might love long-form blog posts but hate Twitter; others find their niche in video, media appearances, and public talks. Experiment with different media to find the one that comes most naturally and is most motivating.

That said, as a secondary consideration, it can make sense to focus on media that are new and rapidly growing (it’s much easier to gain followers on new social media platforms than established ones) or are especially good for reaching a certain audience (e.g. HackerNews for the tech industry) and that fit your message (e.g. books and podcasts are better for complex ideas).

Finding your audience

To get started, you might ask yourself: “What’s a type of person that I understand and communicate well with, better than most people wanting to make a difference do?” If you’re a student, this might be fellow students. Or it could be others in your industry (e.g. biologists, policymakers). Or it could be a mass audience, like educated Americans. You might also pay attention to why it might be valuable to reach a certain audience.

Once you’re clearer on who your target audience is, your main aim should probably be to build your general ability to communicate with that audience. You might want to try to get any job that involves communicating with your chosen audience and allows you to get feedback on a regular basis — whether or not you’re producing content on topics directly related to pressing global problems.

If you’re interested in communicating with fairly general/widespread audiences, most jobs in journalism, and many in public relations and corporate communications, would be useful. If you’re focused on a more niche audience (e.g. AI scientists), then you might want to work somewhere where you can meet lots of people in that audience.

Once you’ve developed your skills and audience, then it’s time to focus more on having an impact, which we cover in the next section.

Organisational communication skills

The structure of these careers are similar to ones focused on organisation-building skills — you can get started by finding any role that will let you start learning one of these skills, like any role in marketing, editing, public relations, lobbying, visual design, or campaigning.

For communications roles at organisations, it can help to spend some time getting good at presenting yourself, for example by building a personal website with nice copy and good presentation. This lets you practise your skills as well as having something to show off to potential employers.

For more — including which organisations you should work for — take a look at how to get started building organisation-building skills.

Get funding

If you’d like to pursue this type of career, there is sometimes funding available. Some sources to consider include:

• The Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund sometimes makes small grants that could help you transition into these types of careers. For instance, if you’d like to test out making YouTube videos about one of our recommended problems full time for three months, you could ask for $10,000; or if you’re interested in working in journalism but can’t earn enough money right away, you could ask for a salary top-up. They’re also interested in helping cover the costs of internships or graduate school.
• Longview Philanthropy funds media projects within effective altruism. For instance, it recently helped fund a $100,000 prize for new blogs.
• Open Philanthropy is interested in funding marketing related to effective altruism.

Apply for free one-on-one advising

Want more individualised advice before diving in? There’s a lot more to be said about:

• How to find the communication career that’s the best fit for you
• What strategy to take for getting started in communication careers
• How to best use your following if you already have one

Get in touch with our one-on-one team, and we may also be able to introduce you to people in these paths.

APPLY TO SPEAK WITH OUR TEAM

Find jobs that use communication skills

Filter our job board by ‘outreach’ to find jobs in this category:

View all opportunities

Once you have these skills, how can you best apply them to have an impact?

Once you have the skills and an audience, the question becomes which messages to focus on to have the biggest impact.

Some messages are more important to spread than others, but some messages are also easier to spread. You need to consider both factors and how their significance multiplies.

Moreover, you need to customise the analysis for your audience. The messages that are important and likely to spread among Ariana Grande fans are totally different from those likely to spread among philosophy academics.

Some key factors for comparing messages include the following (which is an adapted version of our problem framework):

1. Important — if this idea spread among your audience, how much impact would result?
2. Neglected — how widely known is this idea by your audience already? How much is it already discussed by other creators in your space?
3. Is it of interest to your audience? Or otherwise possible to get attention for given your platform? This makes it more likely to spread.
4. Is it personally interesting and motivating for you to work on?

The aim is to find messages or topics that do best on the multiple of all four factors.

Here’s a process you could go through to generate ideas:

1. Make a list of the global problems you think are most pressing.
2. Generate ideas for messages and ideas that could, if spread more widely among your audience, enable more progress on these problems. This could be calls to get more people working on these problems, information about the best solutions to them, or messages to help decision makers understand these issues better. To do this, explore the resources in our problem profiles and then speak to experts in the area about what would be helpful.
3. Think about which messages could be most of interest to your audience or a good fit for your platform.
4. Experiment with spreading those that seem most promising. It might take some trial and error to find an idea and framing that resonates with your audience. In particular, before taking on a big project like a book or documentary, try to test it out in a smaller version.

We listed a couple of examples of ideas we’d like to see spread above.

In practice, you’ll likely want to continue to publish a mixture of content that builds your audience or pays the bills and content that you think is especially impactful.

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use these skills

• Academia
• Building effective altruism
• Party politics
• Journalism
• Public intellectual
• Working at an AI lab
• Non-technical roles at AI labs
• Think tank careers
• Work at a nonprofit that focuses on advocacy
• Non-technical role at an AI lab
• Organise an effective altruism local group
• Pursuing fame in arts and entertainment

Learn more

Our articles and podcasts:

• What do journalists say about journalism as a high-impact career? — interviews with Dylan Matthews, Derek Thompson, and Shaun Raviv
• Podcast: Kelsey Piper on room for important advocacy within journalism
• Podcast: Ezra Klein on aligning journalism, politics, and what matters most
• Podcast: Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals
• How to be an effective advocate

See all our articles and episodes on advocacy careers

Some of the best resources we’ve found about individual communication:

• Messages to spread to help with the most important century
• Write Useful Books — one of the best guides we’ve read to writing good nonfiction
• The Priceonomics Content Marketing Handbook — a guide to writing shareable, data-driven online articles
• How to be popular on the internet by Tom Scott

Read next:  Explore other useful skills

Want to learn more about the most useful skills for solving global problems, according to our research? See our list.

Continue →

The post Communicating ideas appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

In a nutshell: For the right person, becoming a journalist could be very impactful. Good journalists help keep people informed, positively shape public discourse on important topics, and can provide a platform for people and ideas that the public might not otherwise hear about.

But the most influential positions in the field are highly competitive, and journalists face a lot of mixed incentives that may detract from their ability to have a positive impact.

Why journalism could be a high-impact career

Some of the most promising ways to have a positive impact with a career in journalism include:

• Encouraging the adoption of good policies or discouraging the adoption of bad policies
  • A single article or reporter is unlikely to be solely responsible for a given policy change, but they can play a significant role in influential coverage.
• Acting as a check on bad or dangerous actors in the public arena
  • Public officials and figures can be forced out of their positions as a result of news reporting, and fear of exposure might have a chilling effect on bad acts.¹
• Inspiring readers to take specific high-impact actions, like making donations or changing their careers to work on pressing problems
• Helping to promote positive values, such as respect for the interests of nonhuman animals
• Supporting social or political movements that are trying to do good — we’re especially excited about journalism that informs people about the ideas of the effective altruism community
  • Also, you can potentially strengthen ideas and communities you agree with by subjecting them to analysis and criticism.
• Instilling better reasoning skills in readers — often by acting as a model — and keeping the public informed to promote good decision-making
• Positively shaping the discourse to better prioritise major problems and solutions, including introducing new topics for wider debate
  • Though note that sometimes drawing attention to an important topic can backfire.²

We believe the most neglected yet important problems in the world are those that involve existential risks or impact future generations. So we’d be particularly excited to see journalists who could eventually help us make progress as a society toward preserving the potential for a bright and flourishing future by, for example, prioritising coverage of the threats from nuclear war, pandemic disease, artificial intelligence, climate change, and the possible decline of liberal democracy. We discuss some of the potential for this kind of impact in our review of communications careers.

Despite the potential, though, much of journalism probably has minimal impact (and, as discussed below, some is actively harmful). Based on my experience in the industry, a lot of journalistic work is duplicative, and news outlets often compete in zero-sum contests to see whose story can rank the highest on Google search results. Even many prestigious outlets prioritise breaking news stories faster than their competitors, despite there being little to no benefit to the news consumer. For instance, journalists might race to be the first to report who a presidential candidate has picked to be their running mate, even though there’s actually little or no benefit to readers knowing this information a day or two before it’s officially announced.

But the news industry as a whole tends to reward these priorities.

If you plan to prioritise helping others, though, there is clearly the possibility of having a big influence — with the right role and the right content.

Some journalists do have considerable discretion in what they write about, though they often need to spend several years to get into this position.

Journalists who work for nonprofits like ProPublica can have more freedom to write about important issues due to the smaller role that market pressures play in these organisations. Future Perfect, a subsection of Vox, was launched with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation (though it now has separate sources of funding) to tell stories about big and neglected problems in the world.

And even within for-profit journalism, there are many examples of journalists writing about important causes. Vox journalist Dylan Matthews, before founding Future Perfect in 2018, was already writing about topics like immigration policy and effective giving.

There have been more opportunities in recent years for journalists with an interest in effective altruism, longtermism, and related topics. In addition to Future Perfect, outlets such as BBC Future, Works in Progress, and the newly founded Asterisk magazine present exciting opportunities for writers who want to publish on these kinds of ideas. There may be even more opportunities like these in the coming years, given some funders’ interests in impactful writing.

But even if there are more opportunities like these, the specific area of journalism focused on the issues that we think are most pressing is likely to remain quite small in the broader media landscape. And if you’re successful in journalism, there might be greater opportunities for impact within traditional news outlets.

One path we’d be particularly excited to see some readers take is to establish themselves as credible reporters in the areas of science and technology, especially because emerging technologies are related to many of the problems we think are most pressing.

You don’t necessarily need technical expertise to excel in this way — and in fact, if you have technical skills related to some of the world’s most pressing problems, there are likely more promising career opportunities for you outside of journalism. But you’ll need to develop a sophisticated understanding of the field and a set of critical thinking skills to assess complicated claims and degrees of evidence. Otherwise, you may fall into the trap of perpetuating overly sensationalist and sometimes misleading science journalism, which some incentives in the industry encourage.

Some examples of high-impact journalism

One strong reason to believe journalism can be a high-impact career is that there seem to be many examples of journalism causing concrete benefits and harms for the world. By considering some examples, you can get a sense of how journalism can have an impact — and how it might go wrong.

A note of caution: It’s inevitably contentious to make historical claims of causation, so there’s likely no example on this list that is beyond dispute. Assessing the practical difference made by a single article or reporter, or even a group of stories, is difficult, and we have struggled to find systematic studies of the impact of journalism.³ (Please let us know if you have any!) It’s completely possible, for example, that positive effects that appear to be attributable to a given work of journalism would have come about regardless.

But it still seems quite likely that journalism does often have an impact, and it’s worth examining some plausible cases, such as:

• Zeynep Tufekci advocated for mask-wearing in March 2020 to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by publishing an op-ed in The New York Times when public health experts argued the opposite.
  • Ben Smith later wrote for the same newspaper: “The C.D.C. changed its tune in April, advising all Americans above the age of 2 to wear masks to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Michael Basso, a senior health scientist at the agency who had been pushing internally to recommend masks, told me Dr. Tufekci’s public criticism of the agency was the ‘tipping point.'”
  • This seems like a very big deal. It’s unclear, though, how impactful Tufekci’s piece was. Was the CDC on a clear path to recommending masks regardless? Did she only speed up the trajectory by a few days or weeks? Though it’s also possible she was more influential than that — other health agencies in the world were very slow to adopt masking recommendations. And in general, it seems good to have incisive writers applying critical scrutiny to public health pronouncements.
• Coverage of surprise medical bills in the US appears to have led to a new law restricting providers’ ability to catch patients off-guard after treatment with large, unexpected service charges.
  • Trudy Lieberman, a public health professor and a journalist, wrote for USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism: “In many ways, the law is also a victory for the media since it was their sustained coverage that spurred public outrage. In particular, I would say it was the product of a continued focus on surprise medical bills by Sarah Kliff, now at The New York Times but who started collecting such outrageous bills when she was at Vox, and Kaiser Health News and NPR, whose joint bill of the month series beginning in 2018 kept the focus on this insidious practice.”
• 538‘s Nate Silver argued in May 2017 that the media coverage around the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton likely played a significant role in determining the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election.
  • Of course, any election is probably dramatically influenced by the media coverage of the relevant events and candidates. And no one person or even one outlet is wholly responsible for the general pattern of how an issue is covered. But this case does point to decisions made in the news media that plausibly contributed to an extremely significant course change in American politics.
• Reporting on former US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s conduct in office, particularly his personal use of public funds, led to his resignation. He explicitly cited what he called the “unrelenting attacks” he faced in his resignation letter.
  • While the resignation was very plausibly an effect of the reporting on Pruitt’s scandals, one can question the impact of the reporting, because he was replaced by someone who was ideologically similar.
• Elizabeth Warren, then a law professor, published a story in the journal Democracy in 2007 arguing for the creation of a federal agency to regulate financial products.
  • In 2009, then-President Barack Obama referenced her arguments about the need for such protection.
  • Obama later signed into law the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which, in part, created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Warren had envisioned.
• Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey at The New York Times, as well as Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker, published pieces in October 2017 surfacing allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse against Harvey Weinstein.
  • While this may have seemed at the time to be a narrow story about a single figure in the entertainment industry, it helped spur a wider movement that exposed patterns of sexual harassment and abuse in many different industries.
• Anecdotally, we’ve heard of several policy advocates who’ve found the existence of highly accessible, mainstream coverage of issues they think are important to be very useful for showing policymakers what the issue is all about and why people might care.

Journalism might also have a more diffuse impact, though these effects will be even harder to directly measure and assess. For example, Naina Bajekal wrote a cover story for TIME in August 2022 about the effective altruism community, which likely introduced many people to a number of ideas that we think are important, and which could have a profound impact on what they choose to do in their lives (she even mentioned 80,000 Hours in the article!).

A lot of important journalism might have its biggest impacts in this way — by influencing a large number of people in ways that are small at the individual level but add up to being a substantial impact on the world.

And sometimes, the highest-impact decision a news outlet can make is not to publish a story. For instance, in 2006, Bill Keller, then an editor at The New York Times, revealed that his paper had withheld stories “that, if published, might have jeopardised efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear material.”

Why having a positive impact in journalism might be challenging

Because they rely on ad revenue or paid subscriptions, many news outlets are most motivated to maximise the engagement of their readers. This leads to a focus in a lot of the news media on dramatic current events and contentious hot-button issues. While some of this coverage is surely important, much of it is not, and a lot of it may be actively harmful.

Examples of generally harmful types of journalism include:

• Hyper-partisan journalism
• Unnecessarily inflammatory coverage
• Misleading reporting or outright misinformation
• Journalism that promotes or embodies bad values, such as racist stereotyping
• Overly credulous reporting
• Reporting that distracts from more important issues
• Reporting that reveals information that is dangerous for the public to know (e.g. private personal information or national security secrets)

Unfortunately, even well-intentioned and thoughtful journalism may end up being harmful. Consider, for instance, the following possibilities:

• The story draws attention to an important cause, but it creates more backlash than support.
• Policymakers react to address a problem highlighted in a story, but they overcorrect and create a new problem.
• Critical mistakes in the reporting spread falsehoods.

One now-infamous and concrete example of harmful reporting is The New York Times 2002 story “US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” about Iraq’s supposed effort to create weapons of mass destruction. This report, which relied heavily on anonymous sources in the Bush administration, was found to be based on dubious claims, and the idea that Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear weapon in the run-up to the 2003 invasion was discredited.

Historian Daniel Strieff noted that many other media outlets played a role in pushing the narrative, but this story played an outsized role in pro-war rhetoric.⁴

For a more hypothetical example, consider that some people who are concerned about potential risks from artificial intelligence worry that coverage that focuses on the impressive capabilities of AI systems could help inspire an arms race in the technology, potentially increasing the dangers.

In general, you might care a lot about avoiding harmful journalism. But once you have a job, you’ll likely face a lot of incentives that distort your priorities. You might work for an editor who assigns you stories, and you may have little say in what you get to write about or what the final product looks like. In many cases, journalists have complained that they have no say over misleading headlines that top their articles — a particularly troubling situation, since many more people will see the headline than will read the content of the story.⁵

Even if you get more autonomy, you’ll be aware that keeping your job is often contingent on keeping readers engaged.

And indeed, having an impact is often contingent on keeping readers engaged. A story that few people read is less likely, in most cases, to have much influence on the real world. So even in the ideal scenario, you’ll have to find a balance between writing stories that grab readers’ attention and those that share important information. Sometimes doing so is easy — other times, it’s much harder. And navigating these mixed incentives may distort your assessment of what really matters in your work.

Striking the balance between important writing and writing stories that people want to read is an extremely valuable skill, and if you think you’d be good at it, you should definitely consider becoming a journalist (or some other kind of communicator). But if you think you’d feel uncomfortable in this position, or find it too difficult to weigh up these competing priorities, it may be a challenging career path for you to pursue.

It may be quite difficult on the whole to be confident you’re having a positive impact with a career as a journalist. But we also think the world would be better off for having more people in journalism who are motivated to work on the most pressing problems.

Tips for picking high-impact stories

Two of the most critical types of decisions a journalist makes in their work are which story to write and what angle they write it from.

The ‘angle’ of a story refers to the specific focus, framing, and context the journalist uses to convey the facts they’re reporting. For example, a journalist writing about the launch of a new phone app could choose from a wide range of angles to focus on in the story, such as:

• The technical breakthrough a developer achieved to create the app
• The positive experiences users are having with the app
• The negative experiences users are having with the app
• Externalities created by the app that impact third parties (such as if a delivery app creates a surge in downtown traffic)

In terms of the impact the reporting has, the angle a story takes can be at least as important as the topic the journalist is covering. This is especially true since the angle is likely to dictate the headline, and many more readers will ever read the headline than will actually read the body of any article.

And this is one way in which journalists’ discretion can be very influential, even as they aim to be impartial observers. Articles with each of the angles listed above about the hypothetical app could all include the same basic facts, just with different orderings, tone, and emphases, but the impression readers walk away with — whether the app is good or bad, brilliant or short-sighted — could be quite different based on the journalist’s choices.

Depending on the role they have, their level of seniority, and the institution they work for, journalists will have widely varying degrees of discretion over the stories they cover and the angles they use to cover them. Typically, as you advance in seniority, you’ll have more discretion. Freelancers, though, have a lot of autonomy, but they may struggle to publish frequently, especially if they’re not willing to conform their story ideas to particular outlets’ niches.

Assuming you have some autonomy over the stories you write and how you write them, how can you pick a topic and angle to have a positive impact? The decision criteria will vary a lot, based on factors like what kind of audience you’re writing for and how frequently you’re expected to publish. (And of course journalists typically aim to write stories that their readers will find interesting, because if they can’t do this, they likely won’t have a job for very long.)

But within these constraints, journalists aiming to have an impact could apply the ITN framework to choosing stories. Under this framework, you would aim to write stories that are:

• Important: involve impact to the wellbeing of a significant number of individuals
• Tractable: are about a problem that could potentially be solved or mitigated with more attention
• Neglected: are getting insufficient attention relative to their importance and solvability

These are very rough heuristics, and we don’t think they’ll apply to every story. Sometimes a journalist will cover a story just because it would seem like a huge omission to their audience if they ignored it — like a local news outlet failing to report a major celebrity came to town to shoot a movie.

And it might be worth covering stories that don’t clearly meet all the ITN criteria. For example, a journalist might cover a deadly conflict in a war zone that, at least from all appearances, seems intractable to solve. Or reporters might find themselves, as many journalists did in April 2020, writing about a major story like the coronavirus pandemic, even though it was getting covered in every outlet, and it was hardly neglected. (It was arguably neglected as a story in early February 2020, though!)

But even in these cases, it could be particularly impactful and advantageous for reporters to look for angles on the story that do more closely match the ITN framework.

For example, while conflict in the war zone may be intractable, there may be solutions to certain problems within the conflict, such as a lack of medical supplies, that could be tractable if more attention were paid to them. Or if you’re covering a pandemic that is already widely talked about in the news, you might be able to apply the framework by avoiding discussion of the day-to-day controversies and instead drawing attention to policies that would reduce the longer-term risk of similar pandemics arising.

How to pursue a career in journalism

Getting started

Many journalists in print or online media start off as interns or entry-level reporters. It typically helps to have a bachelor’s degree, though it doesn’t need to be in journalism⁶ — and you may be fine without one if you demonstrate an ability to get published or bring a highly valuable knowledge base.

If you’re just starting your career out of university or college, experience at a student newspaper can be valuable for getting your foot in the door.

For certain roles, such as legal or financial reporting, employers often seek job candidates with some level of subject matter expertise.

Master’s degrees in journalism are rarely if ever required, and getting them can be extremely costly — it’s probably better to learn on the job. This is especially true because many jobs in journalism aren’t particularly high-paying — so having a lot of student debt might be a big problem.

If you’re not looking for an entry-level position or internship, and you don’t have any publishing experience, it makes sense to start by writing articles part-time to build up a personal library of content you can link to on a personal blog (Medium is quick and easy to set up) or Substack. Substack can allow you to charge your readers for access to your posts, but that’s probably only a viable business strategy after you’ve already developed a large audience.

Once you’ve gotten in the habit of blogging, try getting pieces published in existing media outlets. Your first instinct may be to go for well-known names like The Guardian or Vox, or even more prestigious newspapers, but you’ll likely have an easier time publishing at smaller outlets or local publications. You’ll be able to use your blog posts as writing samples.

Some writers even get noticed for having a strong Twitter presence. It’s not unheard of to have a story solicited based only on your tweets. If you’re able to impress people in the news industry with thoughtful and insightful posts on social media, you may have a leg up on those who avoid Twitter. (But be warned: there are many risks to spending too much time on Twitter, and careers can be ruined at least as easily as they can be started by a tweet. So post carefully.)

Getting your first piece published is often the hardest step. If you do a good job, it will be much easier to publish with that same publication and editor in the future. Having been published by a mainstream outlet will make your future pitches much more likely to succeed, or at least be seriously considered, and you may be able to use your published work to get a full-time job.

Newer journalists typically don’t get to choose what they cover, particularly at large organisations, and are instead assigned stories by editors. However, even new journalists can sometimes earn more autonomy if they become successful at pitching stories that they want to write to their editor.

This is most likely to happen if you successfully carve out a “beat” for yourself — a specialty subject that you’re deeply familiar with. Once an editor trusts that you know the area well, they may come to rely on you to shape the course of your outlet’s reporting on the topic. You’ll likely still be subject to the same incentives that drive the rest of the media, but you’ll have more discretion in deciding how to navigate competing demands.

Some key roles in journalism

Investigative reporters are highly prestigious, and there are many cases in history of them having a positive impact.⁷ But it may be difficult to optimise for impact in these roles, because the goal of investigative reporters is to uncover exciting and newsworthy facts — which isn’t necessarily correlated with having a positive impact. (Though one potentially underexplored route to impact would be an investigative journalist who specialises in scrutinising charities.)

When journalists establish themselves in the industry, they sometimes progress to roles in which they have more freedom to choose what topics they write about, as well as add opinion, perspective, and more complex analysis. These include columnists, who write opinion pieces, and correspondents, who cover various locations distant from their main workplace (e.g. the White House) while adding their perspective on the news.

Opinion columnists may have the most latitude of anyone to pursue whatever stories they think are important, and we’d be excited to see more people interested in effective altruism take these roles at prestigious media outlets. However, precisely because these roles are so valuable and influential, they’re among the most competitive positions in the industry.

Senior roles are usually as editors or producers, who coordinate the work of other journalists. These too might be among the most impactful roles in journalism, because they can shape the coverage of a much wider range of stories. But even editors, producers, and publishers are subject to the financial incentives of the news business (unless they are philanthropically funded), so they’re not typically free to focus completely on having a positive impact.

Freelance journalists aren’t employed full-time by a news outlet but instead get paid a set amount for each article or column that an editor agrees to publish. Sometimes they have arrangements with outlets to contribute a certain number of stories or columns on a regular basis.

Usually, freelancers submit story pitches to editors, who will decide whether they want to pay for the story. In theory, anyone can submit a pitch and get something published — but editors are most likely to accept submissions from experienced writers, experts, or people with unique experiences. Sometimes editors will reach out to an established journalist or writer to solicit a story that hasn’t been pitched.

It’s difficult to make a living as a full-time freelance journalist. But freelance writing can be a productive way to start out a journalism career, and it may be financially sustainable when supplemented with income from other sources.

Training for Good has launched the Tarbell Fellowship, which provides financial support to early-career journalists who are looking to have a positive impact. There may be other opportunities for funding from philanthropists who are eager to support this kind of writing.

Changing paths

One of the benefits of journalism is that you can explore it as a career option without investing in an advanced degree, which makes it easier to keep your options open while testing your fit. If you have a clear idea of how you want to have an impact as a journalist, and you have an aptitude for it, it may well be worth trying your hand at it for a few years.

(A caveat to this point, however, is that you should expect anything you publish will be accessible forever. Publicly taking controversial stances on hot-button issues may limit some of your career options down the road.)

You can try freelancing as a side gig and see how it goes, or if you’re early in your career, you may just try getting an entry-level job in the industry. If, after a few years, you find it’s not working out as you hoped, you should still have other options open to you. For example, roles in communications, research, policy, and advocacy can make good use of skills developed in journalism.

What is journalism like day to day?

The day-to-day activities of journalists vary by industry, role, and level of seniority, but almost all journalist jobs involve researching stories and interviewing people, preparing content for publication, and staying up to date with the area they cover.

Here’s how Kelsey Piper of Future Perfect described her typical day when she spoke with us in 2019:

Vox has a very fast pace, which was definitely something I was a little apprehensive about going in. Like can I write that much? But it’s been very good for me because I think the push to think about something you want to tell people every day just keeps you moving. On most days I will try and send my editor about three story ideas. Things that I’ve thought of that I want to write about, things that I have a lead on, things that I saw in the news that I felt like we needed a Future Perfect take on. My editor will get back to me with the one or two that he’s most excited about and say, Yeah, go ahead and write this story.

So, then I’ll email people who I want to talk to. I’ll try and get introductions. I’ll research for the piece. I’ll have those conversations and phone calls. I’ll try and write the piece. I’ll try and file it before I go home. Then often at the same time, my editor and I will be going back and forth with edits on yesterday’s story to get it to a state where we’re both proud of it and confident of it and ready to put it on the site.

Now, in practice, some pieces take longer to come together. Or they come partway together and then we realise there’s not a good story here. Or the situation is confusing enough that our initial take on it didn’t work. A fair number of stories get scrapped. In practice, I think I end up publishing four things a week. But yeah, the goal is certainly to have a week where every day we put out a new story.

She also added:

It’s amazing to call people up and just ask about their research or ask about what they’re doing. I feel like I’ve learned a ton about lots of fields, just by having the luxury of spending a day talking to five experts. Then doing a lot of reading and trying to put together an accurate, if limited, picture of something I didn’t know much about before.

How to assess your fit for journalism

To assess if this path might be a good fit for you, consider these questions:

• Are you a fast writer? One of the most distinctive things about journalism jobs is they tend to have very rapid deadlines following current events and a very regular publication schedule.
• Are you an excellent communicator? The key skill you need to have is writing stories that get a big audience — and/or good speaking skills for working in podcasts, radio, or television — plus comfort with interviewing people.
• Do you have experience working for a college newspaper or an internship, or a portfolio of published work? If you do have journalism experience, did you enjoy it?
• Are you willing to work long hours, including nights and weekends? This is common in journalism careers, though some positions offer reasonable hours.⁸
• How important is a high salary to you? It’s hard to get paid work early on, and even after you get a full-time paid position, the average salary for a journalist is relatively low.
• Have you written a blog? Do you find it relatively easy to produce large amounts of content?
• Do you get good feedback on your content?
  • Don’t forget that most public communicators have honed their craft for years, often long before they were famous.

Want one-on-one advice on pursuing this path?

If you think this path might be a great option for you, but you need help deciding or thinking about what to do next, our team might be able to help.

We can help you compare options, make connections, and possibly even help you find jobs or funding opportunities.

APPLY TO SPEAK WITH OUR TEAM

Learn more about journalism careers

• Historian Daniel Strieff has compiled a list of more than 20 highly influential pieces of journalism in US history
• Podcast: Ezra Klein on covering the most important topics in journalism (or watch on our YouTube channel)
• Podcast: Kelsey Piper on what this kind of journalism is like day to day
• Podcast: Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures
• Podcast: Matthew Yglesias on avoiding the pundit’s fallacy and how much military intervention can be used for good
• What do journalists say about journalism as a high-impact career? — interviews with Dylan Matthews, Derek Thompson, and Shaun Raviv

Read next:  Learn about other high-impact careers

Want to consider more paths? See our list of the highest-impact career paths according to our research.

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Special thanks to Roman Duda and Arden Koehler for their contributions to this article.

The post Journalism appeared first on 80,000 Hours.