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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" seemed to have a significant impact on the national debate about race. Photo credit: Sean Carter Photography.

I interviewed three journalists who have written articles that promote important causes: Dylan Matthews (for example, on a guaranteed basic income); Derek Thompson (for example, on effective giving); and Shaun Raviv (for example, on open borders).

Key takeaways:

• The impact of journalism is difficult to quantify as it tends to take the form of having an incremental shift in public perception of an issue, though it clearly sometimes has major impact.

• By focusing on neglected topics like animal welfare or open borders, you may be able to have a comparatively larger impact by bringing attention to the cause.

• A strong indicator for whether you’re a good fit for journalism is simply how much you can write per day.
  

 
Dylan Matthews is a writer for Vox.com

WM: If you’re doing well at a good university, and want to become a journalist with the aim of making the world better, what are the first steps you should take?

DM: The first thing you should do is write. Start a blog or a Tumblr and tell yourself you’re going to write at least one post every week day. If your school has newspapers or student-run magazines, find the one that’s closest to your temperaments and join it. Get on Twitter and follow journalists whose jobs you envy. Get into debates with them. If you can financially swing an internship, or if your university can support you in one, apply to publications you admire.

WM: How promising do you think journalism is as a path for someone who wants to use their career to do as much good as they can? For what sort of people, or under what conditions, do you think it’s a good path?

DM: I think journalism is a potentially promising path for people seeking to do as much good as they can through their careers. I think it’s particularly so for people who want to engage in opinion and/or advocacy journalism, which enables them to focus on stories meant to sway opinions among elites; for people who are interested in neglected top areas like global health, animal welfare, or existential risk where there isn’t as much writing as on, say, domestic policy or foreign affairs, and thus where people’s opinions are more malleable and easier for writers to influence; and for people who are naturally prolific and capable of producing several thousand words a day on a regular basis.

WM: Do you know of any concrete positive impact that has resulted from articles you’ve written? If so, what?

DM: Concrete positive impact is hard to come by in journalism, and the arrow of causality is never firmly pointed. But there are two cases where I think articles I wrote probably had some small influence. One is a profile I wrote of Stanley Fischer when he was governor of the Bank of Israel. When I wrote the piece, he wasn’t really being discussed as a possible successor to Ben Bernanke and I thought he deserved to be one, based on his superior track record in Israel. Fischer is now deputy chair of the Federal Reserve. I didn’t make that happen, obviously, but on the margins, I think the article slightly improved Fischer’s reputation in DC economic policy circles and helped make it more viable for President Obama to appoint someone who’d so recently worked for a foreign government. The other article is a piece I wrote exposing the dissertation of a Heritage Foundation fellow who co-wrote a very widely cited report attacking immigration reform; it turned out he believed that Hispanics are genetically inferior to whites, intellectually speaking. Within a week of the post running, the fellow had left the think tank. I take no pleasure in costing someone their job (he’s now a consultant and by every indication doing fine), but I’m glad that citations of his study fell off after that, since it was a bad, misleading study.

Derek Thompson, senior editor at The Atlantic

WM: If you’re doing well at a good university, and want to become a journalist with the aim of making the world better, what are the first steps you should take? How promising do you think journalism is as a path for someone who wants to use their career to do as much good as they can? For what sort of people, or under what conditions, do you think it’s a good path?

DT: This is a very hard question to answer. There is no question that some journalism achieves immense good, even when it’s immeasurable. I think that Ta-Nehesi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations,” for example, galvanized the national debate on race. It was not the only thing to galvanize that debate, and it’s not clear what outcomes we should expect from this debate. But the piece was momentous and I think it’s changed the way many people talk about race, at least within my limited group of friends, peers, and journalists.

That said, journalism students have asked me this very question, and the truth is that I’m torn. On the one hand, I want to say that journalism is a light, and without it, the world will be a darker, more corrupt, less moral place. I believe this is true. On the other hand, let’s be honest: What percent of journalism meets that bar? The vast majority of published work on the Internet that is journalism, and I’ll accept the liberal definition of the word, is just entertainment. (I’m not blaming the Internet for this effect, that’s just where the vast majority of published work lives.) Entertainment is great. But it’s also perfectly useless. It’s not concerned with the greatest good.

… and that’s okay. Some of my writing–say, on the immorality of public lotteries or the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate–has a chance to make a significant difference in people’s lives. But most of my writing is not engineered to maximize for global health, morality, and goodness. I write because I love writing, and I think that if you can do the thing you love all day long, you should probably give that a shot. So when a student asks me “do you write to make the world a better place?” the ugly and true answer is that’s not why I got into writing. I write for the same reason dancers dance and actors act and painters paint. It’s the thing I can do and love.

That said, I ALSO want to make the world a better place and think effective altruism is a great way to start. That’s why I write, earn money, and then give some of it to international malaria organizations.

WM: Do you know of any concrete positive impact that has resulted from articles you’ve written? If so, what?

DT: My article on effective altruism, The Greatest Good, in which I publicly thought through the implications of maximizing the good from my own donation reportedly inspired significant additional gifts to the Against Malaria Foundation and sparked interest in effective altruism from larger organizations like the Gates Foundation.

 
Shaun Raviv, a freelance journalist who has written from The Atlantic and The New Yorker

WM: If you’re doing well at a good university, and want to become a journalist with the aim of making the world better, what are the first steps you should take?

SR: I’ll have to guess at this one. I went to a good University (Duke, only good if you wear screwed-on blinders), but didn’t get high marks and didn’t do any sort of journalism at all until a few years after I graduated. Many of the journalists I have worked around in the biz were editors for their university papers, mostly at Harvard. That was pre-internet-news-explosion, so nowadays I’d guess it’s just as common for journalism-prodigy types to write for real news sites while studying. I’d also assume that working for the school paper puts you in touch at an early age with people who will be rising in the biz as you do, and you can more easily all grab hands and rise faster together if you are reporting together at school. When they graduated, most of the writers I knew interned at places like The New Republic and The Atlantic, and then got hired to be lowly editors/writers for those publications. That’s the stage when I met them, but I never did any of that. One day, I just decided to be a journalist and I used a connection to sell a pitch. Nowadays, most of my pitches are cold, and I’ve been surprised how easy it is to sell a good idea. At least for me, connections haven’t been very important.

Some steps I’d suggest are: (1) reading Jay Rosen to get tips on what journalism today is and is becoming; (2) writing and publishing now, for your own site or another, both to get reps and to start gathering readers; (3) living in, or planning to live in, unusual places because there will be unbelievable stories other people don’t know about; (4) reaching out or clinging to writers and experts you admire and asking them a ton of questions, which can maybe lead to (5) getting mentors, people who believe in your work and will vouch for you as you pitch stories and look for journalism employment. One example of a mentor/mentee relationship that you can read about is David Carr and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

WM: How promising do you think journalism is as a path for an effective altruist?

SR: I think there is a lot of room for an effective altruist to make an impact. Dylan Matthews has written a lot of convincing and entertaining open borders-related stuff for big audiences, but I wonder if we’re often preaching to the converted (this blog post makes me question everything), but not many people are converted to supporting open borders, so some of the 50,000-100,000 people people who read my article, and some of the several-times-as-many people that who have read Dylan Matthew’s articles on Michael Clemens must be learning something new. I also think open borders specifically is a huge low-hanging fruit, and that taking baby steps toward convincing people that border restrictions are akin to bondage can eventually add up to big impact. If you can get Mark Zuckerberg to say he supports open borders, then maybe other people start thinking differently, too. I had zero thoughts on open borders until I read an article about Clemens, so someone writing something has definitely had an impact on me.

WM: Do you know of any concrete upshots that resulted from your Atlantic piece on open borders, or from other articles you’ve written?

SR: Not sure if this is concrete, but I know my article on open borders directed more readers to the Open Borders website, which I thought was a small victory. Hard for me to measure, but at some point Vipul Naik did say that it was sort of a tipping point for their audience growth. Still, we’re probably talking about a few hundred or thousand people at most. Maybe it got some people thinking, but the only person I can say for sure that changed their views was my dad. Aside from that article, and another on a very specific serial killer case, I haven’t seen any change come from my writing. But there’s no doubt that journalism can have a huge impact.

The post What do journalists say about journalism as a high-impact career? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

David has been NPR’s media correspondent since 2004, and before that spent over a decade at the Baltimore Sun. He has won numerous awards for journalism, and is the author of Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires.

I had the chance to meet him at the 4th annual Nexus Global Youth Summit, where we chatted about careers in journalism for people who want to make a difference. Here’s the notes I made on the key takeaways, which I ran past David before publishing for edits (and are entirely his own views).

• If you want to get a job in journalism, apply to any news organization that interests you, including all the major media organisations. Set some priorities – pay, location, size of organization, type of work, etc and select among them based on your top several priorities once you’ve got offers. “I applied to over 70 organisations. I got two offers, only one of which paid more than $10,000, so I went with that!”
• Previously the route into the industry was to get a job at a local news station or paper. But the local news industry has shrunk significantly in recent years, so it’s a lot harder to advance from these positions today.
• Build a personal library of content on Tumblr or some platform where it’s relatively easy to build a site. “There needs to be something out there you can link to.”
• If you’re still in college, what should you do next? Start writing and reporting on the side to test yourself out, and to start building your portfolio.
• How competitive is journalism? “You need to really want it; that’s the major filter.” It’s not a career you should drift into, but if you’re motivated, you’ve got a decent chance.
• Although the industry is changing rapidly, it’s not high risk if you’re young and don’t have a mortgage or other family obligations. And if you do, it can still be rewarding.
• Journalism is a good path if you want to effect social change, but that change may be defined quite differently than it would be at a philanthropy or advocacy organization. Providing good information and analysis is a public good in itself. You’ve also got a public platform to promote neglected concerns. And there’s been a renaissance of new news outlets that openly embrace advocacy and point of view journalism.

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At the recent Good Done Right conference, I had the opportunity to speak with Larissa MacFarquhar about careers in journalism.

Larissa is a journalist at the New Yorker, and next year will release Strangers Drowning, which explores the lives of those who dedicate themselves to helping others, and features a chapter on effective altruism.

The following is a couple of notes on my key takeaways from our conversation, which were run past Larissa before publishing.

The structure of the career

The industry is undergoing a transformation and it’s unclear what the career path will look like in the future. So, it’s difficult to give advice about how best to enter the industry.

Previously, you would often do an unpaid internship, and then try to get a paid job. It was seen as better to enter directly than to do a Masters in journalism.

Today, it’s much easier to get published, but it’s harder to get a paid position. People sometimes try to build a body of unpaid work, perhaps on a blog, while seeking a paid position.

So many people work for free these days that the situation seems unsustainable. New models will need to be created, but it’s unclear what these will be.

Potential for impact in journalism

The media are influential and it seems useful for effective altruist minded people to enter the industry.

Personal fit

Journalists have to work faster than academics, so people who like to analyze a problem carefully over a long time (as do many of those interested in effective altruism), developing arguments or constructing proofs, might find the pace frustrating.

There are some journalists who specialize in one area, and they can delve more deeply into that area than generalists can; but not all types of journalism permit this sort of specialization, so it is important to research the sort of work the different types involve before committing yourself.

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