A good friend of ours always asks, “why do your articles always take so long?”
The best answer we have is that we are trying to create something new. Something in between research and media journalism. We always try to deliver something that most people are not aware of, but is still important. And that takes a lot of work. We are trying to inspire Black economic students and researchers through detailed, thorough economic research. It is a slow process.
Our goal is to inspire students of Black economics. We also offer plenty of avenues for a Black economics researcher to pursue. We feature questions, open issues, unresearched topics, and missing data requests.
For example, our Black economics challenge question this month was: “What was the effect of restricted admissions at white medical schools on the population of black doctors?”
In addition, we cite articles, review US census data, other media sources, and historical documents. We also fact-check and cross-reference every documented figure, table, or graph. We traced it back to the source, so our information can be trusted. We fully read all documents.
Research is not always journalism. There are important differences. Media stories often cover the first level of details, but frequently don’t answer the “why” question. They skip the details. The media misses the interpretation of the source material under the guise of being reporters, not analysts. Good reporters always cite references or use small quotes in their stories, but don’t offer the full context of the source or any interpretation of the source material. They leave the reader without the full context of the story.
We don’t do that. We are not media journalists. Instead, we are, at our core, Black economics researchers. And we write that way. We are trying to find the right balance between pure research and media journalism.
So what does all this have to do with research “landmines?’ Landmines are why our articles take time.
Landmines
Occasionally, while doing research, we hit a “landmine.” A landmine causes you to stop everything you are doing as a researcher until you get to the bottom of the issue. You have to answer the question that media journalists don’t have time for.
We are completely open about our research process. When you are doing real economic research, you occasionally hit what we call a “landmine”. Something so important that you have to stop everything else and research the topic deeply before you can move on. You have to be able to write credibly and with knowledge to tell the full story.
For us, recently, the Flexner report was that landmine. We had no idea how consequential the Flexner report was to the US healthcare system when we started. But we soon learned. We had to stop all of our writing on Black healthcare in the US. The report was influential to our future writing.
The Flexner report embedded the idea that scientific discovery was more important than patient care. The idea still dominates US healthcare today. The report directly led to the idea that the best way to improve healthcare was scientific discovery and corporate profits rather than patient outcomes.
Let’s suppose we wrote about the Black doctors shortage without mentioning the Flexner report. The report would be incomplete because Flexner’s report led to the closure of black medical schools.
Summary
The point is, you cannot write a good story without getting the details right, and that takes a lot of time. We write at a different level than the popular media and our target audience. Our audience is Black undergraduate students of economics, so are articles reflect this important fact.