Navigating Impressions and Impact in Journalism and Academia

The final keynote speaker at ECREA 2022 this week is Gary Younge, a former editor-at-large for The Guardian. He begins by playing a promotional video from his exploration of whiteness in America, from his perspective as a black man from the UK, which intended to flip the script on white journalists’ explorations of black lives in the US or UK. The clip went viral and Gary has kept getting recognised for it, even if the full documentary was perhaps not watched anywhere near as often.

The clip, unfortunately, reduced racism to a spectacle, and after a lifetime of teasing out the nuances of racism and whiteness this is deeply frustrating; it is perhaps not completely without merit, and illustrated a different and more aggressive journalistic approach towards white supremacy – but there is a difference between making an impression and making an impact. These are not two completely different phenomena, but at least are two different parts of the process. Impressions accrete in number, import, significance, etc., until they produce impact, but this cannot be simply quantified – and impact loses value when you try to measure it.

This is the tension underlying this talk, now translated to the academic environment and to Gary’s role as a public intellectual working for Manchester University. This work is varied and rich, engaging in guest lectures, public events, and public writing, but what of this will be impactful cannot be known ahead of time. How should one thus thing about it? Philosophically, impressions and impact need again to be distinguished; practically, this can be illustrated by case studies.

Gary had a scholarly background even before his role in Manchester, becoming an academic because he wanted to spend more time saying fewer things in more depth. This is not how journalism works; it requires rapidly produced content of a very specific format and length at very regular points on matters that are both understood enough to be able to offer an informed opinion and new enough to provide new insight, and the nature of opinion columns is also that they need to be expressed in the voice of total conviction, however preliminary the observations might actually be.

This kind of writing also plays into punditry of the TV variety, of course – an even more difficult format that requires dealing with stupid questions, strange framings, and odd opposing views while remaining affable and presentable. Plus, this kind of media profile, much like social media profiles, is problematic because of the kind of public performance they require and the potential negative attention they might attract, as well as the visibility they provide to eventual missteps.

And there is no immediate sense of the impact that such work might generate; indeed, any impact might well be long delayed. But there may be a sense: Gary’s presence as well as his work (which he’s demonstrating by showing another Guardian video) might have had impact, for instance, in terms of race, class, and ideological representation in the media. But even such impact could not be anticipated, because in journalism the nature of the story emerging from the investigation cannot always be pre-determined, however much editors might ask for this.

This process of open-ended discovery is better suited to scholarly work, then: journalism is better suited to amplifying little-known facts to a wider audience, and anything more ambitious is a greater struggle. This means that Gary now has a less prominent and visible profile, but that is fine too.

Gary now moves to a case study, beginning with the arrival of US troops in post-war Germany, which produced a number of dalliances and children between black US soldiers and white German women. Because of racial stigmata attached to these children, they were sometimes adopted out, and indeed there was a surprising story of some of these kids being adopted, quite illegally, by families in Denmark – and indeed this was fashionable with affluent families in Denmark for a while.

Gary came about this story at first in the course of reading about race after Hitler, where the Danish adoption scheme was mentioned in a short passage; he eventually found some leads for this story, but only via very lateral connections, in part with the help of Danish academics. Journalistic work should perhaps credit such sources more explicitly, but this is not usually done; the standards in academia are different.

But what can be done with this story now? Journalistically, a few more leads could produce a piece for The Guardian, and could maybe lead to a documentary or another format; this might generate some significant interest and produce substantial impressions, but further academic follow-up would be required for a more comprehensive investigation. This would ask why this story is important, place it into a broader historical and sociological context, and move it beyond the case study. This is also a very drawn-out process involving ethics approvals, peer review, and so on, of course, and the eventual output may still not generate substantial impact. This is also a fundamental problem with the highly exploitative business model of academic publishing, of course.

One solution may be to include this case study in a broader selection of case studies in a book on blackness in post-war Europe that Gary is currently developing, and this would be part of a process of knowledge dissemination that combines elements of both academic and journalistic practice. Neither of these disciplines, Gary suggests, are discrete.