June 2021 Media Brief - Editor's Reflections

This month’s media brief had the most amount of articles out of the three media briefs I have worked with. It was the longest media brief I have written, but I was still only able to briefly discuss the articles with some light, one to two sentence analysis. The policy inadequacies was my favorite section to write, as it is just full of potential for future articles and research. While writing, I must admit that I still wasn’t too sure what our audience was. Throughout this media brief, I made reference to our team’s work and other projects. I mention things our team could do in the future and our plans for the Social Studies of Science conference coming up in October of this year. I was writing for our research team, but did not write the media brief as if it was addressed to the team. The way this was written was almost as if it was written to someone familiar with our team’s work but not part of the team. Our research group’s discussions of the audiences for our work have always been interesting, but I never feel like we’ve come to a full conclusion on who the audience for these media briefs are. At the same time, we usually conclude that they’re both for us and other researchers. If that is the case, then discussing our other projects might lead researchers to get curious and seek them out.