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> tend to stick to what they've studied and know.

Isn't there a serious risk of bias, there, though? For example, if a journalist is specialized in CS and have to write about the ecological impact of technology, you can expect them to be biased in favor of technology, even in good faith.

While what you're suggesting seems common sense and is indeed better than current situation, I think it could be even better if rather than having one journalist writing one piece, every piece was a joint effort by several journalists, some expert on the subject and some not.



> Isn't there a serious risk of bias, there, though? For example, if a journalist is specialized in CS and have to write about the ecological impact of technology, you can expect them to be biased in favor of technology, even in good faith.

All journalists are biased. Pretending they can be unbiased is silly.

Beyond that, a journalist specialized in CS writing about the ecological impact of technology is no longer "sticking to what they've studied and know" any more than a sportswriter would be writing about the ecological impact of a new stadium.


Just like in academia, interdisciplinary research is best served not by a single polymath, but by a collaboration between domain experts. In this case, the proper (money-is-no-object) approach for an editor to take, would be to attach both an ecology-expert journalist and a tech-expert journalist on the piece, likely with the tech-expert driving doing the research and the ecology-expert writing the piece.


One could argue that in your situation a journalist trained in CS is simply not the educated party that should be writing a piece anyway. Knowing CS doesn't mean you understand the ecological impact of technology, you'd want someone with an ecology degree.


Sure, but then that journalist doesn't know about technology and is biased toward ecology :)

Although, I guess that rather than having experts and non-experts co-writing the article, it would even be better to have experts on all identified topics. So here, it would be both the journalist with a technological background and the one with an ecological background.

It seems a bit unrealistic to have experts on all subjects at hand, though, so I guess mixing non experts could at least be a minimum effort.




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