Think Tank Digital

[Commentary] The lesson was clear: think tanks could reach their audiences using a tactic borrowed from modern politicians — speak directly to your preferred constituencies, going over the heads of the news media middlemen who once offered the sole route to a mass audience. Today, going straight to your audience is standard practice. Indeed, many think tanks draw a million or more visitors a month, and they feature not only classics of the milieu (e.g., 150-page research papers), but also a range of new content, everything from blog posts, videos, and audio podcasts, to complex multimedia productions. The Nieman Foundation, itself something of a media think tank, featured the Brookings Institution’s website on its own pages recently, noting the think tank was publishing 20 pieces a day and netting 1.5 million unique users monthly. “Go back 20 years: for a piece written by a Brookings scholar to be perceived as impactful and topical, it would have to be published in the New York Times or the Washington Post,” Brookings Vice President of Communications David Nassar told NiemanLab.org. “Now we have the capacity to publish this content ourselves. Obviously, the New York Times is still important, but we have the capacity to deliver our own message as well.”

[Michael Moran is a visiting media fellow with Carnegie Corporation of New York.]