Journalist and writer Malachi O'Doherty is the new BBC Louis MacNeice Writer in Residence at Queen's University, Belfast. This is his first blog post for the College of Journalism and it heralds a year of events in Northern Ireland examining key issues in journalism, broadcasting, writing and academia.
Ideally, journalists and academics would be complementary parts of an endeavour to explain the world.
Instead, there is a clear division between the types of approach they take, the ways they write and the audiences they address.
The terms 'journalistic' and 'academic' can both be used derisively; for writing that aspires to being the one fails if it sounds like the other.
Queen's University in Belfast, like many academic institutions, has a writer in residence. This year it is me, and what's different about that is that I am a journalist. I have an office in the Seamus Heaney Centre of Poetry. I don't feel like a trespasser, for Queen's is elevating the importance of journalism.
But before we take this as evidence that the barrier between journalistic and academic perspectives is breaking down, let's be clear about what the differences are and how strong they are.
The first thing a journalist wants a story to have is an angle. And the clearer and sharper the angle, the better.
'Political crisis follows Irish bailout.' 'Prince to Wed in Spring.'
A story, in a journalist's hands, tells us clearly that someone has resigned or been shot or been made president, and then it delineates the background to this intriguing development.
The academic, by contrast, often works with details that build slowly into a - sometimes very small - increment in our understanding of epilepsy, or dark matter, or Japanese foreign policy. Most of the discoveries of academics are not what we journalists would call newsworthy.
When we do find their stories worth retelling, they often accuse us of being superficial and putting the emphasis in the wrong place.
They believe, at heart, that there are some things in this world that really can't be explained in simple language. Every journalist instinctively rejects that; or at least is committed to communicating as much as possible to the non-specialist reader.
We think that they labour the point too much. The old joke about academic writing is that it requires you to first describe the point you are going to make - the abstract; then say it - the body of the article; and then say that you have said it - the conclusion.
Journalists don't want to hang about. It is not that we want to rush ahead without evidence or authority; the good ones stand over what they do. But we will cull a long paper or speech for the core point.
They say you can't understand that point unless you have considered the evidence and the limitation.
A producer of mine called this "death by a thousand qualifications".
He hated interviews with academics because they could not say what they believed without including the counter view.
We journalists suspect that academics have incentives to pad out their work, quote more sources than they really need and write about very small advances in understanding. And they do. Universities depend on published, peer-reviewed research, so it pays to push out articles that haven't taken the big strides in human knowledge that would excite the ordinary reader and viewer.
On the other hand, the academic will say we skim the surface of their great ideas and then move on to the next story.
But maybe they wouldn't be so miffed if as many people were reading their work as are reading the morning paper or listening to the news.
