Generating publicity and engaging with the media to promote academic research

This chapter provides insight into ways for academics and researchers to generate media coverage for their research and communicate knowledge to the public through mainstream print, online, radio, and television media. Despite growing scholarly interest in social media and public scholarship, public engagement through mainstream media remains a prestigious form of outreach that can result in significant public exposure. While there has been recent scholarly discussion of types of academic media engagement and public intellectualism in an increasingly democratised digital media landscape, little attention has been paid to practical approaches to generating media publicity for research from an academic’s perspective. This chapter draws on my own experience of media engagement as an Australian film scholar with a specific focus on the importance of media releases and processes involved in working with different media. The chapter frames aspects of the public intellectual, discusses planning for media engagement and offers approaches to publicising research outcomes