Orchestra worked with The New School’s Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy to create an editorial program that translates rigorous scholarship into accessible formats for students, journalists, policymakers, and general readers.
Strategy guided by three principles: preserve rigor, choose the best format per idea, and make content reusable across channels.
Target audiences include students, faculty, journalists, policymakers, researchers, organizers, and intellectually curious readers.
Race, Power and Political Economy produces research intended to shape policy and public debate. Much of that work, however, was locked in dense research papers, expert commentary, or social posts that mainly reached people already familiar with the field. Orchestra identified a gap: important ideas weren't getting into the hands of broader audiences who could act on them.
Orchestra's explicit aim was to build a "center of gravity"—an editorial program that could introduce the Institute's scholarship to nonacademic audiences without stripping away its rigor. The program had three concrete editorial principles:
Orchestra designed a nine‑story editorial program to operationalize those principles. Six pieces were published as of the case description. The published formats include:
The program's audience list is specific: students, faculty, journalists, policymakers, researchers, organizers, and intellectually curious readers who may not speak academic or policy jargon. The content strategy aims to make each piece serve multiple uses: inform people who find it on the site, provide quotable lines and visuals for journalists and communicators, supply sharable snippets for social, and create material that can be repurposed for events and PR.
Instead of relying on dense papers or academic channels, this program starts with audience comprehension and utility. It reverses the usual flow: select the research idea, choose the editorial format that best communicates it, and then design distribution-ready assets so the idea moves beyond the academy into public and policy conversations.
What this implies for similar institutions
Institutions that want their research to influence policy or public debate can adopt the same three principles. Doing so requires editorial capacity to translate, a flexible format toolkit, and coordination so that each published item produces reusable promotion and PR materials.
Ideas Beyond the Ivory Tower reframes academic content strategy as an editorial product designed for multiple downstream uses. The program converts rigorous scholarship into readable, shareable, and reusable work aimed at widening the audience and increasing the practical reach of research.
The diversity principle – the idea that people with different backgrounds, identities, and viewpoints produce better work – was a core tenet of the first modern research university and the inspiration for John Stuart Mill’s classic treatise, On Liberty. But as a war on diversity upends government, corporate, and educat
Ideas may begin with a small group of people, but with the right partnerships, they can grow into movements that shape communities. This is the thinking behind the third edition of...
Restoring the academy requires more than budget cuts-it needs grant funding for the research that the Left has ignored.
When we picture leaders, we still tend to imagine experts anchored firmly in one sector—finance, education, health, or technology—each fluent in its own metrics and jargon. We rarely imagine leaders whose core skill is crossing boundaries: learning from a superyacht builder how to rethink a university or borrowing idea
Thought Leadership Campaign
In over 30 years in consulting and senior marketing roles, I've sat through more planning off-sites than I care to remember, and while they rarely produce identical plans, they often produce remarkably similar topics.
Loading more related stories...
Open the app view to save this story, compare related coverage, and continue from the same source.