Academics and journalists have a lot in common, at least in principle.

Whether you’re a reporter or a professor, your job is to go out into the world and figure out the truth. You’re supposed to be careful, to check and correct for how you might be wrong. And at the end of the day you’re supposed to communicate what you found.

The differences mostly come in how you’re paid.

You could imagine some sort of pure truthseeker, paid purely by how well they tell the truth. People would ask them to find out the truth about something, and pay them for the service. And the truthseekers with the best track record would get the most clients. But neither profession really works like this.

Journalism comes closest. Once upon a time, people bought newspapers in order to be the first to know when something important happened. While there’s still a little bit of that going on (I guess this is what Bloomberg Terminals are for?), it’s a lot less central because of the internet. Now, there are hundreds of ways to find out about things, from a multitude of news sites to social media. More and more, people expect to be able to get information for free.

In that environment, the news has to compete not on the facts themselves, but on how it presents them. People pay for news that’s curated well to match their interests, or news that feels more respectable. And more than either of those, they pay for news that’s entertaining. So while truthseeking skills pay, writing skills often end up mattering more. In a sense, it’s why it’s possible for me to do journalism at all. I was trained in the academic truthseeking tradition, not the journalistic one. I got into journalism by impressing editors with my writing, not my ability to suss out the truth.

That academic truthseeking tradition is quite different, in part because the rewards for it are much more indirect. Academics pay comes from two main sources: research grants, and student tuition. Students are mostly there to learn old facts, not new ones, so that source of money supports research only in so far that students believe that a successful researcher with time for research will also be a better teacher.

Research grants, in principle, pay for truthseeking. But they’re typically paid by governments, which often don’t have a clear idea of what they’d like to learn, since the more practical questions are already being researched by private companies. So the decision gets delegated out to other academics, who have a vague shared sense of what’s worth knowing and what’s not. Accuracy should have an impact: that is, it should be easier to get grants if you’re better at finding the truth. But in practice, unless someone does so badly they trigger a scandal, academics don’t usually get things all that wrong. So grants are mostly based on other factors.

Paying someone purely to deliver the truth, not to entertain or match a culture, seems tricky. You could imagine sci-fi scenarios. What if we could track the logic people used to make decisions, and demand payment if those decisions were based on facts we uncovered, like a journalist getting a percentage of every short made in response to bad news they dug up about a company? What if governments paid in proportion to how valuable academic ideas turned out to be, centuries after they were discovered, and modern-day academics sold shares in that future payout to fund themselves? What if prediction markets something something?

For the moment, academics and journalists are both in a weird middle space. They’re truthseekers, still, by culture and inclination and desire. But they’re paid for something else.