Lawrence Lessig, hero and leader of the Open Source movement, is putting down intellectual property law to spend the next decade focusing on issues of political corruption. Good man. His actual reasoning, that after a decade in IP his energies could be better spent mastering and advancing another field, is solid, too. It takes relatively less energy to remain somewhat current in a field you've already studied intensely than it does to gain fluency in a whole new subject area. I, for instance, do a lot of work in health care policy. At some point, I'll do relatively less. Even now, as my workload has sharply increased, I spend less time reading Health Affairs articles than I used to. At a certain point, increasing your command of policy minutia has diminishing returns as compared to, say, focusing on Iran.
I would love to see political journalism/punditry work in ways more explicitly similar to the Lessig model. When you start at a magazine, you'd be given a beat. Doesn't mean that's all you'd write about, but it would be your job to keep the readership current on developments, argument, and debates in that field. After two or three years, you could ask to change your focus. But in an explicit (you will do this), rather than implicit (you seem to enjoy doing this), way, everyone would be forced to consciously develop policy expertise, potentially on multiple subjects. To some degree, this happens naturally, as writers begin publishing more often on subjects they enjoy, and find they get good response to. But it's largely at the writer's discretion how deep to dive, and whether to continue, and whether to follow the policy literature or just the op-ed currents. It shouldn't be. If magazine writing were more directed, with more attention to the training rather than just the product, we'd be better off.
