7 Conclusions: Intervening on Shifting Sands 235
put, while the economics behind NIESR’s publications may have remained relatively stable, their mode of public engagement changed considerably. This belied a shift from targeting a narrow academic and policy elite to seeking to influence a larger audience, which occurred in parallel to crucial institutional changes, especially in relation to their funding sources. Developments such as these can be linked to shifts in the environment in which think tanks operate, especially in relation to the publics its work intends to reach. To expand on this point, it is useful to examine their media coverage. After all, the format of a think tank’s public interventions is linked to what type of audience it seeks to inform, and traditional media outlets are a privileged conduit for reaching some of these audiences. The graph (Fig. 7.1) shows think tanks’ yearly mentions across Britain’s four most circulated daily broadsheet. From these numbers, it is readily evident that their media presence expanded considerably after 2008. Total mentions for all cases went from 374 in 2007, and 481 in 2008, to 513 in 2009, and 604 in 2010. To be sure, this increase could happen without direct planning or action by think tanks, as the case the growing interest on NIESR’s forecasts shows. However, for institutions whose primary policy interventions are in the form of commentary (particularly the ASI) or policy reports (e.g., NEF), this growth may be linked to an expansion of their output (see Fig. 2.1, Chapter 2). Meanwhile, the media coverage of well-connected policy institutes can be enhanced by their hosting of speeches and announcements of senior politicians—e.g., the case of PX, especially after 2010. These numbers also provide evidence that the presence of each organisation varies across broadsheets—which can be associated to their political proclivities. For instance, while NEF enjoys considerable visibility in the left-of-centre The Guardian, it lags behind in right-leaning papers such as the Daily Telegraph and The Times. There are also significant variations in the capacity in which each think tank is presented. For example, while most of ASI’s coverage is in the form of commentary, much of NIESR’s corresponds to citations of their numbers, especially in the Financial Times. In this sense, the larger volume of opinion pieces written by NIESR staff as years went by is an index of important shifts
