Mair is a serial book editor and a serial teacher, having taught at six British universities - Westminster, Kent, Brunel, Edinburgh Napier, Coventry and Northampton.
Journalists and academics share much in common. They are both seekers after truth (or say they are). Primarily, both groups speak and write English (or say they do). Sadly, language too often gets in the way of communication.
When did you last pick up a journalism academic tome and get to the end of it? Some of it is simply indecipherable. Too many of my colleagues in the academe hide behind obscure and obscurantist language.
Some of them are even former "hacks" who should know better, but are trying to gain cred on the library shelves. Often in vain. The sad truth is that many of those who teach media have little time for journalism and for journalists, however elegant the language.
What do we mean by local? is the tenth "hackademic" collection edited by Richard Keeble and myself in the last five years. In that time we have commissioned and edited well over 300 chapters from up to 200 authors.
We get the brilliant, the bad and the simply incomprehensible submitted to us. Authors fight to get it into the books but I sometimes have a fight to get to the end of their pieces. It need not be so.
Academic does not, or should not, mean arcane and obscure. In writing, as in life, keep it simple and sweet. Frequently, we head off to non-grabby titles, endless subordinate clauses, footnotes galore and the long words that make some academic pieces similar to reading the novels of Salman Rushdie or Wilson Harris (whose books have never engaged me beyond page 10).
Do authors understand the language they are using?
I am not always convinced the authors understand the language they are using. As a reader, I sure have a struggle.
Let us tell the tale of two men in the jungle of the academe. Alan Geere is an unlikely hero of mine. Loud, brash and larger than life. He ducks in and out of the journalism profession and academia with gay abandon.
One day editor-in-chief of the Essex Chronicle, the next head of journalism at Victoria university in Uganda. But he knows how to communicate. His chapter in our book about the 60 journalism trainees hired by Northcliffe in the south east from 2008-2011, and their current destinations, is a good linear study. Interesting and informative reading and vital for journalism educators.
It is a piece of research that advanced my knowledge. And Geere's piece has been picked up by both of journalism's "parish magazines" - Hold the Front Page and the Press Gazette.
But I bet Alan has a struggle getting it accepted for [academic magazines] Journalism Studies or the Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies. More is the pity.
The second is an anti-hero: Captain Robert Maxwell. I live in Oxford and every time I pass or visit Headington Hall, I think of the old fraudster. His empire at Pergamon Press was built on academic arrogance. Pergamon launched 700 academic journals in Maxwell's day.
Those in the academe lapped it up. An article in the Bulgarian Journal of Social Sciences deemed worthwhile, a piece in the UK Press Gazette not. We all chose to ignore the fact that few read these journals and the price of their publication was Maxwell turning in a hagiography of the various monsters who ruled communist eastern Europe.
Pergamon certainly had impact. It is what we all chase in the academic world - out of the ivory tower and influencing everyday journalistic practice through our research and the students we produce.
In the forthcoming 2014 Research Excellence Framework, which determines research money for all universities, "impact" is all. Twenty per cent of each entered academic's score is determined by that. But just how you measure impact in a necessarily woolly subject like journalism is a moot question.
My own impact Everest was hearing that Lord Justice Leveson was reading the book by Richard Keeble and myself on the phone hacking scandal as he took evidence. That was pretty special.
Journalists crave impact as much as academics. When Mirage in the Desert? Reporting the 'Arab spring' was published two months after the fall of Tripoli in 2011, it splashed.
Which journalism books have been the most influential?
So much so that the then foreign editors of both BBC News and ITN asked that we publish a swift second edition because they wanted to be included in what they saw as the public record. Naturally, we obliged.
Inside the academe, ask yourselves which books and programmes have most influenced your students and their thinking in the last five years? Nick Davies's Flat Earth News would be high on the list so too Andrew Marr's My Trade and also the work of film-makers Chris "Starsuckers" Atkins and Richard Peppiatt washing tabloid dirty linen in public. Few mainstream academic tomes, sadly.
Immodestly, I would also claim our 10 "hackademic" volumes are up there high in student reading lists and consciousness. Kent's centre for journalism orders 10 each time.
The books take a big issue and get some of the finest journalistic and academic minds to tackle it from their own perspective in bite-sized chapters and in clear English-often after several drafts.
Professor Keeble learned his trade subbing on the Cambridge Evening News. The skill has never left him. He can cut through the most obscurantist text in record time.
So, fellow toilers in both vineyards, remember we are in the communication business. Speak clear English, write clear English. Stop talking about industry involvement and using it just as a marketing tool for your courses and start to use the basic tools of journalism better.
Get down and dirty. An audience of tens of thousands for your work has much more impact that they the four or five in your specialist sub-field. Journalism is what we do. Let's celebrate that - in clear English.
PS: Mair and Keeble are about to produce two more books, one on data journalism and on the other on what Leveson missed out. Writers of clear English are welcome to offer contributions!
*What do we mean by local? The rise, fall – and possible rise again – of local journalism is edited by John Mair, Richard Lance Keeble and Neil Fowler. To be published 1 September by Abramis at £19.95. Special offer to Guardian readers, £15, from richard@arimapublishing.co.uk
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