FAQ

What is Miller-McCune?
It’s a public benefit corporation founded by Sara Miller McCune, founder and chairman of SAGE Publications. Its three arms are this Web site, the magazine Miller-McCune and internships. For more details, see our About Us statement.

Why did you start this?
The body and quality of knowledge created by scientists and researchers are critical to addressing today’s pressing issues. To compete in today’s world, we must raise new questions, inspire new research and inject new ideas from and into all involved.

We don’t have all the answers, but we have the resources and intellectual energy to move the research and knowledge forward towards reasoned solutions. We aim to tap new ideas offering genuine solutions and leave purely political rhetoric, sound bites and stale buzzwords in the dust.

Why now?
There’s always been a need for what Miller-McCune is doing now, and a variety of attempts and media have labored to fill that need. But the Internet revolution has provided both an extra need as news becomes so cheap, repetitive and ubiquitous as to lose its purpose (and impact), and an extra boost by allowing substantive journalism to be distributed widely and instantaneously.

With literally too much information, where do you go for substance? Where do you go for quality? Who can you trust to have investigated the problem and served as an honest broker to dispense meaningful suggestions? Our answer is Miller-McCune.

What makes you different from a lot of other Web sites and magazines out there?
We are not reporting just on problems — that’s what the popular media does already — but on research-based starts for solving those problems. Most public interest journalism focuses on revealing or explaining problems, the theory being that society will respond appropriately, once journalists make the problems known. Miller-McCune and Miller-McCune.com will focus on practical options for solving serious problems, particularly if the options are backed by quality policy research and researchers and the research goes against common wisdom.

Who is writing your material?
Our writers — staff writers, well-regarded journalists and public intellectuals — work with the academic community to promote their findings in accessible format that is both easily understood and thought-provoking.

Who is reading this?
Our readers are both the type of people we are talking to — academics and government, non-governmental and private-sector policy-makers — and the engaged populace as a whole. We’re starting with North America, but there’s no shortage of issues — and potential answers — globally for us to seek in the future.

Why are you in Santa Barbara, Calif., and not New York or Washington?
There are some practical reasons — our founder lives here, and SAGE is based in Thousand Oaks, which is just north of Los Angeles. And our contributors span North America, Oceania, Asia and Europe. Nonetheless, we could just as easily located in a traditional publishing center, but we decided that our Pacific Rim vantage point would help us always take a new look at issues — not political, not ideological, not for profit, but eminently practical.