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Work with the media
Rowan Philp
Specialist reporter, Sunday Times, South Africa
Science stories are unique in journalism, in that they do not require conflict, controversy or celebrity elements to satisfy editors that they are worth running. Although some traditional news values such as rarity; impact, time-relevance, and humour, are still the key to many science stories in the media, the sheer sense of wonder generated by research and discovery is often enough.
Secondly, with reader focus groups increasingly indicating that newspapers are "too negative", science stories, along with charity or hero citizen stories, offer editors the primary "go-to" solution to present the kind of positive news that will protect their subscription levels by mollifying many of these readers.
And, thirdly, South Africa's eight science councils, dozens of universities and research institutions all enjoy a major media advantage over private institutions: journalists can pitch profile and news stories on their doings without having them thrown off diary as "plugs" or "free advertising". These are three significant pre-existing advantages for science in terms of accessing media space, and can easily be exploited.
In reality, most scientists will have professional media liaison professionals attached to their institutions, whom they will brief first on discoveries and research breakthroughs, and will rely on them to contact reporters with ideas and contact numbers for those scientists. However, exclusivity is key to major story "splashes", which should involve direct contact - even initial contact - between reporters and scientists.
Sunday newspaper reporters arrive on Tuesday mornings with two hours to come up with two or three stories for news conference (if you're going to call a Sunday reporter with a story tip or motivation, 09:30 on Tuesdays is the time to do it). One of the first things they turn to in their panic for story ideas is their "Futuring" file, which contains "Significant Dates" for that week - whether the start date of an Aids Conference; the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing; International Astronomy Day; the appointment date for the new National Research Foundation director; or the expected publication/ release of major new research. Scientists should ensure science reporters are told, and reminded, of the key future dates for their research - but should only choose the best two or three dates, relating to the most newsworthy science stories that are likely to happen.
If you do succeed in getting a reporter interested in a science story, don't stop there! Propose a story package, in which you, the scientist, can contribute, say, two sidebars to run along with it. For some reason, sidebars escape most of the normal rigours of news value and multiple source balance, leaving scientists with the opportunity for an almost pure public service information box.
Speed and scale must always be described to reporters with real-world comparison. And so large surface areas should be described in terms of soccer fields; a tokamak combustion chamber described in terms of a single or double garage, etc.
Do NOT say sub-atomic particles will travel through a particle accelerator at 280 000 kilometres per second; say rather that "tiny particles will travel fast enough to go around the equator 8 times (or over half way to the moon) in a single second".
Not too long ago Dr Zeblon Vilakazi, director of iThemba Labs near Cape Town, was faced with the challenge of explaining to a reporter how his High Level Trigger software would uncover quark-gluon plasma at the Large Hadron Collider. Commendably, he explained that it would work in the same way as a detective at a murder scene: using the angle of bullet holes to work out where the killer had been standing. This is a case study in good science communication. Unfortunately, Vilakazi did not apply the same metaphorical imagination to describing the plasma itself, leaving the reporter to do it. Inevitably, the reporter resorted to calling quark-gluon plasma "Creation goo", when, in fact, it should be been described thus: "a fifth state of nature, adding to solids, liquids, ordinary plasma and gas".
Science stories are overwhelmingly concerned with the "What", and, to a lesser extent, the "Who" (particularly when successful research has been conducted by a scientist from a previously disadvantaged background). The "How" of scientific discovery is routinely ignored, and represents a rich vein of possible stories in future.
Only a fraction of South Africans, for example, know that perhaps the greatest discovery of the 20th century - an ever-expanding Universe - was made using the same basic method that sees them caught in speed traps - the Doppler effect.
The same applies to engineering. Few South African journalists were impressed by the most impressive engineering achievement at the Southern African Large Telescope - being built for one third the cost of the equivalent 10 metre telescope in Texas - but all were dazzled by HOW engineers cooled it: using louvers in the shape of aeroplane wings built into the walls, rather than costly air-conditioning systems.
While controversy is not required in science stories, it will quickly elevate that story to page three or even page one. If a scientist on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project learns, for instance, that the SABC is dragging its heels in terms of shutting down its broadcast towers in the far Northern Cape - and thus endangering the bid or the instrument's radio-noise standards - then give an off-the-record tip off to a trusted science reporter. Ditto any opportunistic land claims in the site area, or police refusing to switch to lower radio frequencies, or whatever. All readers want the SKA to succeed, so there is nothing to fear from tip-offs like these, and a great deal of publicity to gain.
Read the publication you hope the results of the research will appear in, and try not to form a picture in your mind of how the story you wish to tell would appear in a journal, or even the specialist magazines or newspapers you may read.
Nowhere in any press release for the Southern African Large Telescope was it noted that a magnum of champagne sits on a shelf at the facility, bearing signatures and amusing remarks of all scientists involved in achieving "first light" on its label, and containing no cork, having been drunk and sprayed in celebration of the occasion. When it is difficult to explain the significance of a breakthrough to lay readers, it is often as good - or better - to show the excitement of the scientist involved (The public rationale for this is: if geeks spray champagne around, it must be a big deal).
It's the human detail you as scientist see around you in the lab; the humorous or poignant prank or knick-knack that will hook a reporter into a story; the serious science stuff can then be worked in beneath.
Two years ago, Professor Neil Turok co-authored an alternate theory to the Big Bang Inflation model in the journal Science, referred to as the "Cyclic Theory". Despite the great news value attraction of the fact that Turok is South African, the story of his published theory would not have been run in the Sunday Times without a clear measure which might invalidate his theory. This is because editors of general news publications are loathe to allow theoretical physicists to use their pages to "float" grand ideas, without proofs the newspaper can later test them on. Turok obliged by conceding that any discovery of gravitational waves by the Planck satellite would render his entire model invalid, and, even then, a skeptic was quoted to contextualize the claim.
Watch out for God! We see it everywhere in media accounts on physics: The Higgs boson is "the God Particle"; hydrogen is "God's fuel"; and the SKA may quickly become "God's Radio".
I personally made the mistake last year of flooding my coverage of the Large Hadron Collider with references to God - including a sidebar which explored "fine tuning" in the Universe, and the idea that "if ours is the only universe, then it could not have happened by accident". The problem is this: even science reporters with some basic knowledge of science have to pitch their stories to entirely lay editors, who tend to respond only to sweeping concepts gleaned from pop culture and science fiction.
Of course, most discovery is built on pre-existing discovery, and happens through collaboration and a long period of time. But if there is a "eureka moment", alert the nearest reporter immediately!
Repetition: It can be safely assumed that most readers are vaguely aware of a mysterious start event to the universe called the "Big Bang" (surely, the best science communication phrase yet devised (albeit by a detractor of inflation theory); but little else can be assumed. Less than 1% of readers will be aware that the Milky Way has a sister galaxy, Andromeda.
For any story on astronomy or cosmology, it must be constantly repeated that the current decade represents one of the great era's of discovery, matching the first decade of the 20th century - particularly in view of the fact that "It was only about ten years ago that scientist learned all the stuff we can possible see - the galaxies, stars, planets, and atoms - are in fact just 10% of the 'stuff'; that's out there."
Request a review of the draft story. Although news editors are loathe to allow sources to vet stories ahead of publication, they are still less keen on having to run corrections and clarifications on published errors. It is generally accepted in specialist fields such as medicine and physics that reporters (who are both anxious not to look like fools, and keen to preserve the respect of their sources) can ask their sources to check the accuracy of their copy, although they are NOT allowed to influence the angling, or edit their quotes. However, scientists must make it clear to reporters they wish to check the draft not out of any lack of faith in the journalist's intelligence, or out of any desire to control the story, but rather strictly for the reasons mentioned above.
Avoid "alarm words". One of the world's biggest and most important science experiments today, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, began as a public relations and fund-raising disaster, simply because it had "thermonuclear" and "experimental" in the same sentence. The correct name is now banned in its own communications office, and it is permanently handicapped with the name "Iter". Meanwhile, some scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in France thought they could impress reporters by suggesting that "unstable mini black holes" could flash in and out of existence at the Atlas detector. The result: more bad PR, and a major law suit in the US which claims a danger that the experiment could create a massive black hole which could gobble up Earth! The second warning lesson here is that the scientists used the word "unstable", knowing that "stable" black holes are the "dangerous" kind, and "unstable" to mean very short-lived and, therefore, harmless. However, "unstable" to the general public means uncontrollable and dangerous, pure and simple, just as "radiation" means energy to a scientist, but something sinister and dangerous to the public.
Be slow to ridicule gross media and public misconceptions. Remember, scientists themselves were recently responsible for the greatest miscalculation of all time: the estimated value of the Cosmological Constant, which turned out to be 10 to the power of 120 weaker than the estimate. (This is a remarkable mistake, when you consider there are only 10 to the power of 80 atoms in the universe).
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