Closing Claim on a Tired and Good Thing

During certain moments of the conference I felt as if I’d been invited to a tryout for the NBA and then told, “hey kid, you got some talent and we’d love to give you a shot, but there may not be any basketball next year.” The prospects for being a good science writer and finding steady employ were so gloomy and yet there I was in a room with some of my heroes, studying them, blogging about them...hoping.

Following the conference I was virtually blogged out and hurried to LAX for a flight to my childhood home in Colorado for some long overdue family time.

The house was mostly the same, a neighbor had moved away and the place was a bit tidier than when boisterous adolescence used to swirl through.  There was also a more subtle change as, ‘The Wall Street Journal’ and ‘The Christian Science Monitor’ had been added to the kitchen table.  My mother had subscribed to them ever since the two local papers had changed hands, shuffled personnel and their quality unpalatably eviscerated.

My childhood manse does not have high-speed internet, I’m posting this last reflective blog via the power of an AOL dial-up connection that was a fascinating novelty a decade ago and without which it is unlikely that the massive expansion of high-speed internet into the consumer marketplace would have occurred.

I don’t think my mother would ever upgrade to high-speed internet in order to read the news online.  She was annoyed at the dearth of local quality and had to acquire out-of-town papers primarily because the local papers had ceased to be local and she wanted to be able to read well-written articles.

Being home, I also remembered how my life had progressed to allow for the privilege of blogging in a room full of science writing luminaries.  Before the internet came to a neighborhood near you, my mother would clip out articles from the paper and give them to me in the morning.  Many were science articles—the work of paleontologists with a Colorado slant.

The articles were local in the sense that a newspaper should be and good science writing in that they affected my nubile imagination when it was fertile and sent me off on intellectual tangents to bookstores.  One may think of this as ‘browsing’, I would read a great paleontology article in the paper and then go spend hours with a book on crocodiles.

Those science articles spawned my interest in science writing.

I’m not buying the death of newspapers because of the internet argument.  I can buy the loss of advertising revenue to google, which then makes the business-minded chaps at papers engage in creative cost-cutting and ruin a good paper.  That I buy, but not that the amazing technological features of the online experience are making the newspaper obsolete.

What Tom Siegfried was howling for the entire conference is correct.  None of what has been discussed matters without smart journalists doing good, analytic work and online gimmickry distracts from this.

Personally speaking, I’m more than happy to limit my internet speed and read two or more papers a day as long as those papers are good and well-written, which brings me to something interesting now that I can no longer do quick factoid research without high-speed.  I wonder if there is a connection between people who subscribe to 2 or more papers a day and limited to no internet use? There will obviously be demographic qualifiers like that older people read newspapers more and are not as tech savvy etc...but I think something else would be discovered as well.  People who read two or more papers a day do not need the internet in the ways others have come to depend on it.  They are connected to their neighborhoods by following the local beats so they will not feel a need to create a sense of community with an online social network.  They can read the results and analysis of the previous day’s sports and feel the commensurate emotions rather than being deluged by any desired statistic.  Think of what a strange thing fantasy sports leagues really are compared to the experience of being invested in local sports coverage.

Granted this exercise into the Luddite ways of the early 90’s will not last once I am back in the graduate school grind, but I will be conscious of distracted online learning and point-and-click politics...all the conveniences of the internet that reduces the quality of journalism.

What a newspaper provides is concentration.  The internet certainly lends towards exploration, but it can be so ill-focused (Britney Spears—caveman spear—Clan of the Caveman—Porn) that it can be distraction rather than curiosity. 

Journalism is bleeding, but returning to Colorado and its slower pace of life that has always led me towards something thoughtful made me realize that the answers to the quandaries the conference presented do not exist in the future, but in the recent past.

The Internet Changes Everything

...Or does it?

It changes many things, to be sure. Hyperlinks append the encyclopedia to end all encyclopedias to every article. Flash and php enable “interactive content” much more advanced than simple page-flipping. Many of the games and demos suggested today are excellent examples. The Internet also provides an unparalleled way to track how readers experience pages, articles and demos, through what they choose to click and what they post in blogs.

And yet, in the wake of the symposium today, I found myself mulling what Tom Sigfried said: “All that stuff is very nice, but is it journalism?”

...or, could it be journalism? More directly: are the technologies of the web going to remain supplemental material, or are they going to change the very core substance of journalism in the future?

I doubt it.

Alfred Hermida’s admonition that journalists need to “have a multimedia mindset” should be heeded, but also taken with a grain of salt. Every story can’t be deconstructed into bits.

Narrative is primary. People understand the world in terms of stories; that’s what they’re looking for in news. The implicit question people ask when they pick up a newspaper or magazine (or go online in search of news) is “what’s going on?”—and the answer to that can’t always come in choose-your-own adventure form. Breaking a feature article into blurb bios, a game, and a flash animation of the relevant science destroys something valuable. The narrative, the story, is lost.

I heard various grim statistics today about how few people will follow a link to the latter half of a story (less than 20%). Still, though, if a publication cuts all such stories, it shouldn’t be surprised by a 20% drop in readership.

People do have the patience for longer stories, even if they don’t read them much online. As I said today, I think this is largely the result of the discomfort of reading from current computer screens. I refuse to believe that the attention span for all readers has dropped to 300 words in the last ten years. I think that advances in display technology will prove that.

Just as MTV didn’t kill the feature film’s popularity, I can’t believe that the internet will reduce journalism to blurbs. People will still want someone to connect the dots for them, to tell them a story.

He Said She Said versus The Facts

Your assignment is to do a story on a life-time smoker dying in the hospital.

Do you talk to the patient and the clerk who sold him cigarettes all those years?

A tobacco company representative and the man’s doctor?

Or should this be avoided and you do a story based on scientific facts? The statistical inevitability of this man’s death, his suffering, the cost to society and to his family?

There is a debate in science writing that journalists tend to go for the he said/she said convention out of convenience while this may not be what is best for the story.

Now, global warming, stem cells, eugenics...which approach is best when scientific things are very much human?

Websites for Ethical Improvement

by Andrew McGregor

Yesterday, the journalists were divided into teams and given the task of conceptually developing a new science news website employing the interactive and graphic potential of the internet.

This is a stab at an emerging venue of journalism and a profound statement on the current state of journalistic affairs.

Television news is largely an overwhelming sensory experience with viewers pinned to their seats by slick graphics and sound effects selling what is not normally considered news.

If people were really interested in Anna Nicole Smith beyond pathological voyeurism they would not need to be sold by graphics.

This conference has been floated on two conflicting notions of the America public: one being that the American public wants journalism that cannot see above the tabloid and that the writers in this room somehow need to trick their editors into allowing them to do stories the science writers find innately fascinating.

The other notion is that the American public is actually being estranged and neglected, that when media moguls point to high ratings for scandalous content and all the advertising lucre that comes with it they are selling a huge lie; a grand part of a self-replicating delusion.  In this model journalism is identical to entertainment, it serves no other role than to make money for its owners and its greatest virtue is in being so false that it upsets no one and can be completely forgotten as background noise.

This model is very successful.  CNN and Fox News are indistinguishable reflections of each other, mouthing accusations of political bias while running partisan opinion as news and filling 24 hours of airtime.

Personally speaking, every time I tell someone that I am a graduate student in journalism they ask me why journalism is so bad, so stupid, so untrustworthy.  They feel betrayed by an institution that is supposed to be handling something sacred.

Why have an interactive website? Why is it necessary to have blogs and viewer responses if the reporters have done their job and the story is great?

It is necessary in part because trust in journalism has been lost so that instead of being overwhelmed by graphics viewers would like to explore issues on their own.  It may be that cynicism is the impetus for curiosity, and if so the scientific news websites discussed in the room should have a pleasant future.  Innovative websites with strong user involvement and intellectual rigor are auspicious portents for what journalism can be like in the future; that they are unequivocally necessary is a damning comment on the condition of the fourth estate.

The Soul of the Story

“What is the role of the story?” Vicky Porter asked yesterday. 
“They are interesting,” said someone else.
“Important,” emphasized Tom Siegfried.
“Stories excite neurons,” replied Larry Gonick.
And so the debate raged on.  While writers may never agree on their role in informing the public, they can agree on something bigger.  The importance of choosing a “good” topic (with as many definitions here as there are people in this room) should be one of their main concerns. 
Educators and entertainers alike can unite over the gravity of topic choice.  And as science becomes more technical and narrow in scope, particularly in fields like molecular biology and neuroscience, it becomes harder to say something meaningful about the recent advances. 
“We need to challenge each other,” concluded Vicky Porter.

To Educate or Inform is a Decision to Behold

by Andrew McGregor

There is a school of though that in order to learn one needs to suffer with a text book. 

An interesting debate going on about the difference between informing the public and educating them.  Whatever its grumblings, science journalism does fill the role of educator to the public and not just informer, and it is not journalism in the ‘man bites dog’ sense of daily reporting on humanity’s failures.  Also, communal complaint at this conference has been the inexorable justifying of science journalism’s existence to editors.

What the future multi-media components can do is to evoke that childhood sense of wonder shared by the sports pages.  The sensation when one first sees an eclipse or imagines what it would be like to win the Super Bowl.  This is all interesting because it is making news a videogame experience.  Want to learn about how Tsunami’s work? Well, here’s a video simulation of what Malibu will look like underwater.

I personally grew up playing Sim Earth, Sim City and Sim Ant and I think that these videogames greatly enhanced my intellectual life.  For example, Sim Earth had a detailed explanation of the nitrogen cycle one could read before using it on a planetary scale.

In this example the visual and interactive experience fused to provide something wholly worthwhile, informative, and educational.

In terms of journalism, well...there is already a problem with the use of graphics as the major networks happily paraded representations of high-end US military technology before and during the current Iraq War.  The same thing happened when North Korea declared a successful nuclear test: hundreds of computer-animated depictions of ICBM’s streaking towards America from Asia popped up online and on television.

In both cases the rubric of accuracy implicit in journalism was sacrificed for the benefit of a visual illustration.  The current War in Iraq was not going to be decided because of high-tech considerations and North Korea cannot currently send a missile across the ocean.  In both cases the graphics distorted what the real concerns with both of these stories were and are.

So, in terms of science reporting, the interactive element can be very beneficial when a younger version of me is playing Sim Ant and managing my own colony and doing these kinds of things.  Yet, there are going to be problems with scientific coverage that also have policy ramifications.  A graphic illustration has no wiggle room, so in terms of science coverage with political consequences it is likely going to say nothing and be inoffensive to everyone or be completely accurate and offend a certain percentage of the population...or be completely inaccurate but very viewable.

Still, if journalists can maintain their integrity and fruitfully collaborate with scientists the internet’s ability to indefinitely display an interactive science feature and allow for limitless amounts of text could allow for the best of both fields in a shared world.

Can we teach them?  And if we can, should we?

A recent poll said that over half of Americans reject evolution.  The cause of this dismal state of scientific ignorance is, as we all know, complicated.  But where in this muddled mess of confusion do science writers fit in?  Is an attempt to educate futile?  According to Michael Lemonick, “we’re kidding ourselves if we think we can convince that 50% of the population.”

Of the rapture, Larry Gonick wondered if they believed that their bodies will physically ascend to the heavens.  And if so, he’s been “wondering how to make a bet on that.  The problem is that I won’t be able to collect when I win.”

Money-making schemes aside, what, if any, is our duty as science writers in education?  As people chimed in around the room with their take on this, I sensed an old argument re-surfacing.  “We are not educators,” Tom Siegfried said. 

Someone else mentioned that we can’t be burdened by being the “explainers,” and trying to change the culture is hopeless.  It is simply too hard.

The fact remains that the science stories in newspapers, on-line, and on the radio do educate the public, regardless of what we’d like our role to be.  So how much (if at all) does this impact the day-to-day work of a science writer?  Have you successful science writers learned to ignore this educational burden?  Or do you simply do the best you can?

An embargo on science?

Will science coverage suffer if the embargo system is abandoned? If science reporters no longer have the advantage of several days to research their articles and talk to sources, will they start churning out crap?

This topic was touched on several times today.  Over lunch, Alexandra Witze from Nature was kind enough to explain the basics of the embargo system to us (me, Laura and Mark).

In the embargo system, everyone gets a list of journal articles, PDFs and supporting information in advance, on the condition that they will not publish anything until the agreed-upon date.  Each news organization then decides what to write about, and the stories are all published the same day, coinciding with the publication of the journal article. These tip sheets from the major journals, said Witze, are the “bread and butter” of science journalists.

Nowadays, journals are beginning to publish some articles online ahead of their print edition.  Don Kennedy of Science said that this trend was likely to continue, and that the media might soon be receiving science information in “driblets,” rather than the nice packages they are accustomed to.  This could put science journalists in the position of scrambling to put a story together, perhaps even leaving out important pieces of the puzzle. 

Scientists, after all, are not easy creatures to catch hold of. They are rarely in their offices, more likely to be found lurking in the back of a committee meeting, lecturing to undergrads, or perhaps even looking over their graduate students’ shoulders.  I can only imagine working on a deadline, trying to get ahold of an expert to provide you with some context or an explanation on a difficult topic.

It’s not necessarily about being first, though.  Alfred Hermida pointed out that even if a story has already been reported, a thoughtful analysis will always add value.  The addition of expert voices and context will be a welcome explanation to those readers whose interest was aroused by the initial short news stories on a newly released paper. 

Perhaps, in an ideal world, science journalists could specialize further, and really get to know what they are talking about in a specific field.  Trying to know everything about science is like trying to know every word in a dictionary.  If a writer already has a good understanding of the context in their field, they can put a new finding into perspective more easily.

Why scientists can’t tell stories

Adam Franks from the University of Rochester teased out a key issue in his talk - the role of scientists as gatekeepers.

What he means he how scientists themselves communicate, or rather, fail to communicate, the meaning of their work. Why is this? Partly, said Franks is that there is a sense among scientists that appearance of seeking too much media attention is bad. This is despite the fact that grants tend to have an outreach component. In other words, how is the scientist going to tell the world about their work?

But then the other issue that comes up is that scientists don’t understand narrative.  They tend to adopt an expository approach in writing. The aim is to expose information.  In contrast, journalism is about telling stories through narrative writing. 

This divide illustrates one of the big challenge scientists and journalists face in communicating about science. 

Not the Be All-End All

There are different levels of science journalism. I look at the kinds of science news we do at Discovery News - text and video - as a kind of invitation to people who want to know more, not the be all and end all on a topic.

Our text stories are limited to about 400 words—occasionally we’ll go longer if the topic warrants it or we want to cover something more deeply—so we can’t really go very deeply into things. And our video stories (http://www.discoverynewsvideo.com) are usually around 3 minutes.

But hopefully, through succinct reporting that presents a good overview of what any given research is, we’ll prompt readers to go deeper into the topic. We try to facilitate that through sidebar links or video content that’s relevant to the story.

Lori Cuthbert, Director, Discovery News

Science Journalists Should Shun Objectivity

by Andrew McGregor

If someone were to say that Barry Bonds is a better baseball player than Babe Ruth every sports writer in the country would have a very strong argument backed up by statistical analysis.

Tom Siegfried argued that science writers should be more like sports writers; science writers should be able to understand statistics and be very well-versed in their field.

A good science experiment has to be objectively verifiable, but science journalists should not strive for objectivity because in science journalism there is a right and a wrong.

Think back to the coverage of the health risks connected to smoking cigarettes.  It is difficult to imagine that cigarettes are somehow healthy, however, the field of journalism very much failed to inform the public about the issue because of an interest in fairness—to give both sides to every story.

In this case the tobacco companies had no legitimate scientific backing for their claims and common sense dictates that cigarettes are at best unhealthy.  Yet, journalism’s tendency to strive towards fairness led to coverage of the health risks of cigarettes that was false and pernicious.

If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is part of a grand process constantly refining and improving itself, promising through the scientific method to prove itself false as the verification that it is true.  Science journalists then have a responsibility to inform the public by being accurate to the best of their abilities rather than resting upon the intellectually indolent ideal of fairness.

Use your noodle (and your rolodex)

Tom Siegfried tells us that much of what is reported in scientific journals may be wrong.  He cited a story that appeared in PLOS a while back, showing that many reported studies are based on faulty statistics.  Another story, in American Scientist recently explored the misuse of averages in clinical studies.

“The corollary to this,” said Siegfried, “because we write about these studies, is that much of what we write is wrong.”

Siegfried argued that we’re even more likely to report on false findings because they type of stories that are newsworthy are liable to be wrong.  A finding that is reported for the first time, new research from a hot field, or a study that contradicts previous studies are all likely to be refuted later.

Joe Palca of NPR took issue with Siegfried’s cynicism, giving the simple advice to “use your noodle.” Take your common sense with you, ask questions, and talk to people. 

Charles Petit returned to the idea of science as a process.  He noted that if a study turns out to be wrong, this can give an insight into how science works.

“It’s a meritocracy of error,” he said, “That which is not wrong, rises to the top.”

Let’s be pragmatic about statistical mistakes

Tom Sigfried opened his talk with, “It’s time to stir things up.” Balance, he said, is a bad idea: it’s a journalist’s responsibility to weigh the evidence and draw a conclusion. Merely citing sources leads to the implicit equation of good science with bad or pseudo- science. Science writers should strive for reliable information above all else. That necessarily involves a deep knowledge of the field.

Which raises the question:
Whose responsibility is it to make sure that the public gets reliable information?

There certainly should be accountability at every level for mistakes made. But if the public at large, undergrad psychology majors, and in many cases the scientists themselves can’t grasp statistics, how can journalists be expected to catch everyone else’s oversights?

Practically speaking, the battle to educate science writers to evaluate all the evidence themselves may not be worth fighting. Asking journalists to know more than scientists about their topics is certainly unreasonable. In some sense, they have to be able to trust their sources, or at least the consensus among many of their sources.

Adam Frank noted that it must be difficult for journalists to know which scientists to trust. It takes scientists themselves a while to learn who rushes to publication and whose work is consistently careful and good.

Alexandra Witze rejoined that there are at least a couple of areas in which journalists can and ought to have a couple of trusted sources (climate change, stem cell research).

Charles Petit pointed out that these problems with properly weighing the evidence provide journalists with a chance to emphasize the self-corrective nature of science. Science journalists should embrace botched articles as a chance to tell people what science is all about: finding and fixing mistakes.

Verbs for Scientists

Part of the problem in communicating science to the public is the scientists themselves.

“Scientists have a responsibility to communicate what they do,” said science journalist Tom Siegfried this morning.  “Part of the whole purpose of science to communicate what you found out to the world at large.”

Michael Lemonick, who has declared himself the morning’s iconoclast, argued that that would require too much of scientists.  “You’re asking people to do something beyond their job,” he said.

Even if communicating with the public is not a responsibility of a scientist, it is an essential part of being successful.  In order to write a successful grant, you must convince the funders that your research is important.  In order to get a faculty position, you must explain your work to people in different specialties.  Even fellow scientists will have no idea what you’re talking about unless you can explain it in something close to plain English.

Scientists usually like to talk about their work, and if they have achieved any prominence, they are usually very good at talking (and writing) about it.  But we are not taught to communicate.

Even though we are funded by public money (the NIH is paying for my PhD!) and work in the public interest, communication with the public is not emphasized.  Instead, we learn how to talk in the jargon of our field, to write scientific papers, grants, and give research presentations.  We use words like elucidate, attenuate, and potentiate.  When we do talk about the significance of our research, we are instructed to condense it into one long, unreadable sentence; “These studies may help elucidate the role of the neurotransmitter transporter GAT1 in contributing to epilepsy, stroke and excitotoxicity.”

Cartoonist Larry Gonick said that there should be a class called “Verbs for Scientists.”
I say “Please!”

Science Journalism Faces Important Challenges

by Andrew McGregor

In the film “Goodbye Lenin” the protagonist’s mother suffers a stroke just before communism falls in East Germany and he tries to maintain her perception that communism has not ended.  One of the ways he does this is by playing old news broadcasts because in communist East Germany the news never changes.

That moment was funny and interesting but it also sheds light on journalism everywhere.  If someone were to randomly be given a newspaper with the headline “SEX SCANDAL ROCKS CAPITOL HILL” they would be hard pressed to determine exactly when that headline was written.  Mark Foley, Bill Clinton? Who? When?

Science journalism is different because when a story is reported the category of science gives the article validity not possessed by other kinds of journalism.  For example, the headline “FIRST TEST TUBE BABY BORN” is an important moment of scientific progress: a headline that stands alone in history.

The session this morning very much dealt with such issues as luminaries from around the nation debated the nature of science writing, starting with such fundamental considerations as asking, “What is science?”

Dialectical opinions about what to do with science journalism were expressed, but the salient issue became the problem of science and belief.  Donald Kennedy, the editor-in-chief of Science Magazine gave an example by dropping a pencil on the floor as an example of people believing in gravity.  He contrasted this with a belief in evolution, stating that only about half of the American population believes in evolution.

This statistic belies the seminal role of science in terms of cultural and journalistic importance.  While journalism in its idealized manifestations is supposed to be fair, objective, and balanced.  What science journalism states is perceived as being true by the public.  This is part of the uneasiness faced by science writers as they must be both educators and reporters; forcing science writing outside of the traditional tropes of journalism.

In terms of journalism it is interesting to contrast science reporting with political reporting.  People expect politicians to lie on some level.  This cynicism gives itself to different styles of reporting where George Bush says A and Nancy Pelosi retorts with B and that can be a complete story.

Science journalism is held to a different standard commensurate with the way science is perceived not as another story, but as something true.

Science writers and scientists themselves will not tend to argue that their research is a unifying and complete theory of life.  However, the perception is there as scientists are expected to provide missile defense shields, cures for AIDS, and a narrative for the creation of existence.

It is this expectation that makes science journalism an intrinsically difficult and important part of contemporary culture.