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.

Harnessing the Internet

Yesterday I tagged along with one of the “break-out” groups, as they tackled their assignment: find a controversial subject in science, and cover it using the many interactive tools of the Internet. 

One questions popped up repeatedly as we brainstormed: how would we make this idea a viable business model?

Where would the money come from?

Who would use it?

How would our users find it?

Eventually, the group (very scientifically) agreed to assume that all of these questions were taken care of, so that they could continue with the exercise.

But skepticism was apparent.

When people no longer read newspapers and stop listening to the radio, will they accept lesser substitutes to the high-quality reporting that they used to get through traditional news outlets?

Or will they seek out new ways to find this information, and in doing so, make experiments like the one we participated in yesterday into feasible business models?

High Tech Fights Old Dignity

by Andrew McGregor

How to maintain integrity on the internet? An entity that was created by mathematicians and commercialized by pornographers is the hopeful nesting ground for the future of science writers.

The writers themselves do not see a problem in continuing what they were doing from their former print days when they chose not to lie and tell the news and things like this.  However, people instinctively do not trust what they read online versus traditional, authoritative sources and the public spends even less time reading online articles than print.

So, the preceding comprise at least two daggers pointed at the proverbial body of science writing.  The task of shoving the thoughtfulness and eloquence of the past into multi-media and diffuse cells does not look to be an easy one.

Fortunately though, there is a hope that all the online technological trend-hopping can just be avoided and that e-paper can fundamentally give people the searchability of the internet without the visual inconvenience of staring at a computer screen.

Acrimony is the only agreement, but there is hope that a future technology will allow the writers to do what they know how to very well and provide their readers with the meaningful content they so very much crave.

Will the twain meet under a new tech sky?

Getting Personal

Making a story personal is hard, especially when it’s about the newly discovered oceans of methane on Titan, as Adam Frank pointed out.  But it seems like everyone agrees that relatinga topic to a reader can make it better.

“There is a collective yawn out there,” Matt Crenson said, “so how can we shake them up?”

As groups present their projects this morning, there has been an emphasis on how best to draw people in to their sites through personal narratives.  One group proposed to feature families affected by global warming by allowing them to blog about their experiences.  It could feature a family from Antarctica, who is literally at the icy edge of the controversy, and a farming family in middle America, whose crops may be suffering. 

Matt Crenson suggested including an “interactive-build-your-own-story-assembler,” feature about stem cells.  The website would include primary resources, like the original science article describing the breakthrough, and audio files of interviews with a source.  The reader would be able to take a quiz, and their responses would go into a story.  Correct answers would be written in black, and incorrect answers would be red.  Users can then rate other user’s story, which takes advantage of people’s competitiveness.

Even though stories like Titan’s seas can’t be easily personalized, their inherent beauty can carry them.  While relating stories to people can be a great hook, we should all remember that on a basic level, people do care about science, and some things are just too cool to not write about.

The Central Resource (how to make it)

A running theme of this symposium seems to be that there’s a need for supplemental content online - a central resource of sorts - that will keep readers coming back for more information. How might such a site be reasonably implemented?

It seems to me that there are two possibilities: each publication could create several sub-sites for consistently hot issues, or there could be some non-partisan (non-profit? Governmental? International?) site to which many different publications could link.

Several sites already have sub-sites dedicated to particular issues. The New York Times, for example, has a sub-site dedicated to climate change . Of course, it seems that the last time it was updated was in 2001. It seems a good idea to put all the related articles from a publications archives into one place, but there may be practical barriers to this.

A central issue is that it’s costly to produce supplemental content (as Vicki Valentine and others pointed out in yesterday’s web technology show-and-tell session).

One solution to this might be found in another idea that’s floated around today: the idea of responding to hot topics.

The second group suggested that their site might somehow respond to whichever stories were most-clicked on Yahoo! or Google news. They also suggested that the most-clicked topics on (or portions of) their site could change colors (which I think is an excellent idea).

Because of the high price (in money and time) of fancy supplemental material, it might be practical for sites (either within a publication or at a non-profit) to wait a minute before developing such content. That way, they could add bells and whistles selectively to those stories that actually generated interest. Or they could add fancy video side bars to stories they thought needed more attention.

The issue with non-partisan resource sites is: How could you get Science, Nature, the New York Times, the USA Today, Discover, National Geographic, and all the rest (sorry if I didn’t hit your publication) to link to the same page?

Who would they all trust to accurately portray all the information on the issue, when they all rely for their survival on being known as the Best Source themselves?

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.

Good interactive ideas

Yesterday Cris Russell asked what “interactive” meant. She pointed out that merely clicking around a web site is little different than flipping through a newspaper or magazine.

Some of today’s suggestions have proposed excellent ideas to have readers meaningfully interact with a web page.

* Calculating your own carbon emissions
* Dueling blogs (two on one page) or Expert blogs (hopefully with expert contributions, to avoid he said/she said faux-balance of opinions)
* Coolest user on YouTube
* Interactive maps (to which users can upload their own illustrations of climate change, for example)

Also, I think it’s a great idea (nice one, Kat) to get attention-starved and under-appreciated grad students to advertise their work online. It would probably be a lot of work to set up a streaming feed from a lab, and to would require quite a bit of technical expertise. But we grad students are used to having to do all the work, and by and large science grad students are fairly tech-savvy. So a site would only have to ask, “do you want to be a celebrity?” and grad students would probably jump to do whatever it took to post information from their lab. 

Joke of the Day, as told by Joe Palca

During some free time away from a scientific meeting in LA, a PI and her two graduate students are walking along the beach.  They stumble upon a lamp in the sand, and one of the students picks it up and rubs it.  Out pops a genie, who says, “Since I don’t know which one of you found me, I’ll give each of you a wish.”
The first graduate student says, “I wish that you send me skiing in the Alps, with fresh powder, beautiful mountains, and a snifter of brandy when I’m tired."
The genie grants the wish and the student disappears in a poof of air and sand.
The second graduate student steps forward and says, “I wish to be scuba diving in Bermuda, and I want good visibility, amazing marine life, and a nice mai tai afterwards.”
He also disappears.
The genie then turns to the PI and asks for her wish.
“I want them both back in lab after lunch.”

As a graduate student whose absence from her lab has been sorely felt over the last few days, I appreciate the sentiment of the joke.  But what I can’t figure out is why, WHY, didn’t they wish for their PhDs?

Yeah, but who’s going to build it?

The first two presentations this morning presented very interesting-looking web sites with very vague sources of funding and unnamed contributors.

I understand that everyone at this conference works for different publications, and that resorting to media consortiums and non-profit sites with unnamed editors is a way to stay on safe ground. But come on, folks.

A site run by some non-specified government agency or consortium of competitors is a site run by no one. Fantasies of large staffs and pie-in-the-sky ideas of experts contributing for free will not lead anywhere.

Larry Gonick pointed out that this was a conceptual exercise, because it’s easier to do everything than to make small, focused suggestions, and there were only a couple of hours yesterday to work on this. Fine. But I’d be very curious to hear more practical ideas about how such grandiose plans might actually be put into action today in the discussion of the presentations.

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.

Images as Scientific Evidence

Rebecca Perry spoke yesterday not only about the use of images in science journalism, but also the use of images in science, as data.

Understanding the purpose of an image is important because if this is misunderstood, the image itself can seem to convey different meanings.

Researchers these days produce much of their data as images. Molecular biologists look at fluorescent microscope images of cells to determine how a protein’s concentration, location or expression is changed in response to manipulations.  Similarly, astronomers and physicists peer into the universe with techniques that have become increasingly complicated.

The images produced by these methods are much different than something we can see with our own eyes, even with the aid of a microscope or telescope.  Scientists use complicated processing and modification to produce representations of something that was previously invisible.

As science journalists, it’s important to understand how these images are generated, what one is looking at, what it means and whether the evidence is likely to be reliable.  This involves the same fact checking, reporting and research that science journalists have always done.

Power of Images

Larry Gonick, creator of the Cartoon History / Cartoon Guide explanatory comic books, discussed the value of image in narrative this morning.

“Image is not about making a page pretty,” he said. “The images should serve narrative ends.” He disparaged the idea that a cartoon figure pointing to the most important equation on a page served any useful purpose.

This message could—should—have strong consequences for the presentation of science online. Gonick pointed out that the most visually salient thing on one of the web pages in a previous presentation was one of the ads. Which should not be the case.

“We’re in the business of capturing readers’ eyeballs,” he said.

Gonick uses human figures in his comic book illustrations to drive points home. He also shamelessly anthropomorphizes. It’s intuitively obvious that putting people into images makes them easier to relate to. But there’s probably a deeper neurological reason for this.

Visual cortex dwarfs other sensory processing regions; we’re visual creatures. And significant parts of that processing structure are devoted to understanding human / biological motion and human facial expressions. Adding lifelike figures to a graphic serves two purposes: It makes the image “pop” and it gives a reader’s brain another handle on a difficult concept.