Scientists and journalists need different things from science – Response 2: Power-blogging outreach to the media

Posted on 16 Mar 2012 by Soapbox Science Editor

Tim Skellett is an Australian living in northwestern Germany. His interests include nature, ecology, gardening, reading, metal- & hot-glass-work and travelling, to name a few. His blog is listed in the Guardian Comment Network and can find him 0n Twitter, where he is @Gurdur.

Do blogs matter to the press? I came across on Twitter what I thought was a strange statement from Fiona Fox, head of the Science Media Centre of Britain, speaking at a recent discussion on science-journalism in London. The relayed partial quote was: “Fiona Fox: blogs are fantastic but no journalists goes to them to look for full stories – must be realistic”. I thought that was quite wrong, and more importantly, that it would discourage scientists and others from blogging and from reaching out to the media.

Can your blog or your networking change the world for the better? Will the media take notice of you unasked? The answer to both questions is a definite yes. A simple single blog post can lead to major governmental events such as the resignation of Bush-appointee George Deutsch.

In Britain, a blog was very much thrust into mainstream-media news when the British police officer Night Jack’s blog first won the prestigious Orwell Political Reporting prize, then had its pseudonymous blogger author outed by a Times reporter who hacked the blogger’s emails. Other UK police bloggers as yet still not outed include Inspector Gadget and PC Bloggs, both of whom also have books out, and regularly get looked up and quoted by the media. Getting onto science, environment and medicine, it’s difficult to see how people like Carin Bondar, Bora Zivkovic, Maryn McKenna, Holly Tucker, Deborah Blum, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Chris Mooney could have achieved the massive success each has attained without their blogging. For book authors, these days, often a blog is essential. Grant Jacobs ‏has also noted how New Zealand science-bloggers have appeared on NZ prime-time TV.

It’s vital to realise that the media do take account of blogs, do sometimes actually look up blogs of their own accord, and that blogs are an essential part of outreach. This all takes place in the long-debated topic of whether or not the media needs to change, or whether science-bloggers and scientists should change. The problem is, the media is changing, and often not for the better. Chris Mooney (@ChrisMooney) already documented back in 2008 how science coverage is disappearing from newspapers; that can only get worse as newspapers crumble economically under the weight of the net. There is however a counterweight, the net again, and that is many newspapers now regularly include blogs in their online coverage and often in their print coverage.

In the UK, there is:

The Guardian Comment Network (of which my own blog is part); The Guardian Science section with several bloggers,

The Times with its own science blog and many other bloggers,

The Daily Telegraph with its own blogs section and its own science section,

The Independent with its science section and blogs.

In the USA, there is:

The New York Times with its own opinion/blogs section and its science section, The New Yorker with its blogs and its science section,

The Los Angeles Times with its science section and blog.

It’s essential to know that, in almost all these cases, the newspaper section editors and their reporters are accessible via Twitter and email. Pointing them towards an existing blog-post can often be helpful (I’ve done so myself many times, and it’s been productive, even if I am a very tiny fish in a huge sea). Even more, some newspapers are experimenting with public input into their reporting process; for example, the Guardian now has a Newsdesk Live section where you can have a direct input into the news topic of the day. Working together with Prof. Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu, of New York), the Guardian now has an Open Journalism section. Then there are sometimes cross-political initiatives like this one in 2008 which can make great venues for blog input. The need for effective science-communication as in the wake of ClimateGate or fracking has been stressed time and time again.

These means are all there for you to use. There are even freely available academic papers on science-outreach like this one. I would also name some helpful books, but I see many of them have already been named. It is really up to you, to each one of us, to use the opportunities provided. Yes, MSM science coverage is shrinking. Yes, in tabloids and sensationalist reporting, science will often be brutally mutilated. But corrective possibilities are there, and if you can make your story good enough, the media will sometimes come to you unexpectedly.

The most important thing is to build up your media-contact network before anything happens. If reporters already have some contact with you, and they know you are reliable, they will be much more inclined to listen to you or even initiate contact with you. In the end though it’s scientists who will have to initiate the most effort from their end; MSM journalists do most of what they can already. Since timeliness is the main part of response to a news topic, then having pre-existing contact even at a very basic level can be very helpful.

The next important thing is to realise that a science item must be told in a way that is intelligible and interesting to the general public. For example the #arseniclife debate was fascinating to scientists, but it left the public mainly unmoved. However, can you imagine what impact fast-response science-blogging would have on any event like the Camelford water pollution incident of 1988? Or Love Canal, New Jersey? The recent catastrophe in Fukushima was a good opportunity for science-blogging for outreach; unfortunately, that one fell victim to premature dismissal of risk.

A journalist’s job is not to relay hard science in an academic way; it is to entertain the public, hopefully with some solid information thrown in. Yes, Bora Zivkovic (@BoraZ) is right to think that a science journalist should be able to read a research paper; the problem is that there are ever less science-journalists in dedicated full-time staff positions, just as reporter positions overall are declining, and he himself has blogged on how science-blogs should not be written like academic papers. So it’s up to each of us to do what we can to fill that gap. The means are there.

Scientists and journalists need different things from science – Response 1: To Read, or Not To Read a Paper (and Can You Understand It)?

Posted on 16 Mar 2012 by Soapbox Science Editor

Matt Shipman is a public information officer at North Carolina State University, where he writes about everything from forensic entomology to computer malware. He previously worked as a reporter and editor in the Washington, D.C. area for Inside EPA, Water Policy Report and Risk Policy Report, where he covered the nexus of science, politics and policy. He blogs about NC State research at The Abstract, and you can follow him on Twitter where he is @ShipLives.

On March 13, the Royal Institution held a debate about the coverage of science in the media, asking whether scientists and journalists need different things from science. You can read the nature.com Communities team write-up and Storify of the tweets about the event here. While the event took place in London, it was followed online by a large (and vocal) group of scientists, science writers and others interested in how science is communicated. One of the questions that came up was whether reporters should read the scientific papers related to the story that they are covering.

The vast majority of responses can be summed up thus: “Yes.”

I agree that it would be great if reporters read all the papers they wrote about. However, I also think it is both wildly optimistic and very unrealistic to expect most journalists to do so. After all, the odds are excellent that the journalist would not be able to understand what they’re reading anyway.

To be clear: I’m not writing this to defend the practice of not reading papers. I am also not advocating that reporters should avoid reading papers. Rather, I’m hoping to explain why many reporters will either not read a paper, or will read a paper but not understand it (or worse, misunderstand it).

There are some reporters who are able to make a living writing about a specific field of study, whether it’s astrophysics or paleontology. But for most reporters, making a living means writing about whatever subject your editor assigns to you. Or, for freelancers, whatever story you can sell. That could mean writing about astrophysics and paleontology. And materials science. And entomology. And that’s just this week.

Researchers spend years learning the ins and outs of their fields, mastering a jargon that is beyond the ken of those outside their specific fields of study. Most reporters do not have that luxury.

This is where most scientists – and many science writers – chime in: “Stop!” you say. “We didn’t say it was easy. But how can you write about a paper you haven’t even read? That makes no sense. You’d just be making stuff up! You MUST rely on the primary literature.”

To which I say: Yes, it would be better if all journalists could read and understand every paper they write about. But, since they can’t, should we give up hope?

I don’t think so.

Full disclosure (and this will not shock you): I am not a scientist, I was not a science major, and while I try to read journal articles, I often don’t understand what I’m reading. It may be clear prose to you, but it’s a shibboleth to me (and if you don’t know what a shibboleth is, you’ll know how I feel when I read phrases like “rectification using multiheterojunction”).

Still, somehow, I’ve made a living writing about science (directly or indirectly) for 14 years. And I’ve never had to run a correction related to the scientific content I’ve written about. How is that possible, if I don’t understand the papers? Easy. I ask questions. A lot of questions. “What questions were you trying to answer with this research? Why? What was your methodology? What were the key findings? What new questions did this research this raise?” And every time I don’t understand the answer, I ask them to explain it.

In a sense, the researchers act as translators, walking me through the paper step by step. This sort of dialogue is essential for any non-expert (like me) who wants to write about a paper. It allows me to understand the content and context of the research in the paper, even though I don’t understand the lexicon used in the paper itself.

All that said, I do think reporters should try to read the papers they’re writing about. Once in a while, they’re actually written in prose that is accessible to the lay reader (or at least the abstract is). This is true for institutional science writers/public information officers (PIOs) too.

For example, a friend of mine is a PIO at a well-regarded university who writes research-oriented news releases (and, no, this is not a thinly-veiled reference to myself). A while back he was reading a paper and noticed that at least one of the statements in the “discussion” section of a paper was at odds with the data itself. When he mentioned it to the researchers, he found that he was right – and the mistake had somehow been missed by the authors, reviewers and journal editors.

When he was telling me this, he said, “This is another reason why [PIOs] should always read – and make sure they understand – studies” that they write about. I’ll meet him halfway. I think science writers – reporters and PIOs – should always understand the studies they write about. I just don’t think reading the paper always helps that much.

If you’ve enjoyed this post from Matt, you may like to read his 3-part mini-series on Soapbox Science about The Promise and Pitfalls of Public Outreach.

Best of Nature Network, nature.com blogs and Scitable: 10 – 16 March

Posted on 16 Mar 2012 by Laura Wheeler

GrrlScientist reviews Nature Education’s new introductory biology textbook, Principles of Biology, which she says is affordable, lightweight and never goes out of date:

The presentation of the book is obviously designed with teaching in mind; it presents specific concepts along with the best information supporting those concepts. Although written with college and university students in mind, the explanatory text is sleek enough that at least some high school students could also use this book in their courses (refer to the sample objectives page screen shot for an idea of the writing style).

Learn more about Principles of Biology in the official press release.

Scientists and Journalists

On Tuesday night, the Royal Institution, London hosted an event where the topic for debate was Scientists and journalists need different things from science. Curated by the Guardian’s Alok Jha and chaired by Dr Alice Bell, the panel included: Dr Chris Chambers from the University of Cardiff’s School of Psychology, Dr Ananyo Bhattacharya, Chief Online Editor of Nature, freelance science journalist and blogger, Ed Yong, and the Head of the UK’s Science Media Centre, Fiona Fox. London blogger, Joanna Scott, summarises the event in her post:

Alok proposed that there are good scientists, good journalists and a genuine desire to communicate science to the public but in many cases, good communication isn’t happening. Why not, and what can scientists and journalists do to improve the situation? The debate is not new – amongst many others, panelist Ananyo Bhattacharya last year wrote a series of three blog posts on the nature of science journalism and the distinction from science communication – and tonight’s event was specifically designed to get past theoretical, and often unproductive argument, and towards a set of practical actions which might be genuinely useful in changing things.

In Joanna’s summary you can also find a Storify collating the online debate. Continuing this theme, Nature Network’s newest blogger, Peter Etchells, offers a few of his thoughts about the event in his post, Science journalism: time to move the debate on:

3) Watch the neighbourhood Or in other words, if you see something that’s dodgy, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Could. Not. Agree. More.

It might be that something’s been misreported, or it might be that the science itself is a bit dodgy. Either way, say something – write a letter, comment, write a blog post. Anything that can engage with the guilty parties and sort it out.

You can find more of his thoughts in the summary and make sure you subscribe to his new blog, Counterbalanced.

Social media

As an extension to the discussion above, this week’s Soapbox Science post is by Matt Shipman and is the final instalment to his series, “The Promise & Pitfalls of Public Outreach.” In the previous two posts Matt talked about how scientists can work with reporters, public information officers and others to disseminate information about their research to a non-expert audience. But the advent of blogs and social media has given researchers the ability to cut out the middle man entirely and speak directly to the public:

The one cardinal rule for scientists who blog is (or should be) this: do not regurgitate your papers as blog posts. If you’re simply going to paste your abstract into your blog, what’s the point? You need to bring something new to the table. And there are a lot of ways to do that.

If you want to reach the broadest possible audience, it’s always good to write for your blog in conversational language. Write as if you are writing for your mom (assuming your mom is not also a biochemist). A casual writing style can make even the most arcane subjects seem approachable. If you dive right into a subject using professional jargon, a lay audience will have no idea what you’re talking about – and you’ve lost them.

Do join in the online conversation and leave your comments in the thread.

CINDI

Laura Nielsen, a Frontier Scientist, has been reporting from the AGU Exploration Station in San Francisco, an annual free science event for families and teachers where kids can get hands-on science. Here she met science superhero, Cindi, the Android Space Girl, a real life comic character, who helps to engage children in creative ways. Laura explains that Cindi and her comics go a long way towards helping curiosity and imagination in children flourish:

CINDI IN SPACE with artwork by Erik Levold — NASA: CINDI Small Explorer Mission: Story by Dr. Mary Urquhart and Dr. Marc Hairston

You can find the free, complete comics online, as well as educational materials to aid in lesson plans. According to NASA, the third instalment of the Cindi series, Cindi in the Solar Wind, is upcoming. Find out more about this initiative in Laura’s post.

I’m an Engineer, Get me Out of Here!

This week marked the official start of I’m an Engineer, Get me Out of Here! an engineering enrichment and engagement activity funded by a grant from the Royal Academy of Engineering. The event is a spin-off of the exceedingly popular, I’m a Scientist, Get me Out of Here!an X-factor style competition in which high-school students get to interact with scientists online. Nature Network blogger, Paige Brown, will be participating as an Engineer in the Health Zone this year, she provides more details:

You can visit my I’m an Engineer profile and check out recent questions that students have asked and that myself and the other Health Zone engineers have answered here. If you’d like to add to my answers, or correct my science, please leave a comment on this blog post referencing the original question. I will also be posting my answers to select questions on Twitter @FromTheLabBench.

Keep an eye on her blog for further updates.

Sparks fly over graphene energy device

The astonishing claim that graphene can draw on ambient thermal energy to generate electrical current has been attracting scepticism from some materials scientists, revealsEdwin Cartlidgein the News blog. Edwin explains that graphene is a one-atom-thick layer of carbon which has exceptional electrical, thermal and mechanical properties, and has become the ‘buzz material’ du jour:

Now, Zihan Xu of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and colleagues have made what they describe as a ‘graphene battery’ by placing a sheet of graphene about 50mm2 onto a silicon substrate, attaching gold and silver electrodes to its ends, and then immersing it in a solution of copper chloride. The device generated a voltage of around 0.35V for some 25 days; six of them in series could power a light-emitting diode.

So where does the voltage come from? You can find out more in the post. If you want to learn more about graphene, this is the focus of the latest Nature Outlook, so do check it out.

Pashmina Goat

Subhra Priyadarshini reveals in the Indigenus blog that after the controversy surrounding the claim over the world’s first buffalo clone three ago, Indian scientists claimed this week to have cloned world’s first pashmina goat. This, they say, was done using an indigenously-developed technique. Subhra elaborates:

The cloned female pashmina kid was born on March 9, 2012, according to reports. The scientists used somatic cells from the ear of a goat to produce the clone. The healthy baby is reportedly under medical observation. The World Bank-funded project was a collaboration between Srinagar-based Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology (SKUSAT) and National Dairy Research Institute, Karnal (NDRI).

Continue to the post to find out more.

Neutrinos transmit message through solid rock

Geoffrey Brumfiel explains in the News blog that physicists have successfully transmitted a message from a particle accelerator to an underground detector using neutrinos:

First there was the telegraph, then there was the wireless radio, fibre optics and now… neutrinos? Yes, the scions of physics have successfully transmitted a message from a particle accelerator to an underground detector using the ghostly particles.

Unfortunately, this newest medium is completely useless (for now, anyway).

Find out more in the post.

Resting state’ brain

Brain scans mapping differences in how brain regions communicate while people lie in an imaging machine, are providing a possible new way to diagnose attention disorders, explains Rebecca Hersher in the Spoonful of Medicine blog. She links out to a video where Michael Milham, of the Child Mind Institute in New York, talks about the work being done on so-called ‘resting state’ brain scans and explains how they are expanding the field of functional MRI:

For more, check out Nature Medicine’s news feature on the clinical utility of resting state fMRI from the March 2012 issue of Nature Medicine.

The Brain As A Network

Scitable’s blogger Dave Deriso in his latest post, The Brain As A Network, reveals that by studying the brain as a network, it helps to give additional insights to the analysis of neurological dysfunction:

Composed of over 1013 neurons, the human brain has been said to have more synapses than stars in the universe. How do you begin to understand all the madness compressed into the three pound ball of flesh? I have no idea, and I don’t trust anyone who claims to know either. However, there are some clever approaches to chipping away at the problem.

At the systems-level, the brain distributes computation over multiple regions. A good analogy is a peer-to-peer network that distributes number crunching across multiple computers, where each computer is specialized to perform some specific aspect of the computation. Abstract this by simply calling the computers “nodes” (which can represent anything, for example, brain regions) and the connections “edges,” and viola! you have reached the entry point of network theory, which is a quantitative and visual approach to understanding how nodes relate to one another and how networks function as a whole.

Figure: Network Graphs, (Left) Undirected cyclic graph, (Right) Undirected acyclic graph viewed as a tree.

Finally

Viktor Poor’scartoon shows you an important property of thiol-group containing compounds:

Scientists and journalists need different things from science… or do they?

Posted on 14 Mar 2012 by Laura Wheeler

Scientists and journalists need different things from science. Discuss. That was the topic up for discussion at a special event at the Royal Institution on Tuesday evening, curated by the Guardian’s Alok Jha.

Chair Dr Alice Bell, science communicator, academic and lecturer at Imperial and UCL was joined by panelists Dr Chris Chambers from the University of Cardiff’s School of Psychology, Dr Ananyo Bhattacharya, Chief Online Editor of Nature, freelance science journalist and blogger, Ed Yong, and the Head of the UK’s Science Media Centre, Fiona Fox. Framing the discussion online last week, Alok Jha had stated, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that the media, in general, could do a better job of reporting science”.

Alok proposed that there are good scientists, good journalists and a genuine desire to communicate science to the public but in many cases, good communication isn’t happening. Why not, and what can scientists and journalists do to improve the situation? The debate is not new – amongst many others, panelist Ananyo Bhattacharya last year wrote a series of three blog posts on the nature of science journalism and the distinction from science communication – and tonight’s event was specifically designed to get past theoretical, and often unproductive argument, and towards a set of practical actions which might be genuinely useful in changing things.

During the build up, Chris Chambers and colleagues set out a scientist’s view, while Ananyo Bhattacharya put forward the journalist’s point of view. Discussion was encouraged before and after the event using the Twitter hashtag #riscimedia and many other interested parties had their say, amongst them Matt Shipman, PIO at North Carolina State University, who has written a related seriesof three guest posts for Nature.com’s Soapbox Science blog on what scientists and journalists can expect from each other and the pitfalls and possibilities of being a non-expert writing on science.

With considerable debate having already occurred online, the discussion began at the RI: for those who missed it, we’ve created a Storify record of the event for you to follow along below. If you’d like to continue the conversation or add your feedback about the event, do leave a comment or get in touch.

Communities Happenings – 12th March

Posted on 12 Mar 2012 by Laura Wheeler

SoNYC

SoNYC is the monthly discussion series that the nature.com Communities team organises in collaboration with Ars Technica and Rockefeller University. The event is also live-streamed and archived and we create a round-up post including a Storify storyboard of all the online conversations around the event. March 20th’s event is a re-scheduling of last October’s event on, Setting the research record straight and features Retraction Watch blogger, Ivan Oransky, John Krueger of the Office of Research Integrity and Liz Williams, Executive Editor of The Journal of Cell Biology:

The internet has enabled the faster and more thorough dissemination of published science, meaning that more eyes than ever are available to check the accuracy, veracity and integrity of the research record. With our enhanced ability to spot plagiarism and image manipulation electronically, it appears that the frequency with which we’ve flagged potentially fraudulent or plagiarized papers has gone up. This panel will look at the trends in retractions and how they relate to real or perceived increases in research misconduct. We hope to discuss what steps publications are taking to deal with the sloppy or fraudulent research practices that sometimes result in retractions, and also what research institutions are doing to investigate and deter such practices. Is the system broken, and what can researchers do to help fix it if it is?

As we did for February’s event, we have been posting related content on Of Schemes and Memes and first up we heard from Richard Van Noorden, Assistant News Editor at Nature, giving us an overview of what retractions can tell us about setting the research record straight. In his post he highlights some recent high profile cases of retraction, explaining why retraction rates appear to be increasing:

For suddenly, in the last ten years, retractions have shot up, rising ten- fold while the scientific literature expanded only 44%. A blog, Retraction Watch, has monitored them over the past 18 months. Recent examples include prominent psychologist Diederik Stapel’s fraud (particularly shocking because Stapel had such a stellar reputation); the dispute over whether or not chronic fatigue syndrome is linked to a virus ; and the scandal in which cancer geneticist Anil Potti’s flawed research led to patients being enrolled in clinical trials based on faulty data. Those are the ones that made headlines – but as Retraction Watch and Neil Saunders’ live feed of retraction notices on PubMed show, rarely a day goes by where a paper is not being withdrawn. The new norm nowadays is to expect hundreds of retractions, and perhaps that number will continue to rise.

Do stay tuned for more posts and please get in touch if you’d like to contribute anything.

SciBarCamb tickets

April sees the return of SciBarCamb – an unconference for scientists and technologists, taking place on the evening of Friday 20th April and all day on Saturday 21st. The earlybird tickets have now sold out, but there’s another chance to reserve your place from 10am on February 29th. If you’d like to find out more about the event, read what co-organiser, Eva Amsen has to say about it.

NPG to publish new open access journal CPT

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (ASCPT) are pleased to announce a new, open access journal. CPT: Pharmacometrics & Systems Pharmacology (CPT:PSP) will launch in fall 2012 and will be hosted here. The journal will be a companion title to Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (CPT) and will be accepting submissions in summer 2012:

CPT:PSP will be a cross-disciplinary journal devoted to publishing original research in advances in quantitative methods as applied in pharmacology, physiology and therapeutics in humans. The common focus will be on quantitative methods that improve an understanding of pharmacology and therapeutics in humans. The editorial team will be led by newly-appointed Editor-in-Chief Pieter H. van der Graaf, PhD, PharmD. The team aims to provide a unique international forum for scientists in the pharmacometrics and systems pharmacology space.

All content will be open access and will be freely available to researchers worldwide through the nature.com platform. You can find out more in the official press release found here.

Tweetups and Facebook

Science tweetups offer opportunities to mix and mingle in person with sciencey friends you may have met online and are also a chance to learn something new. For those interested the next #NYCscitweetup will be held on Thursday 29th March in the Peculier Pub. Join in from 6:30pm – all welcome! You can also find more NYC events in our NYC Science Communication events calendar that lists this event and others like it.

For those of you interested in science events across the world, you can find a list of our science events calendars here and a Facebook list of science events here. Feel free to let us know what is missing.

To make life easier, we have also created a list of NPG Facebook pages, so make sure you subscribe!

UK Conference of Science Journalists and Science communication events

The UK conference of science journalists will take place this year on June 25^th. Their website is now live and earlybird registration is open until the end of March. The keynote will be by Jay Rosen and you can follow the online discussions on the #ukcsj hashtag.

Now onto another science communication focused event, “Scientists and journalists need different things from science. Discuss”. Held at the Royal Institution in London on Tuesday 13th March 7pm , the event will be guest curated by The Guardian’s Alok Jha, with Alice Bell, Chris Chambers and Nature’s Ananyo Bhattacharya as panel members. The session will look at the gulf between what journalists do and what scientists think they should do.

To warm up for Tuesday’s event, you can read Ananyo’s guest blog posts in The Guardian’s Notes and Theories blog: Science journalists should be asking questions and deflating exaggeration and Nine ways scientists demonstrate they don’t understand journalism. If you wish to attend you can find tickets here and do check out the official hash tag #Riscimedia for the online talk.