Tag Archives: journalism

Nature India Editor Subhra Priyadarshini on the Indian science boom and the role of journalism

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"India is now transitioning from a developing country into an emerging economic superpower and as a result many areas of development, including science, are catching up quickly."

“India is now transitioning from a developing country into an emerging economic superpower and as a result many areas of development, including science, are catching up quickly.”

In the second of our five features celebrating Ada Lovelace Day and prominent women in science and technology across the world, we speak to science journalist and Nature India Editor, Subhra Priyadarshini about the new resurgence of Indian science and the role science journalists play in narrating the country’s success stories.

Ada Lovelace Day, marked today across the world, is an annual celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

Subhra Priyadarshini is an award winning science journalist and currently Editor of Nature India, the Nature Publishing Group’s (NPG) India portal. She was a deadline-chasing journalist covering politics and sports, fashion and films, crime and natural disasters in mainstream Indian media for over a dozen years. She finally chose to come back to her first love – science – in 2007 launching Nature India. Subhra has been a correspondent with major Indian dailies The Times of India, The Indian Express, The Asian Age, The Telegraph, news agency Press Trust of India (PTI) and environment fortnightly Down To Earth. She worked briefly for the Observer, London. Priyadarshini received the BBC World Service Trust award for her coverage of the ‘Vanishing islands of Sunderbans’ in the Bay of Bengal in 2006. She received letters of commendation from the PTI for her coverage of the Orissa super cyclone in 1999 and the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. She is a regular contributor to BBC Radio’s Hindi science programme ‘Vigyan aur Vikas’ (Science and Development) and taught science communication at University of Calcutta.

The scientific landscape of India is a constantly fascinating and fluctuating one. In a country poised to be a global super power, yet fighting issues of poverty, healthcare and education, Indian science has seen something of a new resurgence over the last decade. Research output and publications have increased significantly and an evolving technology industry has been reaping just rewards. And yet for all these exciting developments, in a country where more than 1.2 billion people live, there has until recent years been one fairly absent protagonist: the media.

When Subhra Priyadarshini, who started Nature India in 2006, first specialised in science journalism after nearly 10 years covering everything from economics to sport, she found there were certain challenges to getting science on the news agenda. “In the early 2000s you would be lucky to find a science journalist working on a newspaper or magazine in India. You had to be a generalist and would find yourself one day covering Bollywood and the next looking at financial markets,” says Priyadarshini, who has worked at the Times of India, The Asian Age and the Press Trust of India, among others. “Science was always my first love and I used to get the kind of fulfilment from a science story that I would not get from say a political reportage.”

Phenomenal growth

Priyadarshini is still today only one of a small handful of science journalists in India who are helping to narrate the ever evolving stories of Indian science. She believes many more science stories are now starting to be reported in the mainstream media, a distant reality when she first started specialising in 2000. “Scientific stories that were not popular interest ten years ago are now starting to creep into mainstream media and basic science research is getting more in-depth coverage,” Priyadarshini says. She cites new genomes being mapped or a new nanomaterial with applications in a variety of themes as the types of stories that are now starting to garner media coverage.

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Transitions: From Journalism to Science and back again – Asha Tanna

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Career paths are not always straightforward. Choosing a scientific vocation can involve challenging and unanticipated decisions, often with no tour guide to follow. Some scientists may hop from the lab bench into industry while others progress up the academic research ladder. Others decide to leave research behind and explore science communication,  teaching, setting up their own business or working in technical roles outside of the lab. 

While a love of science can lead to varied and fulfilling careers, it may be lonely trying to evaluate the next step to take. Recently, initiatives such as “This is what a scientist looks like” and the #IamScience discussions, have shone a bright light on scientific career trajectories. In our latest Soapbox Science series, we focus on some interesting examples of scientific career transitions. We will hear from different contributors, all of whom use their scientific background in their current jobs, asking each of them the same questions: how did you decide on your career path, what are your motivations, and what does the future hold?

In this post Asha Tanna talks about her transition from writing into science.

Asha Tanna has been a broadcast journalist and television presenter for more than 13 years, covering everything from news and entertainment; to politics and sport. In 2010, she decided to go back to university to re-train as a Primatologist (monkeys and apes). In September 2012 she will start her new job as Science Reporter for Channel 4 News. You can keep updated on Asha’s latest field trip to Uganda in her blog, whogivesamonkeys, where she posts once a week about day-to-day life in camp and in the forest. In her spare time she enjoys scuba diving, playing the piano, running and cooking. You can find her on Twitter @whogivesamonkey. Continue reading →

Scientists and journalists need different things from science – Response 3: Science blogging in the New Zealand media

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Grant Jacobs, Ph.D., is an established computational biologist contracting to research groups, organisations and companies offering his background in molecular biology / genetics and computer science locally and internationally through his consultancy, BioinfoTools. He has wide personal research interests, including epigenetic and chromatin-level control of gene expression, the three-dimensional organisation of genomes, structural biology and development of new algorithms. Outside of work he is a fan of travel, tramping (hiking), good books and, more recently, writing. He is the author of Code for life and tweets under @BioinfoTools.

During a recent Royal Institution debate (written up here by the nature.com Communities team), Fiona Fox, head of the UK Science Media Centre (SMC), was quoted as stating that “blogs [are] fantastic but no journalists go to them to look for full stories.”

This has not been the experience of those writing at the Sciblogs, New Zealand ’s largest on-line science writing collective. One element to this may be that the New Zealand SMC not only links journalists with scientists, and vice versa, but also promotes to the media the scientists’ causes as presented through articles on blogs. It likely helps that the NZ SMC runs Sciblogs and are in touch with the writers there daily. The SMC imprimatur may give journalists more confidence to use this source for material. An additional factor may be thatNew Zealand lacks science columnists for print and television (a notable exception is Radio NewZealand who have a long-running regular science feature). As a consequence of these factors, it may be that the media are turning to those scientists who make a direct effort to address a general audience.

Peter Griffin, who heads the NZ SMC, reports that he regularly receives requests based on material initially seen on Sciblogs. Where some articles result from interaction facilitated through the NZ SMC, others arise from direct contact between the media and the scientist. In some cases blog articles are re-worked to be run as columns in local newspapers.

Scientists writing blogs at Sciblogs have been called up to radio and television appearances, quoted in newspaper articles, or had their work presented as articles in newspapers. In addition, the NZ Herald opts-in to present blogs on their website, usually opinion pieces or backgrounders to current issues (see Appendix at the end of the article for specific examples).

Below the work of a few writers are presented as representative of the relationship between science blogging and the media inNew Zealand. These examples span three broad areas:

i) Public health issues, such as disease outbreaks and prevention

ii) Science education issues and evaluating risk

iii) Science of topical public concern e.g. the recent earthquakes

It is worth bearing in mind that a wider range of articles (and authors) have been associated with the media than the examples presented here, for example covering technology, climate change science and policy, and so forth – a limitation of the brief coverage here.

Public health issues

Microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles has found herself on radio, in newspapers and television:

– An article on using bees to diagnose tuberculosis (TB) led to an interview on Breakfast with Spanky (RDU 98.5 fm, 31st October 2011) as did an article on ’ferret’ flu (9th February 2012), which also featured on ABC Radio Australia (Connect Asia, 22nd December 2011) and was quoted in various Australian print media (The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald and the HeraldSun).

– Tilting against ’quantum-homeopathic-biophotonic flea-control pendants’ was quoted in Sunday Star Times (Charles Anderson, 22nd Jan 2012) in Scientist gets hot under the collar over flea remedy.

– An article on HPV vaccination was reworked as an op-ed piece for The Dominion Post (Offering HPV vaccination to boys the logical, ethical thing to do, 15 Dec 2011) via an university communication team member inviting her to rewrite the piece.

– The German E. coli outbreak of June last year found Siouxsie on current affairs television (TVNZ Close Up, 3rd June 2011) and radio (Radio Live Drive Time, 3rd June 2011) explaining the story to the public.

Science education issues

– Alison Campbell, whose interests lie with how science is taught, has been on radio, with several of articles from her blog re-worked for newspapers and periodicals. (Changing the culture of science education. New Zealand Herald. 27 January 2011; Predicting earthquakes: hedging your bets – National Business Review, 04 March 2011; Resistance to science. Skeptical Intelligencer. 14: 26-27 (2011); Oxygenated food for the brain Skeptical Intelligencer 13: 23-24 (2010).)

– Michael Edmond, a chemist, has taken part in a panel on radio covering the chemistry of food, sex and ageing. He feels that the presence of the blog made it clear that he was interested in science communication, which led to the opportunity.

Science of topical concern

– Our coverage of the disasters in New Zealandhas been cited in a number of articles, for example in the NZ Herald.

– One of the better-known cases is David Winter’s post examining the statistical meaningfulness of astrologer Ken Ring’s ’forecasts’ of further earthquakes in the Canterbury region following the damaging earthquakes there. Mr Ring’s ’forecasts’ raised considerable pubic debate and concern. David’s article led to an appearance in a prime-time current affairs presentation to relay the gist of his article to a wider audience; his articles was quoted and referred to in prominent print media inNew Zealand.

Colleagues have noted that they are typically introduced as scientists in these presentations, particularly when on radio or television, and the blog is not mentioned. However, it is clear that it was the blog article that led to their media invitations.

With this (and much more) evidence of the interaction of mainstream media with science blogs, perhaps there is a case for science media centres elsewhere to be more active in promoting the role of science bloggers and it should be more widely recognised that, given the opportunity, scientists who regularly address the general public have a lot to offer to improve public engagement with, and understanding of, scientific news.

Less evidenced is a perceived shift by some media venues and publications towards more science coverage. There may be no ready way to quantitate this, but one would hope that in part this is a consequence of exposure of science writing withinNew Zealand. The author’s impression has been that blog articles can act as leads to science-related stories in an indirect fashion. Finally, it’s worth noting that the traditional focus on journalists as the sole source of public information has changed. People can now access information ’straight from the source’ or via (perceived) informed comments on social media sites and blogs.

Footnote: I would like to thank my science blogging colleagues for their contribution to this article and extend my sincere apologies to any of you that have not been mentioned. With so many of you and so many articles that have made it to the media, it has been difficult to represent them all. My thanks, too, to Lou Woodley for constructive suggestions that have improved this article.

Appendix: Examples of coverage in the NZ Herald website

As mentioned, the New Zealand Herald ops-in some articles on sciblogs to their Science/Technology pages. In the previous Appendix, the topics of the examples reflect the writers’ interests.

(Search ’sciblogs’ at the NZ Herald website for other examples).

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

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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)?

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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.

The Promise & Pitfalls of Public Outreach Part 2: Writing About Science, When You’re Not A Scientist

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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. 

Explaining the nuances of scientific research to a lay audience has never been easy. Changes in the news media landscape over the past 20 years have created new challenges. The 24-hour news cycle, for example, offers little opportunity for reflective reporting on complex issues. However, there are still steps that scientists can take to communicate effectively about their work. Matt, in his Soapbox Science series, The Promise & Pitfalls of Public Outreach, has already discussed what Scientists, Science Writers and PIOs Should Expect From Each Other . In his next instalment Matt talks about being a science journalist with no scientific background, offering advice for all parties. Do stay tuned for Matt’s final post published next month. 

Many scientists find it frustrating to work with science writers who have little or no background in their specific fields of expertise. It can be slow going, explaining every little thing – and there is always the fear that the writer will get it completely wrong. But working with a non-expert can have its advantages. Here’s why scientists should give non-experts a chance – and what non-experts should consider when writing about science.

Full disclosure: I am a science writer who is not a scientist. I’ve been interested in science since I was a kid (I wanted to be a marine biologist). But thanks to a seemingly irredeemable conflict with chemistry, I ended up an English major. I went on to work as a reporter covering federal environmental policy issues, and often had to explain the research behind regulatory decisions. Much of this research was done by chemists. To my surprise, I found out that I was really good at describing their research to non-chemists and explaining why it was relevant. Chemistry was my bête noire, so how could this be?

I had two things going for me, which all non-experts have when writing about science. First, I made no assumptions about the work or about what my readers would already know about the subject. Second, I did not use jargon – because I didn’t understand it. I’m often surprised by how much scientists think the general public knows about their fields of study. For example, a researcher I was interviewing recently said “Surely most people know what tissue engineering is?” Actually, I think most people probably have no idea what tissue engineering is. We have to explain it to them.

When writing about research findings, I usually start by asking what question or challenge the researchers were setting out to address. This can take a while. If the relevant scientists phrase things in technical language, I’ll ask them to define the terms. Then I ask them why they found this problem interesting. Sometimes it is pure intellectual curiosity. But usually the research question is one element of a much broader scientific question. Science is an iterative process, and the findings from a single research project may move us incrementally closer to understanding the genetic basis for a disease, how we can boost the efficacy of antibiotics, etc.

If I can get researchers to place their work in context, it becomes much easier to explain the relevance of their work to a lay audience. No, you don’t say, for example, “They have developed a cure for Alzheimer’s.” But it is fair, and important, to tell people if a team’s work is part of the overarching effort to help us understand Alzheimer’s disease.”  Once people understand why something is important, they’re more likely to keep reading as you explain exactly what the researchers did.

Here’s another key point for science writers who aren’t experts in the subject they’re covering: when you’re interviewing the researchers, you can’t be afraid to sound stupid. If you don’t understand something they said, and you think you can “write around it,” you are going to screw up. If a researcher uses a term you don’t understand, ask him or her to explain it. I didn’t know what a TEM was until I asked someone about it when writing a piece on materials science. Why would I? (Incidentally, it’s a transmission electron microscope.) Remember: it’s better to ask now, and possibly feel a bit dim, than make a mistake when you’re writing and definitely look foolish.

Once you’ve explained the work, you get one more chance to place the findings in context. As I said, science is an iterative process. The findings you just wrote about are not the end of the line. The researchers may have answered one question, but it likely raises several more. What are those questions? Where does this work fit into the broader research field it is part of? Placing something in context means not only addressing what led up to a research project, but discussing what may come next. Exploring future research directions helps readers appreciate where findings fit into the continuum of a specific field of research.

Being a non-expert will not make someone a good science writer. But it’s not the kiss of death either. If you pay attention to detail, ask good questions, and aren’t afraid to admit how little you know, you can actually turn your ignorance to your advantage. I’ve found that if  I can get an expert to explain something to the point where I can understand it, then I’ll be able to explain it to anyone else.


SciWriteLabs 7.3: Long-form narratives, crappy first drafts, and the importance of wasting time

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Seth Mnookin is a Lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, was called a “tour de force” by The New York Times and “a book that should be required reading at every medical school in the world…a brilliant piece of reportage and science writing” by The Wall Street Journal.

He is also the author of the 2006 bestseller Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top, which chronicles the challenges and triumphs of the John Henry-Tom Werner ownership group of the Boston Red Sox, and 2004′s Hard News: The Scandals atThe New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, which was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.

Since 2005, he has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and he blogs regularly at The Public Library of Science. For more information, visit his website or follow him on Twitter, Google+, or Facebook.

It’s been two weeks since the previous installment of my three-part conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Amy Harmon; today, finally, I’m posting the concluding chapter in what has been a fascinating discourse (for me, anyway). These discussions have focused loosely on “Navigating Love and Autism,” Harmon’s latest story in an ongoing series she’s working on titled “Autism, Grown Up.”

Today’s entry focuses on the peculiar challenges of writing long-form journalistic narratives.

Note: The first part of Harmon and my Q&A, which looked at neurodiversity and some of the issues that arise when writing about autism, is here; the second part, which examined what it means to be a science writer, is here. These interviews are part of an ongoing project called #SciWriteLabs, which examines topics related to science writing and journalism. Of related interest is a recent roundtable I conducted about autism with a group of self-advocates, parents, and writers; the first part of that discussion is here, and the second part, which ran on The Huffington Post, is here. Finally, an obligatory mention: The Panic Virus, my book about the controversies over autism and vaccines, is out now in paperback.

SM: Over the past several weeks, one theme we’ve kept coming back to is the amount of work that’s required for long-form narrative projects. People who don’t work in the industry might not realize just how laborious it is to produce a 5,000 or 6,000 word story – and in an era of shrinking news budgets, just how at-risk these types of projects are. Can you talk a bit about what happens before your stories end up in print?

AH: There are different types of long-form narratives, so maybe it’s worth explaining first that I tend to do what are sometimes called “story narratives.’’ They have a plot and they are told through scenes and dialogue. They also have an argument, or at least a point, embedded in them, but it is often not explicitly stated, or perhaps only stated briefly in two or three “nut graphs” near the top. Like in a novel or a movie, the payoff comes at the end, so you need to make readers care about what happens to these characters, and if you can’t, you’re kind of screwed, because you then you have nothing.

These are different from explanatory narratives, which weave a story together with direct commentary by the reporter and/or experts the reporter has talked to; or essays, where you strive for a provocative argument; or profiles, where the point is to provide insight into an individual at a particular moment; or investigations. (Nieman Storyboard had a great interview recently with Jack Hart, a former narrative editor at The Oregonian, in which he distinguished between these genres.)

SM: That reminds of a presentation I saw last week by Deborah Blum. She and David Dobbs were speaking about story structure, and Deborah had a series of examples of ways writers can structure a story: By building a pyramid, or an inverse pyramid, or a diamond, or a circle; by weaving a braid, or creating a rainbow, or fashioning a wave. All of those can work – but the key, in every case, is to have the material that makes a reader want to find out more.

AH: Wow, I need a re-do of that presentation. I think that’s true, and the challenge for a story narrative, regardless of the structure, is that you’re relying exclusively on the scenes and characters to build that suspense.Jonah Lehrer’s essay in The New Yorker last week about how to foster group creativity, for instance, made me keep reading because the point he was making was intriguing and the way he argued it was engaging. With my stories, though, if I stepped out of the narrative to directly explain things, it would sound preachy and annoying. So even though I have an implicit argument  –“with the right kind of support, it’s possible for autistic youth to achieve a level of independence that previous generations have not,” say,  — I’m trying to always “show” not tell. I don’t think this type of narrative is any better or worse than the other kinds – I mostly do them because I’m not that good at the otherkinds. But they do require a different kind of reporting.

SM: What goes into the decision to do this specific kind of narrative?

AH: I think a lot ahead of time about whether I have the right character through which to illuminate whatever the broader cultural trend is that I’m trying to get at.  What is the key conflict, how is it most likely to be resolved? How much of it has already happened and how much of it will play out as I watch?

SM: Can you describe what that was like for these stories about autism?

AH: In the first one, “Autistic and Seeking a Place In An Adult World,” I wanted to show what I knew was a growing tension for many families and communities as more young adults like Justin seek jobs and a foothold in their communities. When I started following him, he had 18 months to find a job, and I thought it was a good bet that he would land one. “Navigating Love and Autism,” the story about Jack and Kirsten, took about two months to do, and I was very nervous about finding a good ending. I got lucky when they decided to get a cat.

SM: Jack’s father, John Elder Robison, noted in a comment how much commitment the “Navigating Love” piece took. What, exactly, was involved in that story?

AH: That was so nice of John to say. I did spend a lot of time with them. Between mid-October, when I first spoke to Jack and Kirsten on the phone, and mid-December, when I last saw them, I visited five times for two or three days each time — and when I wasn’t there, I talked to them on the phone pretty much daily. We also emailed and IM’d. (At one point I even invented a character in Eve Online, the Internet game Jack is semi-obsessed with, so that I could talk to him in the game, but it crashed my computer so I had to give up on that.)

There was one Saturday near the end of my reporting that I spent in Philadelphia, where John and Jack and Kirsten were giving a day-long workshop to a group of autistic teenagers and their parents. They drove down from Amherst the day before in John’s car—about a six-hour drive—and when I called ahead of time to ask if I could ride back with them, John said, “I don’t see why you would want to do that.” But to me, those six hours were a gift: I used every minute of that car ride to construct the detailed chronology I needed before I could start writing.

SM: When you’re interviewing someone, are there times when you know you’ve just found a perfect scene for some part of your story?

AH: One of my two favorite narrative journalism quotes is from Gay Talese: “I waste a lot of time. It’s part of my occupation.’’ He was being facetious, but he was also making the point that if you are trying to capture some truth about people’s lives, you have to be there for long stretches where not a lot happens. I pretty much take notes on everything, just in case, and when something really perfect happens, even if I’m not consciously thinking “I’m going to use this,’’ I know it because my note-taking suddenly becomes frenzied.

It wasn’t until the very end of that day in Philadelphia, for instance, that an anxious mother whose teenager has autism asked Kirsten and Jack if they were going to stay together and get married. That question, and Kirsten’s answer, turned into a crucial scene in the story:

A mother who had slipped into the room put up her hand.

“Where do you guys see your relationship going in the future?” she asked. “No pressure.”

Kirsten looked at Jack. “You go first,” she said.

“I see it going along the way it is for the foreseeable future,” Jack said.

One of the teenagers hummed the Wedding March.

“So I guess you’re saying, there is hope in the future for longer relationships,” the mother pressed.

Kirsten gazed around the room. A few other adults had crowded in.

“Parents always ask, ‘Who would like to marry my kid? They’re so weird,’ ” she said. “But, like, another weird person, that’s who.”

It shows how Kirsten and Jack’s struggles are relevant to other young adults with autism, and also, I thought, how universal those struggles are. It also speaks to why Kirsten and Jack persevere with each other despite their difficulties. So that was one of those times when I’m just typing furiously, as fast as I can, because I’m worried about missing one crucial word and I’m cursing the fact that I don’t have a recorder on, which I never seem to at the most important moments.

SM: I find the writing process to be much more painful and difficult than reporting, which is the part I actually enjoy. Is that also true for you?

AH: I like the very beginning of writing, when you have the illusion that it’s going to go really fast, and it’s been awhile since you last wrote, and you’re kind of remembering that you enjoy playing with words. And I like the very end, when you’re not really writing, you’re polishing, and it feels like it’s getting better with not much effort.  In between, it’s torture. I mentioned my first favorite narrative journalism quote already – my second is from John McPhee. In an interview in The Paris Review, he talks about how he gets in at nine, and basically procrastinates until five – not by surfing the Web, or anything, just sitting there and TRYING to write.  And then at five, he starts to write, and then at seven, he goes home. “So why don’t I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing?’’ he says. “Because I need those seven hours of gonging around.’’

I think of that pretty much every day at 5:00 p.m. when I am writing, to try to make myself feel better. When I was stuck and totally miserable on the “Navigating Love’’ story, Dean Baquet, the Times’s managing editor, instructed me write what Anne Lamott calls a “shitty first draft.’’ I hated that idea — but he’s the managing editor, and I felt like I better do what he said.

So I wrote this awful first draft — and it was kind of a revelation. Making the shitty first draft better was much more fun than trying to write a perfect first draft. Also, on that story, I started writing it on Dec. 5, the day after they got the cat, and I basically did not look up until it ran on Dec. 27. For me, that was very fast, and I think just working straight through the weekends helped, because it’s always hard for me to start writing again after I stop for a while. But I probably can’t do that too often and maintain cordial relations with my family.

SM: I had a similar experience once, but the editor telling me to stop being so precious was my mother. I was complaining about having writers block, and she made the point that I didn’t actually have writer’s block — I hadn’t forgotten how to write. I was just obsessing about every word I wrote being perfect. Ever since then, I’ve been aware of how much more comfortable I am revising something that’s already on the page than I am starting something new — even if revising really means taking something I was working on and completely rewriting it.

Switching gears: The Times has had a great website for a longtime — but this story really seemed to highlight some of what the paper is trying to do in terms of adding value to stories online. What was involved in putting together the video clips and images that accompanied the piece?

AH: What I loved about the pop-up video clips and images that we used in these stories is that the technology really grew out of the needs of the story. No matter how I tried, I could not convey in mere words how Justin sounded, how he moved, all the subtle—often totally endearing, sometimes off-putting—mannerisms that make people think “he is different.’’  And we didn’t HAVE to rely on my words, because we had this great video footage that had been taken to accompany the story. It was when we were viewing the video for that first story, which was going to run as a mini-documentary alongside the piece, that the idea emerged to make the video and pictures PART of the story, rather than just running in parallel.

To go back to your first question, all of that requires a lot of work by a lot of great and talented people. I’ll just list some so you get the idea: Kassie Bracken shot the video, Patrick Farrell edited the video, Fred Conrad shot the pictures, Josh Williams created the technology behind the “quick links,’’ Anne Leigh did the layout. I’m not even mentioning the editors in video, photo and multimedia. Then there were also MY editors: Barbara Graustark and Glenn Kramon, who spent many hours shaping the stories and making them much better, and Kayne Rogers, the copy editor, who polished them. It really is a big production, and I feel very fortunate to work at a place where I can do this kind of story and also have so many people make it better than I could ever hope to on my own.

SM: I think that about does it — at least until March, when you and Kurt Andersen will be up in Cambridge for the 10th Anniversary Celebration of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. Any last words?

AH: I’m now in the phase of looking for my next stories, and I’m remembering how important it is to find the right way to do it t at the outset.  Chris Jones, who has won a bunch of awards writing this type of story for Esquire, tweeted something the other day that made me feel justified in spending the time up front. “Idea, reporting, writing, editing. Each as important as the other, but harder to rescue the earlier you lose the string.” Scary and true. Wish me luck.

SM: Luck…

The Promise & Pitfalls of Public Outreach Part 1: What Scientists, Science Writers and PIOs Should Expect From Each Other

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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. 

Make sure you check the other posts in the series, Writing About Science, When You’re Not A Scientist and Social Media: Taking Science To The People.

Whether you’re a scientist or a science reporter, at some point you’ll probably have to deal with a public information officer (PIO). A good PIO, or flack, can make your job easier. A bad PIO can make you want to pull your hair out. So, what makes a good science PIO?

PIOs have been the subject of some discussion recently in the science community. It started earlier this month, during the ScienceOnline2012 conference at North Carolina State University in Raleigh (where I work). During discussions about the relationship between scientists and reporters, it came to light that many PIOs who write news releases about research findings do not run those releases by the relevant researchers to ensure their accuracy. This blew the minds of some reporters, and at least one flack (me).

In the days following the conference, the revelation that PIOs are not vetting news releases led to several prominent blog posts and related conversations through social media. Even science writers who were former PIOs wanted to know what was going on.

To advance the conversation, I want to lay out some guidelines for what I think scientists, science writers and PIOs should expect from each other.

Researchers, you should expect a good PIO to give you an opportunity to review any news releases about your research. I am a flack at a large university. I write about everything from forensic anthropology to chemical engineering. It would be foolish of me to presume I could write about such a variety of topics without making a mistake. Even PIOs who focus on specific research areas make mistakes, as humans are wont to do.

As a result, I always vet my release copy with the relevant researchers. In fact, everyone in my office does. Sometimes that means we have to significantly re-write releases, and sometimes it means we go through several iterations before everyone is happy. We are, after all, writing for a lay audience. So be it. If we botch something out of carelessness, it reflects poorly on the researchers, the research and the institution. From a selfish perspective, it also hurts our reputations with researchers and reporters. We can’t afford that.

What do PIOs need from researchers? Time. Ideally, researchers will tell a PIO about forthcoming papers or conference presentations at least a week or two in advance. This gives us the opportunity to pull together a good release and issue it in a timely way. A six-week-old paper is brand new in academic terms – it hasn’t even had time to penetrate the intellectual marketplace – but if you tell most reporters that a news item is six weeks old, their eyes will glaze over and you will have trouble waking them up. This may not be true for some science beat writers, but most science news stories these days are written by general assignment reporters, and they like their news to be new.

Researchers should also remember that a news release is not an abstract. It is not being written for an audience of your peers. News releases should be written in language that is accessible to a non-expert audience. And, when reviewing a draft release, please respond to your PIO as quickly as possible. If you don’t get around to reviewing a release for a few weeks, odds are good the release will never go out – it’s no longer timely.

In addition, researchers should know that, at some point, they may have to actually talk to a reporter. A good PIO will make sure the researcher is aware of this ahead of time, and will check to see who on the research team is most comfortable serving as a spokesperson. It’s usually the lead author, but that is not always the case. If you’re a researcher, and you do not want to talk to the press, tell your PIO before the release goes out. A news release is not a news story. It’s a summary that reporters can use to determine whether they want to write a news story. If the researcher won’t answer the phone, there’s no point in issuing the release in the first place.

What should reporters expect from a good PIO? Honesty. Don’t say something is the cure for cancer, unless it is actually the cure for cancer. Science is an iterative process, and even baby steps forward can be exciting and important. Exaggerating research findings is a surefire way to annoy reporters (and researchers).

What else should a good PIO do? Be responsive. If a reporter calls you, he or she is probably on deadline. Respond to media requests quickly. And if you can’t get the reporter what he or she wants, explain that as soon as possible so the reporter can begin figuring out how to move forward.

PIOs should also know who they’re pitching. If you pitch a story about beetles to a writer who covers astrophysics, you’re wasting everyone’s time. That said, every PIO makes an off-target pitch from time to time. If that happens, reporters, please tell the PIO you don’t care about that subject  – but also tell the PIO what areas you do cover. If the PIO is any good, you will stop getting irrelevant pitches – and may even get a heads up about something you’re actually interested in.

Why do I care what people at other institutions do? One reason is because it is already difficult to get journalists and researchers to take PIOs seriously. We don’t need irresponsible behavior contributing to the problem. Another reason is that I care about science, and about communicating ideas (and context) accurately. It’s why I’m in this business (it sure isn’t for the money).

PIOs, and their employers, need to know that it is not okay to leave scientists out of the loop when we’re promoting their work. It undermines our credibility. It tells researchers we don’t care about their concerns. And it increases the likelihood that the very work we are trying to highlight will be misrepresented.

SciWriteLabs 7.2: The New York Times’s Amy Harmon on what it means to be a science writer

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Seth Mnookin is a Lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, was called a “tour de force” by The New York Times and “a book that should be required reading at every medical school in the world…a brilliant piece of reportage and science writing” by The Wall Street Journal.

He is also the author of the 2006 bestseller Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top, which chronicles the challenges and triumphs of the John Henry-Tom Werner ownership group of the Boston Red Sox, and 2004′s Hard News: The Scandals atThe New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, which was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.

Since 2005, he has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and he blogs regularly at The Public Library of Science. For more information, visit his website or follow him on Twitter, Google+, or Facebook.

On Tuesday, I published the first of a three-part Q&A with Pulitzer Prize winning science reporter Amy Harmon of The New York Times’s. That conversation focused on “Navigating Love and Autism,” Harmon’s latest story from an ongoing series titled “Autism, Grown Up.”

Today’s entry looks at Harmon’s writing about autism as a way to address questions about what it means to be a science writer — and the amount of work that’s required behind the scenes to make sure that what ends up in print is responsible and reliable.

Background: Yesterday’s post on why Harmon’s story is so remarkable is here. These interviews are part of an ongoing project called #SciWriteLabs, which examines topics related to science writing and journalism. An introduction to the series can be found here; the rest of the entries are here. Amy’s mention of  The Panic Virus is a reference to my book about the controversies over autism and vaccines (out now in paperback), not this blog.

SM: Looking back at your career, it looks like your shift to focusing on science and technology occurred around the same time you began writing about autism (in 2004). Is that correct??

AH: I started writing about technology in the early-1990′s, in my first job out of college at the Los Angeles Times. I pretty much got the beat because I was using email to stay in touch with my college friends, and my editors, who were not familiar with this new “Internet” thing, thought that was super-cool. I was technically a business reporter, but I always felt like a bit of a fraud passing around my cards with that title because I wrote almost exclusively about the sociology of technology rather than the financial stuff.

My interest in autism/Asperger syndrome paralleled my entry to tech-writing in the sense that I had a personal interest in it, and you are right that my other science reporting spun off of that. (I got interested in all the implications of new consumer DNA tests after returning from maternity leave because I had been offered them when pregnant). But just like I felt I was masquerading as a business reporter I often feel like I don’t really have the right to call myself a science reporter, because I’m just writing about people through the prism of science.

SM: I find that fascinating: that you feel like you shouldn’t call yourself a science reporter because you’re writing about people through the prism of science (as opposed, I guess, to writing about neural pathways or synaptic misfires). I actually think that one of the things that makes your work so valuable is that it is so infused with science. Your work highlights how much background knowledge is needed to write about these issues responsibly.

Recently I was talking with some of my colleagues about the difference between a science writer and someone writing about a topic that happens to be related to science. I made the comparison to music writing: I started out my career as a rock critic. At the outset, I’d write features or do interviews with musicians, but I wasn’t really doing music writing because I didn’t have the experience or expertise to be able to talk intelligently and knowledgeably about the actual music. That took much more time and effort and work. (Another example: I recently wrote a piece for Vanity Fair about theGardnerMuseum inBoston; that doesn’t make me an art critic.) But you had to bring an enormous amount of scientific knowledge to these stories.

AH: Well, thanks – and you’re right, I shouldn’t underplay the amount of science reporting that goes into my stories, since it takes up an inordinate amount of my employer’s time. (Ed: Your time, too!) I also spend a fair amount of time feeling guilty for not giving credit in print to the scientists and other experts who help me ensure that the stories you so kindly termed “intimate” are also scientifically accurate. When you’re constructing a story using only scenes and dialogue, you can’t really quote experts: It breaks the flow.  I used to send apologetic emails before the story ran that made it sound like it had just not worked out for me to use their quote. Now I’ve taken to telling expert-y people up front, “Look, I’m not going to quote you. But I hope this will help average readers understand this topic you care about and would really appreciate your help.”

With this latest series of stories on autism, I was hugely fortunate that people like Dr. Catherine Lord, the director of the Institute for Brain Development at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and one of the true authorities in the field, continued taking my calls through the whole process. Cathy and I spoke on the phone on at least five separate occasions and exchanged a dozen emails. She also read drafts of paragraphs that I was concerned about. (I checked with her, for example, about whether Jack and Kirsten’s sensory issues reflected what is typical among people on the autism spectrum; about what is known of the biological basis for autism among people who have normal intelligence and language development like they do; and about whether she thinks it is true, as suggested in the story, that girls are under-diagnosed.)

What I meant about not being a “real” science reporter is that, unlike others I admire, I do not have a particular talent for translating the news scientists report in journals or at conferences into terms that make sense to the general public. So instead I try to discern the impact of science on people’s lives, and write about THAT. It doesn’t mean I don’t have to understand the science – I do – but at least I don’t have to explain it in so many words.

SM: Just yesterday, I was teaching a seminar to scientists here at M.I.T.about how to write for a popular audience. I was trying to lay out the differences between writing for a newspaper/magazine and writing for an academic journal. In an average paragraph in an academic journal, there might be five or six footnoted references indicating why the author(s) feels confident making those statements. I explained that in a more journalistic account, those footnotes aren’t there — but that the writer still needs to have that information at his or her fingertips.

AH: Yes, exactly. I often wish for footnotes. And not only for the science. I think the question “how does she know that?’’ can arise in the reader’s mind when I report on a scene where I obviously wasn’t present. I wish there was another layer of the story, somehow, where I could say, “Conducted separate interviews with everyone in the room to corroborate what was said and done in this graf,’’ or “I have the text of an email so-and-so sent spelling out the thoughts I am ascribing to him here,’’ etc.

SM: Moving on to a subject near and dear to my heart: You mentioned that at various points while you were working on this series, editors/colleagues asked about including a section on the vaccine controversy. Your reply (and I’m obviously paraphrasing here) was, ‘No, that’s been covered and it’s time to move on.’

AH: I cannot tell you how many times I silently thanked you for The Panic Virus and its definitive rebuttal of the idea that vaccines cause autism. And I mean that in a purely journalistic sense, aside from being a mother of a seven-year-old who and a member of society who wants kids to get vaccinated to avoid preventable illness and death.

By the time I began work on this, I felt like the science of the vaccine controversy had been so thoroughly put to rest by you and other great reporters (including Amy Wallace in Wired and Michael Specter in The New Yorker), that I could focus on what I was most interested in — the challenges autism poses for this generation of young adults (and for the rest of us) — rather than on its causes.

That said, I was making the case that this group is newsworthy in part because of its size, so I could not sidestep the question of why the diagnosis of autism has climbed so sharply since the 1980’s. This is where the reporting you’re talking about comes in – for what ended up as three sentences in the first story, I read at least a dozen journal articles, talked to the Centers for Disease control, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, and several other epidemiologists, sociologists, psychiatrists and educators, including Dr. Eric Fombonne, a professor at McGill University who is one of the pre-eminent autism epidemiologists in the world, and Dr. Fred Volkmar, the chair of the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center. I didn’t exactly mean for that research to be limited to three sentences. I wrote many long paragraphs, and edited them five different ways. But they all ended up bogging down the narrative, and at some point, after many hours of tinkering, I realized that I just didn’t need to spell it all out. I was confident enough – because of all that reporting – to condense it. And I added what might seem like an excessive number of  hyperlinks to the online version of the story so that readers who wanted to could see that evidence for themselves:

And Justin’s parents were not alone. As the condition’s hallmark behaviors became better recognized, many children who were previously designated as mentally retarded or just dismissed as strange were being given an autism diagnosis, a trend that has continued. Some experts also believe that the actual number of people with autism has been climbing.

I knew most readers would not actually be clicking through to these and some other links to sources I put in, to show the effectiveness of therapies like applied behavior analysis, for instance. And when the story went up on-line, an editor who way outranks me wanted to remove them, because he worried they would distract from the new  “quick” links we were introducing in the article, which popped up with video clips of Justin and photos of his artwork. But I kind of put my foot down, because I thought they were important. And when I came across this blog entry by science writer Marianne English after the story ran, I felt vindicated that least ONE reader had noticed (watch for your shoutout):

When talking about therapies and options for the condition, [Harmon] hyperlinks to peer-reviewed research to back her claims. I imagine she went to these lengths to battle misinformation that vaccines cause autism or that special diets can help people living with it. Writer Seth Mnookin also puts many of these claims to rest in a recent book with similar evidence…

SM: I don’t think it’s accidental that it’s another reporter who noticed that; the amount of background reporting and research effort that’s needed to do a good job is something casual news consumers often don’t realize.

AH: True. And not only news consumers! I am hugely grateful to the Timesfor letting me spend months on a story, but I know my editors sometimes wonder what, exactly, is taking so long. Because ironically, if you do the background reporting well in stories like this – whether it’s science reporting or other types of material that enables you to get inside the heads of your characters – you can’t SEE it in the story. The background reporting is what gives you the authority to write it – you have to do it, but then you have to hide it, too. As I was thinking about how to answer your original question, I started re-reading the stories, remembering the interviews I did to back up each line. There are so many people whose profoundly influenced the story but don’t show up in the actual text, people like Dr. Gerald Fishbach of the Simons Foundation; Kevin Pelphrey at Yale’s Neuroscience Laboratory; Eric Courchesne, the director of the University of California, San Diego Autism Center of Excellence; and literally dozens more. I’m grateful to be able to give them some small acknowledgement here.