Tag Archives: science writing

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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Bill Bryson: A champion of science and science communication

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A passionate science advocate: best-selling US author Bill Bryson. Image courtesy of the Royal Society

A passionate science advocate: best-selling US author Bill Bryson. Image courtesy of the Royal Society.

Bill Bryson’s bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, A Walk in the Woods and Notes from a Small Island, which in a national poll was voted the book that best represents Britain.

His acclaimed book on the history of science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Royal Society’s Aventis Prize as well as the Descartes Prize, the European Union’s highest literary award.

He has written books on language, on Shakespeare, and on his own childhood in the memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.

His last critically lauded bestseller was At Home: a Short History of Private Life and his most recent book, One Summer: America 1927 chronicles a forgotten summer when America came of age and changed the world for ever.

He was born in the American Midwest, and lives in the UK.

It is over a decade since popular US author Bill Bryson embarked on his eye-opening journey of research for the acclaimed science book ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’. At that time, he could never have envisaged the popularity and esteem his book would be held in today.

With Bryson’s impeccable wit, charm and honesty, he managed to open up a world of science that was accessible and revealing in equal measure. And yet, in writing the book, Bryson was faced with narrative adjustments and the trepidation of not knowing many of the fields he intended to cover.

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Emily Anthes discusses how biotechnology is shaping the future of our furry and feathered friends

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American science journalist and author Emily Anthes with her dog, Milo. Image Courtesy of Nina Subin.

American science journalist and author Emily Anthes with her dog, Milo.
Image Courtesy of Nina Subin.

Emily Anthes is a science journalist and author. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, Psychology Today, BBC Future, SEED, Discover, Popular Science, Slate, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere.

Her book, Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts, is out in paperback today published by Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It received the 2014 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books. 

Emily is also the author of the Instant Egghead Guide: The Mind (St. Martin’s Press, 2009).

Her blog post, “When a deaf man has Tourette’s,” was selected for inclusion in The Open Laboratory 2010: The Best of Science Writing on the Web.  

Emily has a master’s degree in science writing from MIT and a bachelor’s degree in the history of science and medicine from Yale, where she also studied creative writing. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her dog, Milo.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cosmos and integrating science in popular culture

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"science matters in our lives for us to be better shepherds of not only our civilization, but the world." Image courtesy of Patrick Eccelsine/FOX.

“Science matters in our lives for us to be better shepherds of not only our civilization, but the world.”
Image courtesy of Patrick Eccelsine/FOX.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space and a research associate in the department of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History.

A popular American astrophysicist, author, science communicator and educator, Tyson hosted the science educational show NOVA ScienceNow on PBS for five years. He received a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Harvard University and a doctorate in Astrophysics from Columbia University in 1991. After spending a number of years doing post-doctorate work at Princeton University, Tyson landed a role at the Hayden Planetarium.

He is the author of several best-selling books, including Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier, Death By Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries and the Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet. In 2001, US President George W Bush appointed Tyson to the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry. He also served another commission three years later to examine US policy on space exploration. In 2004, Tyson was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest civilian honour bestowed by NASA. He also hosts his own podcast and radio show StarTalk.

“Cosmos is truly intended for anyone with a beating heart. I haven’t checked recently whether zombies have beating hearts, but if they do – I’ll take them too,” barks Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, with exalted hilarity.

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Marcus du Sautoy: Communicating Science within the Sciences and to the Public

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Marcus du Sautoy. A passionate advocate for the "wonders of science".

Marcus du Sautoy. A passionate advocate for the “wonders of science”.

Marcus du Sautoy, OBE, is the Simonyi Professor for Public Understanding of Science and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He is known for his efforts in popularizing mathematics and has been named by The Independent on Sunday as one of the UK’s leading scientists. He was a recipient of the London Mathematical Society’s prestigious Berwick Prize in 2001, which is awarded every two years to reward the best mathematical research by a mathematician under forty.

Du Sautoy writes for the Times and the Guardian and has presented numerous television and radio programmes, including The Story of Maths, School of Hard Sums and The Code. He is also the author of many academic articles and books including the best-selling The Music of the Primes and The Num8er My5teries: A Mathematical Odyssey Through Everyday Life.

When mathematician Marcus du Sautoy was appointed the prestigious role of the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford back in October 2008, he had two distinct priorities looming prominently in his mind.

The job brief was clear in its motives at the time and reflected on the one-hand high-level science, and on the other, the ability to communicate this scientific research widely to a public audience. The latter was the first priority. Stepping into fill the boots of the inaugural holder Richard Dawkins, was by no means an easy feat, but du Sautoy also a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, took to the role naturally.

“When I took over from Richard, my immediate thoughts were on clearly communicating to the public what was happening in science,” says du Sautoy. “Science has such a big impact on humanity. In order for people to feel empowered and for them to be able to make decisions on where they want science to go and the long lasting effects it has on society, they must first fully understand the surrounding issues.”

The second role of his job, encouraging the communication of science between disciplines within the sciences, is perhaps the most intriguing, in terms of developments. The biggest challenges, du Sautoy says, are the “inbuilt education system” and the “linguistic barriers” across the sciences. “This is a fascinating area where across academia we’re looking to break down the silo mentality which I believe has been prevalent in most universities across the world”, asserts du Sautoy. “This is partly due to the time and hard work we put into our own specialist subject meaning there often isn’t time to see what’s happening in other areas.”

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The Promise & Pitfalls of Public Outreach Part 3: Social Media: Taking Science To The People

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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.  In my previous two posts I talked about how scientists can work with reporters, public information officers and others to disseminate information about their research to a non-expert audience and about being a science journalist with no scientific background, offering advice for all parties.  In my last post, I look at how 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. Sounds great, right? It can be. But it poses its own challenges.

Social Media

There are a lot of social media platforms that allow us to share our thoughts with anyone who cares to listen. Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are clearly at the top of that list. If you set up a Twitter account, for example, you can say whatever you want, 140 characters at a time. But who’s reading it?

Just because you set up a social media account doesn’t mean that anyone will know about it. You’ll need to take the time to cultivate a following. You can start by figuring out your desired audience. Who do you want to be following you? Other scientists? Relevant science writers? Potential grad students? If you try to talk to everyone at once, you’ll end up pleasing no one.

Once you’ve defined your target audience (or audiences), you can begin reaching out to friends and colleagues who are already online. They can help point people to your Twitter account, Facebook page, etc. But if you really want people to pay attention, you need to have something to offer. Content is king, and you need to contribute something to the online conversation. In other words, why should people be listening to you?

For scientists, this could mean disseminating interesting articles you run across. It could also mean providing insight into new findings or news stories where you happen to have relevant expertise. Lastly, it is an opportunity to talk about your work. And here’s where things get tricky.

Social media platforms can be very limiting. For example, can you define genotype and phenotype in 140 characters or less? And even if you write a captivating treatise about the subject on Google+, which gives you far more space to work with, how many people want to read an essay on a social media platform? (Answer: very few.)

If you want to use social media to communicate effectively, you need to drive readers somewhere. This means writing an introductory line that gives readers an idea of what you want to talk about, then including a link which drives them to a site where you’re able to discuss the issue in greater detail. Which brings us to blogs.

Blogging

Clearly there are things that are best confined to peer-reviewed scholarly publications. E.g., you don’t want to scoop yourself. But blogging allows you to dig into the nuance, context and detail of a subject. It also gives you the opportunity to explore facets of news stories that have been ignored in other outlets, discuss papers that may have gone overlooked, or simply share anecdotes that highlight what you love (and loathe) about your field of study.

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.

When you do use terms that may be unfamiliar to your readers, take the time to explain them. Remember, most people aren’t familiar with terms like proteomics, inviscid flow or parameter estimation. And be sure to clarify terms that have different meanings in different contexts. The word “significant,” for example, has a very specific definition when referring to statistics. But if you don’t make the distinction, readers will likely read it as meaning “important” – which may not be the case.

A blog can also be a great place to explain entire concepts. When writing journal articles, researchers can assume a certain amount of expertise on the part of readers. Huge chunks of existing knowledge are addressed with a few cursory sentences and journal citations. For everyone outside of that field, however, the research may appear to exist in a vacuum.

Blogs allow scientists to delve more deeply into the history of a subject, laying out the historical challenges and incremental achievements that brought us to this point. You can say: “Here’s what came before. Here’s why we had these questions. Here’s what we did, what we learned and why it matters.”

Reporters rarely have the time, opportunity or expertise to provide this level of background. But it can be a very effective way of helping people understand the importance of new research findings, without sensationalizing or misrepresenting the work.

Conclusion

Writing a blog gives substance to your social media presence. You have the opportunity to talk about science in a meaningful way, which ultimately helps people better understand the world around them. Answering those questions is probably why you got into science in the first place. Don’t be afraid to share what you’ve discovered.

PS: A final, cautionary note: it is important to remember that anyone could end up seeing what you write on social media. Privacy controls are helpful in some formats, but they aren’t necessarily foolproof. Don’t say anything online that could come back to haunt you.

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.