Month: July 2015

Science communication: Science in the media

This post was originally written for the Naturejobs blog by Emily Porter and posted on 8 July 2015.

Emily Porter shares the top five lessons she learned from a media training workshop with the BBSRC.

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Image credit: Getty Images/Mateusz Zagorski

Contributor Emily Porter

Engaging with the media is important and is an effective way of communicating messages to millions of people worldwide. It provides the opportunity to enthuse and inform the public about your research, as well as the potential to create new collaborations, increase funding and add to debates.

These days, to get your research noticed, you need to be proactive. Part of this is getting your science out there using traditional media, such as TV, radio and newspaper but also social media, such as Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and so on.

But where to start? I signed up for a media training day run by the BBSRC, which included practical sessions focussing on writing for the media and dealing with radio interviews, as well as theoretical sessions around social and digital media and working with your press office. Here’s what I found out:

Prepare. Think before you speak. Science journalists often have a reputation (albeit unfair) for reporting science inaccurately. However, a study by Sumner and colleagues, focussing on health related science news and portrayal by the press, found that much of the exaggeration in the media was already present in the press release complied by the research institute itself, based upon information provided by the scientists. Sign up for media training at your university or institute if they offer it. If not, check with your funding body as they may also offer courses to researchers.

Structure. If you want to write a press release or news article, use the 5 W’s as a template for your first paragraph – Who, What, When, Where, Why. This ensures that if the reader doesn’t bother progressing past this point or if your article is edited, then they still know the key facts. Also think about ‘Who cares?’ as this will help you create a ‘hook’ to draw readers in right from the beginning of your article. This is easier in some subjects than others, for example, anything that has an impact on health will generally get most people’s attention.

Language. We played a game in which we were each given a piece of paper with a scientific word written on it. The words were all selected from a pre-course exercise involving a short description of our research. The aim of the game was to give a definition of the word within 3 seconds of reading it. If it wasn’t possible to do this, then that word should be avoided as the chances are your reader or listener won’t understand it either. A great illustration of this is ‘Ten hundred words of Science’ where you can only use the 1000 most used words in the English language to describe your research.

Share. Social media isn’t scary. You don’t need a million followers on Twitter. Whether you want to use it for networking or simply for raising awareness of your research, the best approach is to follow, tweet or message other researchers who do have a large number of followers. When they share your post, hundreds of people will see it with minimal effort from you. Again, talk to press officers and enlist their help if you are unsure where to start. For example, BBSRC helps its researchers produce short YouTube videos about their research.

Personality. Be animated when doing interviews, but also in situations such as writing a blog post. Tracey Logan played ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams in the background to hype us up before our mock radio interviews. This song perfectly illustrates the fact that, most obviously, you need positive energy to engage people, and also provides a guide to the rhythm at which you should speak. Remember, people can’t see you on the radio so a helpful hint is to do your interview standing up as this allows you to move around and gesture which consequently will come across in your tone of voice.

If you need any further persuasion, an Ipsos MORI poll found that 59% of people said that television was their main source of science information and 23% of people said that newspapers were. So whether you update your Twitter account, get in touch with your press office or chat to your local radio station, remember, if you don’t talk about your area of science then someone else will!

 

Jeffrey Shaman: The Game Changer

Prof. Jeffrey Shaman thinks he has discovered something big…but no one will look at his paper. Listen below or stream the official podcast!

Listen on iTunes!

Jeffrey Shaman is an infectious disease modeler at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University. His background is in climate, atmospheric science and hydrology, as well as biology. He studies the environmental determinants of infectious disease transmission, in particular, how atmospheric conditions impact the survival, transmission and seasonality of pathogens and how hydrologic variability affects mosquito ecology and mosquito-borne disease transmission. More broadly he is interested in how meteorology affects human health. Much of his work is computational, employing combined model-inference systems to forecast infectious disease outbreaks at a range of time scales. Shaman also studies a number of climate phenomena, including Rossby wave dynamics, atmospheric jet waveguides, the coupled South Asian monsoon-ENSO system, extratropical precipitation, and tropical cyclogenesis.

Martin Shapiro: A Few Dollars

Dr. Martin Shapiro recalls interactions with four very different doctors with one thing in common – all led to dramatic implications for his career and family. Listen below or stream the official podcast!

Listen on iTunes!

Martin F. Shapiro, MD, PhD, is Professor of Medicine and Health Services and Management and Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research at UCLA. Dr. Shapiro’s scholarship has focused on assuring that medical care is applied equitably and appropriately to the population. He was the Principal Investigator of the HIV Cost and Services Utilization Study (HCSUS), in which he led a national team at over twenty institutions in evaluating such issues as diffusion of antiretroviral therapy, access, costs, outcomes of care, health status, mental illness, and disparities in and barriers to receipt of care in the first nationally representative study of health care for persons with HIV. He established UCLA’s Primary Care Research Fellowship, and is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, and is a past President of the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM).

Story Notes #3 — Use Just Enough Science

The following post about tips on storytelling is the third in a three part series called “Story Notes,” all of which originally appeared on the blog of The Story Collider Co-Founder, Ben Lillie. This entry was a guest post by Erin Barker, Senior Producer for The Story Collider.

Story+Collider_Vanessa+Tignanelli-30How much science should I include in my story? (Scientists Edition)

One of the biggest challenges The Story Collider faces when working with scientist storytellers is how to blend complex science into a compelling narrative that everyone can understand and appreciate. I will admit up front that I have not always had the best ideas in this area. I once asked a neuroscientist to explain his work at a fifth-grade reading level. Suffice to say, I regret this, and will never do so again.

It occurred to me after this conversation that maybe the key isn’t to treat the audience like ten-year-olds. After all, they aren’t dumb — they just aren’t all scientists. They may be experts in other things like tax law or real estate or cake baking or karate chopping, or other important or complex subject areas. They can be perfectly intelligent people who don’t want to be talked down to, just because they don’t happen to have a decade-plus of foundational knowledge in any given scientific field. There must be a better way to communicate with them than by condescending.

Maybe the key instead is to be concise, I thought. By limiting the amount of scientific explanation you include in your story, you could avoid overwhelming the audience without treating them like dummies. A great example of this is a Story Collider story by cognitive neuroscientist David Carmel. In this story (which, naturally, I highly recommend listening to), David struggles with his fascination when his own father suffers a stroke that leaves him believing that the arrangement of his limbs is out of order. (“The bottom two-thirds of my body are gone,” he tells David at one point.) David’s explanation of what’s taking place in his father’s brain, and why it’s so unusual, is succinct — no more than a few lines — and it lasts only about thirty seconds.

There is a representation of the body in the brain. It’s called the homunculus. There are actually several homunculi. There’s one for the sense of touch. There’s one for motion. There’s one for proprioception, the sense of where your limbs are at any given time, so that you can balance properly. And the homunculus is plastic, meaning it can change over time, through experience. For example, the representation of the fingers is larger in pianists. But I’ve never heard of a complete remapping, a complete rearrangement, of the body representation after a stroke.

I’m sure that David, being a cognitive neuroscientist, could have waxed lyrical about what was going on his dad’s brain for hours. But because he kept it to only a few lines — and used really only one or two pieces of jargon — it becomes much easier to digest, and in fact, much more memorable. I have remembered the term homunculus and what it means ever since I first heard this story over two years ago, which is longer than I remembered the names of half of the people I’ve dated.

Sadly, David and I are not the first geniuses to consider this. In his book Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style, science communicator and filmmaker Randy Olson also advises concision.

“Dumbing down” refers to the assumption that your audience is too stupid to understand your topic. So you water down all the information or just remove it, producing a vacuous and uninteresting version of what in reality is complex and fascinating. “Concision” is completely different. It means conveying a great deal of information using the fewest possible steps or words or images or whatever the mode of communication is. The former results in a dull, shallow presentation; the latter is a thing of beauty that can project infinite complexity.

After listening to David’s story, who can argue?

So what can you do to be more concise? Start small. If you could teach someone just one thing about your work, what would it be? What are the facts we absolutely need to know in order to appreciate your story and the stakes at hand? Each time you are including complex scientific information, ask yourself: Does this advance the plot? Does the audience need to know this in order to follow the events taking place? If the answer is no, it’s likely that your story is better off without it.

You may feel naked without it. Suffocating detail can be like a warm, comforting blanket to scientists. It means you have covered all your bases and left no stone unturned – understandable instincts for someone in your line of work. But when it comes to storytelling, if that detail comes at the cost of losing the audience’s attention or overwhelming them, what is it really worth?

Erin Barker is senior producer of The Story Collider and a host of its live show in New York. She is the first woman to win The Moth’s GrandSLAM storytelling competition twice and has appeared in its Mainstage and shows in cities across the country, as well as on its Peabody Award-winning show on PRX, The Moth Radio Hour. One of her stories was included in The Moth’s New York Times-bestselling book, “The Moth: 50 True Stories.”