Science story

Making News, For People

unnamedSo you are a scientist or press officer and you’d like to get something covered. Where to begin?

I shape news. Specifically, health-related news. I work for a major media organization. I’ve worked for major media organizations in New York and internationally most of my career.

Every day I come into work and help direct what articles will be written and where they will be placed. A large bulk of what’s commissioned or picked up is planned far in advance. We can guess fairly well which stories are going to trend and when: cold and flu season revs up in February; allergies hit the Northeast United States in late April.

We also cover more topical, breaking stories – the kind you couldn’t see coming. These might include a family in Denver adopting a kitten with rabies that consequently infected the whole family. Or how a pediatrician in Detroit refused to care for a child with lesbian parents.

There’s a third type of story that we cover too, the kind researchers often want us to publish. We often find out about those from press releases or direct media outreach.

Those last types of stories – the ones presented to the mainstream media to be considered for coverage – are often the hardest to sift through. This is partly because there is such a huge volume of them regularly being pitched at us. It is also because there’s a whole industry of highly skilled public relations experts pitching them. To borrow an expression from the statistician Nate Silver, how do we separate the signal from the noise? How do we determine what stories should be covered and what should be ignored? This is where good storytelling comes into play.

There is no universal methodology for news media picking stories. It can come down to a whole slew of factors including precedent, business intelligence and leadership, which are all organization-specific. But often what carries the most weight is people’s personal editorial discretion. Connect a potential story to an editor personally and you’ll be a heck of a lot closer to getting that editor to want to connect it with his or her audience.

It turns out that a good news story is often just a good story, period. It usually has the same elements. There is a conflict or problem established. People’s lives are affected or changed. Perhaps there’s an injustice or an illness that personally touches, or we have someone close to us who is affected. There’s often a solution, or at least an inroad toward one. If that solution is novel or surprising, all the better.

Good storytelling is essential to people – including news media professionals – caring, retaining and sharing. In most cases people click through directly to individual stories through search or a referral. Contrary to what most people probably assume, for most of mainstream media, the homepage is irrelevant as a traffic driver. The vast majority of traffic bypasses homepages and goes directly to individual stories. People find those stories by actively typing a topic into a search engine. They also find stories through curators like Yahoo! News and the Drudge Report, or curation-platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Essential to having a story go viral – which is most often the goal these days – it must connect with people. People must care, retain and then share the story. If people care enough to share a story, the odds are other people will find that story interesting, and worthy of sharing. This happens offline just as much as online.

So the next time you want to get research covered, or make sure your latest discovery makes the news, using storytelling can be key. After all, I can assure you as a media professional that the hype is not true – we are, indeed, people too.

Dennis Petrone is a senior manager at CBS Local Media in New York. The views expressed in this post are his own and not the opinion or position of CBS Corporation. He can be found through http://dennispetrone.com/

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.”

Gordon A. Crews: There is always a reason why

Dr. Gordon A. Crews discovers through years of research — and one man in particular — that there is always a reason for our behavior, no matter how inexcusable or difficult to understand.

Bio picIn the summer of 2000 I was in the process of making the first of many mistakes in my academic career. I was working as an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at a medium size university in south Georgia. Somehow I was invited by a dean, albeit secretly I was later to find out, to apply for the Department Head position of a very large undergraduate and graduate criminal justice program in Alabama. I should have known it was too good of a deal to be true when he offered to almost double my salary, immediately make me an Associate Professor, and fund me through a private foundation for any and all “associated needs.” Being young, ambitious, and still quite dumb to the world of academia, I immediately jumped at this “opportunity.” I quickly learned that this is often how administrators recruit someone to take over a department that no one in his or her right mind would ever take.

Interestingly, an old mentor of mine was a childhood friend of this dean and had told him about me and recommended me. This old mentor of mine, given his early retirement plans at the time, was also working as an outside consultant for a publisher to review new book proposals, and edit existing works under contract. As fate would have it, he had just received a manuscript/book proposal from a man named Stephen Stanko who was serving ten years in a South Carolina maximum security prison for the charges of “Assault And Battery with Intent to Kill” and “Kidnapping.” The book dealt with his experiences of serving time in an American prison. The rough draft was amazingly written and extremely interesting. The handwriting of the individual was almost as if it had actually been typed—no errors, no white-out, no scratched out words.

Some editors were very interested in publishing the work, but wanted an “academic type” to work with the inmate and control the final draft. Thus, a final piece of the new position offer for me included a contract to work on what would be my fifth book, but ultimately one that would be the most influential in my research career. At the time the work was entitled, After the Gavel, but it would be published in 2004 by me, Stephen, and a third co-author as Living in Prison: A History of the Correctional System with an Insider’s View.

Stephen’s incarceration at the time was due to transgressions resulting from a domestic situation. Apparently, his live-in girlfriend had confronted him one night after finding out that in the prior two or three years, he had been conning her close friends out of their money through various fake deals and lies. This was very disappointing to her in that he had recently started a new job selling used cars after being fired from many others. Unfortunately, this particular day the police had come by her home looking for him with warrants for “breach of trust” and “auto-theft.” It turns out that he was very successful in selling the cars, but not so much in actually turning the money he received over to the used-car lot owner.

Sadly, this confrontation ended up with Stephen tying up his girlfriend and holding her against her will for several hours while he packed and fled from the police and the pending arrest warrants. And, according to her, during this incident he tried to kill her by choking her with a poisoned rag. After three days on the run, he turned himself in to the police. He would ultimately serve eight and one half years out of a 10-year sentence, being released just one month after our book was released in 2004. At this point, Stephen Stanko was being described by many as, “a highly intelligent, polished ex-convict who didn’t mind talking about his life in prison or the book he had written about it.” Stanko would tell everyone, “What I fear most now is that I may carry some of this total institution back into society with me.” These words were ultimately found to be foreshadowing what was to soon occur in all of our lives.

We worked on this book over the final four years of his prison sentence and had a number of arguments over it with various editors, each other, and the South Carolina Department of Corrections. The department felt that Stephen was writing some type of tell-all book, and banned me from visiting him, talking to him on the phone, and receiving or sending prison mail. Therefore, the way this book was ultimately written was from his mother essentially sneaking his writings out from the visitation room during her weekly visits. She and I lived approximately 13 hours apart at this time, so we would meet at a rest stop or restaurant off the highway to exchange pages of manuscript.

Within one year of being released from prison and six months after our book was published, Stephen began conducting library research for a second book we were going to publish. Given his growing depression and issues with returning to free society, I had encouraged him to focus on a new work with me as a way to deal with the issues he faced. While doing this research he apparently befriended a reference librarian at his local library outside Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, became romantically involved with her, and eventually moved in not six months after being released from prison. Unknown to me, he also had developed a seemingly friendly relationship with an elderly library patron.

Shortly thereafter, something went terribly wrong on the night of April 8, 2005, with both of these relationships. Stanko was charged and convicted – after a failed insanity defense – of strangling his new librarian girlfriend, shooting the elderly patron, and sexually assaulting and twice slashing the throat of his girlfriend’s teenage daughter, who survived and made the 911 call for help. The details of what is known about what happened that night are eerily similar to those which occurred with his prior girlfriend on that night in 1996.

Subsequently a nationwide manhunt ensued, my family was taken into police custody for protection, my college campus was closed for two days, and my face appeared on every television show from Good Morning America, to Anderson Cooper 360, to even Nancy Grace. Eventually Stanko was arrested without incident by the U.S. Marshals Service in Augusta, Georgia, on April 12, 2005. Following the conviction he was sentenced to death and placed on South Carolina’s Death Row at Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville, South Carolina. Since this time I have served as a consultant and interviewee on 48 Hours episodes, Evil Men episodes, and numerous true crime books about Stephen Stanko. Each time I have tried to bring attention to the issues that individuals experience while trying to return to our communities as convicted felons, and what baggage they may bring back with them from being incarcerated. Though there is no excuse for such violence, there are causes.

After his first round of unsuccessful appeals were over, we renewed our contact and began working together again in the fall of 2008. Since that time, we have become colleagues in writing and research projects, but in a weird way that I cannot articulate, we have also developed a very unique and close personal relationship, even friendship.

As of 2015, we are working on a number of writing projects including two books under contract. The first is entitled The Realities of Living and Dying in Prison. This work is an extensive examination of all stages of the criminal justice process from initial arrest, the trial, appeals, years of incarceration, and even up to facing the ultimate penalty on death row from the perspective of the incarcerated offender. The second is entitled The Death Row Cookbook. This work is a fascinating collection of over 200 recipes which can be made in a 6 x 11 cell with only a bowl, spoon, hot water, and occasionally a microwave, while in lock down for 23 out of 24 hours per day. This collection includes appetizers, entrees, and even deserts. The ingredients for these recipes can only come from the prison canteen list, from certain food items being “relocated” from the kitchen by a prison food service inmate, or saved after one’s meals in his or her cell.

Ours is a very unusual relationship. It always has been, and always will be. We speak on the phone two-to-three times per week. We visit once every other month, even though we are approximately nine hours apart. And we continue to write and publish together. Our visits are face-to-face, but through very thick panes of glass, and we speak through mesh metal plates. He mails me his writings for me to type up, edit, and review, and I mail drafts back and forth between us.

To say our relationship is a bit unorthodox and hard for some to understand would be a huge understatement. During our various forms of contact over the years, we have shared opinions on each other’s situations and whatever issues one of us might be facing at any given time. As bizarre and incomprehensible as it might sound to some, over the last 15 years Stephen has offered advice to my son on how to deal with growing up with a demanding father, advice to me on how to deal with romantic relationships, advice to my daughter on the benefits of going away to college, and career advice to my students through class lectures given over a cell phone and a speaker. Before my experience with Stephen I would have never imagined any of this from such an individual, but that change in my attitude is part of the important lessons I have learned over the years. I also feel that my past experiences before meeting Stephen have had a major impact on making such a relationship possible.

Prior to beginning my academic career, I worked in law enforcement as criminal investigator (crimes against persons and sexual assault), a field training officer and bloodhound tracker, and eventually in corrections just prior to accepting my first college teaching position. Since that time, my research focus has been on violence and the damage we cause to each other as human beings. I saw it daily in police work and studied it weekly in graduate school. I wrote about it in nine books and numerous articles. I have interviewed many violent adult and juvenile offenders about why they have committed some of the most horrible acts imaginable. This combination of unique real life experience combined with personal interests, albeit dark, have allowed me a deep understanding and appreciation for why people sometimes do what they do. This does not mean it should be excused, nor that they should not be punished – just that any type of behavior has a cause. Violent behavior is no different.