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/

Tomorrow is launch day at Before the Abstract!

Springer StorytellersHello BTA fans and subscribers – the day is almost here that we finally go live!

Tomorrow we will post our inaugural Springer Storytellers podcast in the “Listen” section, which features the story of Dr. Kaspar von Braun, astrophysicist at Lowell  Observatory. Dr. von Braun presented his story on January 6, 2015, alongside the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting.

Be sure to sign up to receive regular updates when new content is posted, and you can also subscribe at “Before the Abstract” on iTunes. And maybe most importantly – tell your friends, family and colleagues to do the same!

Thanks for your support, and we look forward to bringing you many, many more examples of storytelling in science.

Our favorite Tweets from the Springer Storytellers show in Seattle!

We had a terrific inaugural event in Seattle in front of a sold-out and enthusiastic crowd, with great speakers and entertaining stories about science (look for the podcasts soon!). Held alongside the American Astronomical Society’s 225th Meeting, astronomers kicked off the first Springer Storytellers show with a big bang (pun intended), sharing personal stories about the challenges they have faced in their career to find their direction, the thrill of scientific discovery and quite literally, falling off a mountain.

Rather than wax poetic about how thrilled we were to bring this storytelling event to Seattle, we thought we would let the tweets “tell the story” instead.

Our Audience

We hosted a mix of astronomers, scientists, science enthusiasts and the general public, but the storytelling format made it relevant and interesting to all.

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The Stories

It’s challenging to tell a whole story in 140 characters, but there were some great nuggets perfect for sharing.

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The Storytellers

It’s no easy feat to get up in front of a large crowd with no notes, no powerpoint slides and tell a story that grips the audience. But our Storytellers found it a rewarding experience…one that kept them “buzzing” for long after the show was over.

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And finally… 

We are glad that our giveaways – earbuds with wire management – were appreciated!

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Be sure to subscribe to updates on future shows, and to learn about our most recent posts; we’ll be fully up and running with great stories to share later this spring!

 

Some story food for thought

The end of the year is a time when most of us reflect on what happened the 12 months prior, and what we want to accomplish in the next year. My personal to-do list includes regular items like saving money and trying to shed a few of the pounds I put on on during the past month’s holiday festivities.

But if you are a researcher or scientist, no doubt funding for 2015 projects is also on your mind. We recently read this article from The New York Times that we think is a great summation of what we are trying to explore, and what we hope to encourage here at Before the Abstract (and through our Springer Storytellers project). Take a look, and the next time you are pitching for those research dollars, consider a story to help close the deal.

Enjoy the end of ’14, and we hope you visit us many times in the new year!