More on communicating with journalists
Two physicists (and long-time bloggers) responding to Ed Yong’s post on how to talk to journalists:
As a physicist, I’m fond of simple universal principles from which all other results are derived. When a journalist is interviewing a scientist for a story, I think the important underlying idea is that each is doing the other a favor. A quote from a prominent scientist will make a story better, but it’s not an absolute requirement, and there’s certainly no obligation to deal with any particular scientist. Being quoted in a media report about some new discovery incrementally raises a scientist’s profile, but the only concrete benefit is providing a clipping that your parents might read.
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The temptation for each party in this situation is to try to push as much of the work to the other as possible, and that’s where most advice from journalists to scientists (or vice versa) fails. Each side treats the conventions of their particular profession as immutable laws of nature that the other must adjust to accommodate. Even when offered with the best of intentions, as with Ed Yong’s post last week, the advice ends up sounding one-sided: “Here’s what you need to do to work with me.”
There’s a reason you should take some of the advice in Ed Yong’s post with a grain of salt (as I’ve come to realize over several years of hearing or reading advice from Ed): because it comes from Ed Yong. Now, let me explain — this isn’t a dig at Ed. Quite the opposite. He’s an excellent science journalist, and the tips he gives other science journalists about journalism is quite good. But this is a different subject, and given that there are a lot of journalists out there, you probably aren’t going to be asked for commentary from Ed Yong.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »