Ann Friedman has noticed something peculiar about the pitches she gets from public relations professionals: "The job of producing hard-hitting, democracy-protecting journalism is still, statistically speaking, the domain of men. Most newsrooms are more than 60 percent men, whereas 73 to 85 percent of PR professionals are women, depending on how you tally it." Friedman attributes the disparity to the lingering "stereotype that public relations is not a serious job."
Miscellaneous
Phil Davis recaps a speech by Science magazine's John Bohannon at an academic publishers' conference and weighs whether the presence of cameras impedes the open exchange of ideas. In his case, he says the answer is yes: "I’m prone to veering off-topic and making snide remarks. On occasion, I can be downright offensive. So, when I see that camera pointed at me, my head goes down and I start reading, which is my defensive posture – a safe mode designed to minimize risks."
Remember how William Randolph Hearst started a war with one terse telegram? Or how Edward R. Murrow ended McCarthyism with one broadcast? Both of those famous stories and others are myths, Mike Feinsilber writes in a post about American University journalism professor and myth-debunker W. Joseph Campbell, who Feinsilber says has "carved out a niche as the guy who tracks down things everyone knows to be true and proves that everyone’s wrong. He is a dedicated debunker."
Maria Popova writes about the poet xYz (Joanna Tilsley) and her meditations: "Immersed in cosmology and quantum physics at the time, she found herself enchanted by the scientific poetics of nature as she strolled around her home in North London. Translating that enchantment in lyrical form, she produced a series of thirty poems on everything from DNA to the exoplanet Keppler-62F … to holometabolism, the process by which the caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly."
If you're unsure what a confidence interval is, you're not alone, Tom Siegfried writes; a lot of scientists have the same problem: "In actual statistical fact, a confidence interval tells you not how confident to be in the answer, but how confident to be in your sampling. In other words, if you repeated the experiment (on different samples from your population) a gazillion times, your confidence interval will reliably contain the true value in 95 percent of the trials."
Nick Diakopoulos reviews patents for some automatic journalism services and makes some informed observations about how they work. Take, for example, a computer working on a story on a baseball game: "The algorithm computes 'win probability' after every play. If win probability has a big delta in-between two plays it probably means something important just happened and the algorithm puts that on a list of events that might be worthy of inclusion in the final story."
Is evolution "just a theory?" Is there "proof" of climate change? Questions like those, Annalee Newitz writes, show how the public's understanding of scientific terms differs from what scientists mean: Quoting entomologist Gwen Pearson: "Things can be natural and 'organic,' but still quite dangerous. Things can be 'synthetic' and manufactured, but safe. And sometimes better choices. If you are taking insulin, odds are it's from GMO bacteria. And it's saving lives."
The Associated Press recently instituted word-count limits, and Karen Fratti thinks it's about time. In a smartphone era when attention spans are shorter than ever, brevity is a virtue, Fratti writes: "I think a lot of us are writing too much to seem more serious and in-depth so as not to appear too beholden to the ‘clickiness' of the Internet. Yes, we can do serious journalism on mobile and digital-first platforms. But it can also be concise."
Maybe not, Kent Anderson writes writes on the Scholarly Kitchen. Anderson argues that Creative Commons licenses, at least as currently used, are just a confusing and ineffective layer on top of existing copyright law: "Unfortunately, Creative Commons licenses are relatively opaque and difficult to differentiate for the average user. Ask a researcher their initial reaction to a CC BY vs. a CC BY-SA vs. a CC BY-NC-SA license, and you're going to be met with blank stares."
Jesse Hicks peers behind the online encyclopedia's curtain and finds automation: "As Wikipedia has grown in size and complexity, so has the task of quality control; today that responsibility falls to a cadre of cleverly programmed robots and 'cyborgs' — software-assisted volunteers who spend hours patrolling recent edits." Also, Chris Mooney on the personality traits of Internet trolls: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism.