By Michael E. Newman
It wasn’t a review of the latest news in cosmology or a lesson on how underweight folks could put on pounds, but “Take a Lesson from the Universe: Expand” did provide a valuable session for science writers, editors and PIOs looking to broaden their communication outreach to non-scientists.
Moderator Clinton Colmenares, senior director of communications at the University of Alabama School of Medicine, started the panel discussion by saying science communicators need to explore and more importantly, utilize “out-of-the-ordinary means to increase interest and knowledge in science.” It’s critical, he said, that communicators help people better understand the science underlying issues such as fracking and global warming.
Next up was Atif Kukaswadia, doctoral candidate at Queen’s University and blogger at MrEpidemiology.com, who used results from a survey of mainstream Americans to emphasize the importance of reaching the masses with quality science communications. Nearly half felt there wasn’t enough coverage of science but 82 percent believed that “everyone should take an interest in it.” As to the public’s perception of its ability to comprehend the science news they were getting, 64 percent said that “science and technology are too specialized for most people to understand them” and 71 percent complained that “there is so much conflicting information that it is difficult to know what to believe.”
Alan Boyle, science editor at MSNBC.com, next discussed how the changing media landscape has moved science communications from a “one-to-many” information sharing system to a “many-sided conversation.” The biggest driver, he said, is social media as evidenced by the popularity of non-traditional science news sources such as “tweets” from the Opportunity rover on Mars and Facebook’s “Science is Awesome” page. Boyle urged science communicators to experiment with different strategies and tools to find the ones that work best for their consumers. For example, he recently tied a story on an archaeological find to the popular TV show “Game of Thrones” to attract a wider audience.
Following Boyle, Matt Shipman, science writer and PIO at North Carolina State University, offered tips on how to identify science news that appeals to a broad audience and how to tell those stories without “scaring them away because it isn’t understandable.” He suggested that science communicators should tap into life outside the office for story ideas (“Kids are great sources because they ask awesome questions”), “ambush” their audiences by linking science with the popular culture (“Use fictional materials such as what’s in Captain America’s shield to lead into a feature on real materials science”) and inject research and science elements into the “news-of-the-day (“Getting the perspective of a geologist to help people understand what caused the Fukishima nuclear accident”).”
Kukuswadia then returned to the podium to show how he has used methods similar to Shipman’s to make science more palatable, incorporating sports as a vehicle to explain statistics and zombies to help people grasp epidemiology. “Viewers of ‘The Walking Dead’ know how a zombie plague spreads from person to person, and that can be used as an analogy to communicate about an influenza outbreak,” he said.
Joe Hanson, blogger and host of “It’s Okay to Be Smart” on PBS Digital Studios, extolled the benefits of social media in reaching the broadest possible audience for science news. “Social media used to be considered portals to science news but now, it’s the destination, the source to which people turn directly,” he said. As examples, Hanson cited a number of extremely popular science and technology social media sites such as “I F***ing Love Science,” the University of Nottingham’s “YouTube World of Brady Haran,” and Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Tumblr page. “Audiences are hungry for science content,” Hanson said, “We just have to give it to them where they spend their time — online.”
The final presenter, Kiki Sanford, better known to followers of “This Week in Science” as Dr. Kiki, encouraged science communicators to consider online broadcasting as a means of expanding their outreach. “Podcasts started out as a technically challenging form of communicating science,” she said, “but that’s no longer the case with today’s easy-to-use and widely available tools.” Sanford described a number of these tools, including Zoom Recorders, GarageBand software for Mac users and Google+. She noted that Google+ offers many advantages for podcasters, such as being able to add broadcast schedules to calendars and create “hangouts” where people within the Google community can view a podcast, react to it with others through chats and share it via YouTube. “For example,” Sanford said, “the ‘Virtual Star Party’ hangout links astronomers and their telescopes around the world so that anyone watching the feed can get multiple views of a specific point in the universe and hear the perspectives of different astronomers on what’s being seen.”
Also see: Expand Your Audience by Sneaking Up On Science by panelist Matt Shipman
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