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| Volume 51, Number 2, Spring 2002 |
PIO FORUMby Dennis Meredith PIO 101
What follows are some rules and tips I've found useful: In recognizing a story, go with your gut. It's easy to justify doing stories about discoveries reported in scientific journals or presentations. But sometimes a neat science story comes from an unpublished discovery or research-in-progress that you just know will interest reporters and the public. In such cases, you may get resistance from administrators or editors, but if you think it's good, interesting science, go with it. My favorite example is a recent release from the University of Massachusetts, about an engineer who used fluid dynamics to analyze, in a new way, why shower curtains billow inward. When the engineering writer there sent the story to University of Massachusetts science/technology writer Elizabeth Luciano, she recognized its coolness and pitched it widely-even though one dean complained that it was insufficiently serious, and the local AP writer berated her for not sending out "real" news. However, Elizabeth had the last laugh. The story went international with a vengeance, for example showing up in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Scientific American, and London Sunday Times [not to mention the pages of ScienceWriters-Ed.]. News is not what happens; news is what happens to reporters. So make news "happen" to reporters, not only by producing compelling stories, but also by offering media trips, tours, and even "samples" of science. When I was at Cornell, we offered reporters samples of food that our ag writer wrote about, including cans of green beans produced by a new process that kept them crispy. We once even offered samples of compost made by a new technique. Not as many reporters wanted the compost, I recall. Lede tight. Headlines and ledes should clearly tell what the story is about. Don't back into the story by being cute or literary; it wastes readers' time. Put pegs and nut grafs high. Put the news peg for a story high up, as well as the "nut graf"-the significance of the story to readers. Write concisely and clearly. Or, as the saying goes, "eschew obfuscation and eliminate redundant duplication." Don't use jargon, and explain technical terms and concepts in lay terms. Limit sentence length. Readability studies show that the understandability of sentences declines sharply after about a dozen words. Be concrete. When interviewing scientists, ask them what things look like, sound like, even smell like. Ask about the story behind the research. Once when doing a story about a Shuttle-borne gamma-ray detector, the lead scientist told me they were using mats of polymer filaments as the particle detector. When I asked him to detail how they'd developed the instrument, he told me they'd been initially stumped about the detector material. Then, sitting in his office one day pondering the problem, he absentmindedly picked at a hole in his ski jacket. Suddenly, he realized that the polymer jacket stuffing he pulled out was just the material he needed. I got a tale that greatly enlivened my story. Be complete, be fair. List all the contributors to a piece of research, including those from other institutions and the funding source. And if the lead author is from another institution, list that institution first. Such collegiality and honesty will pay you back in greater credibility for you and your institution. Play nice together. Offer to issue joint releases with funding agencies or other institutions involved in the research. You'll likely get broader attention for your story. For example, issuing a joint release with NSF means that the work will take on the prestige of a finding highlighted by a major funding agency. Be sure to coordinate the release distribution so that, for example, EurekAlert! doesn't carry multiple releases on the same work. Give perspective. To help the reader understand the research you're reporting, explain how the work was built on earlier studies and include concurrent studies that bear on the work. Don't oversell. Include clearly in the lede any caveats or cautionary notes concerning a piece of research. Believe me, reporters and the public see through attempts to oversell stories, and the result will not be good for your reputation or your institution's. My policy has been the bigger the story, the simpler the lede. It produces the most dramatic impact. Don't editorialize. Words like "pioneering," "leading expert," or "major discovery" damage a story's credibility. Let the facts speak for themselves. Make metaphors. Don't be bashful about inventing similes or metaphors to clarify a scientific concept and enliven a story-as long as the researcher agrees that they're apt. I once dubbed a flea-growing chamber for veterinary research an "artificial dog," which gave the story legs, so to speak. More recently, I described immune-system dendritic cells as looking like jellyfish that insinuate their tentacles among neighboring cells. Money doesn't talk. The media and the public are not especially
interested in grant-award stories, so try to avoid them unless the
amount is gargantuan. If you're reporting a grant for an especially
interesting piece of work, highlight Think hypertext. When producing a story, include links to bios, background materials, scientific papers, previous releases, releases from other institutions, and any other Web sites that will make your story more useful. To avoid implying that your institution is endorsing external sites such as those of corporations, you can place the links at the end of the Web page, with a disclaimer. Think multimedia. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, an animation or video may be worth even more. Although multimedia cost money and are not as easy to produce as words, when a scientific concept needs an animation to clarify it, go for it. In fact, many news Web sites will use a story based on the multimedia available. Avoid "approval hell." If you're lucky, your institution requires only that the researchers approve a release. At some institutions, administrators not involved in the work want releases to pass through their editorial hands. Argue against such policies. And, if the researcher wants his or her colleagues to edit a release, ask them to produce a consensus version before it comes back to you. Keep editorial control. Researchers can certainly correct any errors in drafts, but establish that you and your editors are the arbiters of journalistic style and editorial quality. I have occasionally yielded to a scientist's wish to use a particular technical word to increase accuracy, but I've explained the word. And, I draw the line at abstruse technical explanations aimed solely at a scientific audience. Don't spam releases. With e-mail allowing essentially free distribution of releases, there's a temptation to shotgun releases to vast numbers of media. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Instead, ask each reporter to specify his/her topics of interest, and send the reporter releases only on the topics specified. I hope these tips prove helpful and that my fellow grizzlies will chime in with more for future columns. Dennis Meredith Dennis Meredith is director of the Office of Research Communications at Duke University. He can be reached at dennis.meredith@duke.edu or 919-681-8054. He welcomes comments and topic suggestions for future columns. |
In
this shared column, Joann Rodgers and I aim to cover the latest
wrinkles in the art of PIOing. But it's also important to help newcomers
by sometimes returning to basics. So, with the indulgence of our veteran
colleagues, we'll spend the next two columns discussing fundamental
lessons we've learned on the way to ecoming grizzled. (Actually, while
I'm grizzled, Joann is gracefully mature.)