|
|
| Volume 47, Number 1, Spring 1999 |
by Charles Petit
Want a weird experience? Try showing up in the flesh at a virtual press conference. I was the only member of the working press actually on the scene at a recent meeting's three news briefings. Paradoxically, I had the unsettling sensation I was less there than some other reporters who physically were not there at all. I have had an intimate brush with the press briefing of the near future--one that suggests it will become a bit harder to justify those frequent-flyer-accruing, expense-account trips to obscure but interesting scientific conferences.
At first glance,
things looked normal enough. Chairs were lined up in a press room
on the second floor of the Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston,
South Carolina. I sat down in the front row. Scientists arrayed
themselves at a table facing my location. They gestured at their
overheads on a screen, summarizing their work and expressing themselves
quotably. But, despite my rapt attention from ten feet away, they
hardly looked in my direction. They huddled around a teleconference
gadget equipped with a speakerphone, with connections to reporters
from Science News, NPR, ABC.com, Reuters, Cox
News, the Dallas Morning News, and others. Lynn Cominsky,
press officer for the annual meeting of the High Energy Astrophysics
Division of the American Astronomical Society, presided with an
occasional interjection, urging the distant reporters to click
on this or that link on a Web site specially set up for the event.
All the overheads were on the Web, in high resolution and printer
ready. Perched on that hard chair, I fleetingly felt left out,
forlorn and obsolete, scratching furiously into my pathetic little
notebook and envious of the disembodied beings present there only
in cyberspace. It was like watching events through a window, my
urchin nose pressed to the glass while the swells swilled champagne.
I didn't even have a tape recorder; I was a fossil, leftover from
the pre- electronic age.
During the first day's briefing, on gamma-ray bursts, all the cyber-reporters got to ask questions. Lynn didn't ask ME if I had a question--not while the phone-bill meter was ticking over. I know how the invisible man felt. Better, I imagined, to have stayed in my room upstairs and dialed in with my laptop fired up, cruising the Web alongside other reporters scattered around the country and Europe.
To back up a bit: Cominsky is a professor of physics and astronomy at Sonoma State University in California, and has been the press officer for the annual HEAD meetings for three years. The meetings regularly have good stories, all about black holes, quasars, exploding stars of various stripes, pulsars, and other venues of extreme, faraway violence. However, only one or two reporters typically attend. Interviews were mainly by phone. Cominsky is also a member of a particle astrophysics group based at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, about two hours drive from Sonoma. That group's members meet once a week at SLAC to catch one another up on plans and experiments. That plus the commute pretty much shot her whole day. About a year ago, she began telecommuting to some of the meetings. First, she tried a straight speakerphone, but could not see anything on the screen at the meeting. They added a Webcam--a little video camera with the signal sent over the Internet--but the resolution was lousy. They tried putting the audio over the net, but it tended to break up at crucial moments. Eventually she and her Stanford colleagues cobbled up a system combining speakerphone for audio quality, and a special Web site where team members put their Powerpoint or other Internet-ready graphics for viewing during presentations. Readily available software, such as Microsoft NetMeeting, was a help. They kept the Webcams so all could see who was talking (it was two-way, so Cominsky's face is visible at SLAC, too.)
It was not so much of a leap to figure that a press conference could work much the same way. A few weeks before the meeting, Cominsky had already selected three groups for press conferences (on discovery of the putative remnant of a hypernova exploded star or gamma-ray burst, on a new class of middleweight black holes, and on the generators of ultrafast X-ray variations on pulsars). Tim Graves, a student of hers, gathered links, press-release text, and visuals from the chosen presenters and composed a convenient Web page for it all. It was appropriately embargoed, with critical links dead until the press conference actually started. If you want to take a look, and if it's still up, go to http://www-glast.sonoma.edu/HEAD/.
It worked smoothly--none of the reporters who went online for it seemed at all confused. The technology is no longer exotic. Business teleconferences have run along such lines for some time now. Many reporters have sat in on press conferences electronically. These include, prominently, NASA briefings in Washington that include satellite linkups with other NASA centers where reporters can see the material and ask questions. Pure telephone hookups with multiple reporters are old hat. But I had never been to a press conference for which the main audience was somewhere else. The NASA updates still regard the remote links as an adjunct, not the main show. The novelty of such things has sneaked up in such a piecemeal fashion, it took awhile for me to sort out in Charleston exactly why it felt so odd. This particular setup, Cominsky agrees, would not work in all circumstances. A fast-breaking story would make it hard to get material Web-ready in time. Similarly, if a meeting merited a great many separate press conferences, the workload on the pressroom crew, to set up Web sites, could be daunting. If dozens of reporters tried to log on, Cominsky's specific system would probably overload the server, with everybody after the same graphics at once, so mirror sites might be needed. But for well-focused events with a keen but relatively small media audience, either at meetings or at individual research institutes, it is a good system as is.
For the future, Cominsky is talking with NASA about some ideas she has for incorporating the Web more deeply into news briefings on fast-breaking stories. Plus, she is trying to figure out how to orchestrate remotely such a briefing from an upcoming meeting in Italy, without even herself going there. It seems clear that the press conferences don't need the sources all in one place either.
By extension, this episode is an intimate glimpse of a wider trend. We've all wondered when the time will come that conferences themselves will commonly occur exclusively in cyberspace. One of these days, we'll probably be able to log on to the main sessions of AAAS meetings as they occur, watching, listening, and downloading material remotely. Maybe most of the scientists taking part won't be there at all, either. Here's a frightening thought: an NASW business meeting online.
For all my carping about feeling left out of the Charleston press conference, no one will be surprised that it was still much better to be there. A virtual press conference is but a simulacrum. The formal press conferences were, as usual, followed in Charleston by the customary mill-around that provided one-on-one interviews. The full sessions that lay behind the press conferences were rich in detail, and full of sources for reaction. I ran into the presenters in corridors and at well-lubricated receptions where I learned of potential stories that never made it near the press room. Plus, Charleston is a beautiful, friendly town and a terrific place to visit.
We can expect more frequent, increasingly sophisticated virtual press conferences and other news events. Whether they are a net plus that bring us things we would otherwise miss, or a minus that beguiles us into staying away from things we would cover better up close and personal, is up to us.
Charles Petit writes regularly about science for US News & World Report from northern California.