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| Volume 46, Number 1, Spring/Summer 1998 |
by Carol Cruzan Morton
Ecologists figured it out about 10 years ago, when the notion of competition as the dominant paradigm shaping communities was unceremoniously dumped. A more complex array of forces seems to be at work, including symbiosis, the evolution of positive interactions between species.
Now science communicators are beginning to catch on: Competing for media attention against other research institutions may not be the most successful strategy for placing a story or source in the news.
Increasingly, public information officers (PIOs) are finding that working with colleagues from other institutions, either directly or indirectly, can pay off for everyone.
Cooperation can mean referring an unsuccessful reporter's query to another institution with the likely expertise. It might mean alerting another news office about a research paper with co-authors at that institution. Maybe it means extending the distribution of another institution's release. Or it could mean going all the way: working together on a joint news release or media event.
Whatever form it takes, collaboration can support some of the best publicity practices -- communicating a clear unambiguous message, identifying the most appropriate source(s), finding regional angles for national stories, minimizing the hype quotient hitting reporters' desks, and enhancing the credibility of a news release.
In February, PIOs gathered at a NASW workshop in Philadelphia to compare notes on the hows and whys of collaborating among research institutions on news and other activities.
"When PIOs help each other manage information dissemination on a continuous basis as well as during crises, it often results in good PR for both institutions," said Seema Kumar, associate director of public affairs of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., who organized the institutional collaboration workshop.
Two years ago, Kumar helped launch a free two-day press seminar in Boston area. Despite Boston's reputation as the medical mecca of the country, this was the first time two prestigious institutions had co-sponsored such an event. The 1996 seminar focused on cancer genetics and was co-sponsored by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. It attracted 50 reporters interested in hearing about the latest research from the country's top cancer researchers and clinicians, including The New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe.
Last year's event focused on infectious diseases in collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital, attracting more media, including ABC and NBC. This year, the focus was on "Brain and Psyche: The Neurobiology of the Self," co-sponsored by Whitehead, Mass General and McLean Hospital. It had not taken place by ScienceWriters' deadline, but they expected an equally distinguished group of journalists to attend and file news and feature stories over the following year.
Success has partly depended on each institution sublimating self-serving instincts to the larger purpose of the seminar, which aims to provide a sampling of the top experts in any given area, Kumar said. Each seminar showcases the sponsors' leading scientists, but also draws from other Boston institutions and invites prominent researchers from around the country. In those cases, PIOs from other institutions would also be consulted. The seminars take about six months of close collaboration and carry a price tag of about $30,000, not including the time and labor of the news offices.
"The collaboration is not always smooth, but we work through it," Kumar said.
Working together might sound like a natural solution to a shared problem. After all, if there's one common thread uniting all science public affairs offices, it's that we all have more things we'd like to be doing than we have the people or time to do them. Why not get together, join forces and pool resources to do more than we could alone?
"It's a good idea, and sometimes it works out that way," said Judy Jackson, director of public affairs at Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill. "Collaborations are a lot like marriages; some work out better than others."
Jackson manages communications of scientific collaborations in particle physics and, more recently, astrophysics. Jackson's experiences have led her to form a principle she calls "the reflective property of collaboration," which states that "any science communications collaboration always reflects the nature of the underlying scientific collaboration."
In high-energy physics, collaboration isn't just an idea, it's a way of life that's developed over 50 years. Fermilab, for example, hosts 2,500 physicists from 190 different universities and 23 countries, who come together to do experiments in high-energy physics, Jackson said. When they publish, 500 names might be listed as co-authors. Communications are managed centrally from the heart of the collaboration. In 1994, when 900 scientists believed they found the first evidence for the top quark, Jackson and her staff put together an embargoed press kit for distribution by Fermilab and by the many participating institutions.
As particle physicists are wont to do, Jackson's lab director has jumped into cosmology with both feet, landing in the lead management role for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Astrophysicists are just learning the art of collaboration, and sometimes it's not a pretty sight, said Jackson. But Fermilab aims to share its hard-won wisdom on teamwork.
The digital survey's scientific group has more characters than a Russian novel, several of whom were vying for the title role. Individual publicity efforts can unwittingly fuel the worst aspects of a dysfunctional scientific collaboration. For example, news about a Princeton University piece of the collaboration would irritate University of Chicago scientists, whose PIOs in turn would fire off news about its work.
As one of its efforts to facilitate harmony in the group, Fermilab is now heading off guerrilla publicity and is managing the news as a collaborative message, not as missives from individual institutions. She spreads the credit in a release, for example, by including a quote from a person at each of the nine institutions involved -- except for Fermilab. Sometimes the release threatens to look like a fruitcake of disparate elements, but Jackson trusts the process and knows a smooth narrative will emerge.
Collaborations that don't work well are even more time consuming and expensive then those that do. A full press kit about the top quark took three weeks and about $20,000 to complete and distribute; the digital survey's earliest joint news effort took two years and $50,000, but Jackson reports progress in the latest round.
It takes time, confidence and experience to learn to trust the collaborative process, Jackson said. Her husband, a particle physicist, offers this advice: "You can't lose in collaboration. It's a win-win situation. You have to trust your collaborators to take care of their responsibilities. Either they will succeed, and you will all look brilliant, and that is great. Or they will fail, and you can heap them with scorn, and that is even better."
Science in general can be considered a loose collaboration. One researcher's discovery depends in large part on the contribution of many other scientists doing similar work. Although news coverage might showcase only one study at a time, the interpretation and conclusions may be based on a much larger body of evidence. Many PIOs work from this broader collaborative perspective in providing leads on stories and sources.
For example, if a reporter calls for an expert you cannot provide, then refer her to another insitution with the requested expertise, advises A'ndrea Messer, science and research information officer for Pennsylvania State University. She's anticipated that reporter is more likely to call back with a request Penn State can fulfill in-house. Beyond simple referrals, Messer recommends using electronic forums like PIONet and NASW-talk. "You have the time, and it's part of your job," she said. Lurking and occasionally posting a comment helps builds those casual relationships that may be useful when you and another institution's PIO find yourselves with co-authors on a splashy research study.
More and more, it seems that newsworthy research is being co-authored by investigators from several institutions. These potential brief informal collaborations can be tricky dances, especially when it seems like everyone is doing a different step.
The first question is, do we want to dance? PIOs typically assess the news value of the study, identify the senior scientist or principal investigator, and then evaluate the role of their institution's researchers in the work. Let's say that the work is judged to be interesting to media and has key players at different institutions. At that point, protocols diverge.
"In cases where the principle investigator is from another institution, or where Purdue was one of many players in a research effort, we will allow the primary institution to issue a national release, while we prepare and distribute information for our in-state media only," said Susan Gaidos, senior science editor at Purdue University news bureau.
"If Purdue researchers played a primary role, and we know that another institution is releasing a story as well, we try to work with them to coordinate efforts and share the information so that we know what is being sent to the media," she said. We also make it clear at the top of our news release that the information is being issued from the other institution(s)to help eliminate confusion." Purdue has shied away from using a single release among several institutions ever since one institution substituted its expert's name in the attribution of a quote from another source.
Duke University has a different rule: One release from one institution.
If Renee Twombly, associate director of medical center news, hears about an interesting result, for example, she will check in with other key players in the story, including a journal's news office or the news shop of the lead author if that person is not at Duke. If a release is already in the works, Duke likely will not prepare another one. Duke may request some input on the release, or they may prepare a in-depth backgrounder for someone else's short release, but they will not aggressively compete.
"If a reporter receives several releases on the same study from different institutions, it looks like people are trying to grab news when they may not have been the main authors," Twombly said. This approach also has its drawbacks. "The main problem comes when we don't have any control over what another institution's release said," she said.
Even researchers who agree to disagree can offer potential for collaboration. When two of our researchers issued differing reviews of a classified government "psychic spying" program three years ago, University of Oregon science writer Ross West and I (then at University of California, Davis) prepared a joint release aimed at framing the media coverage around the scientific merits of the controversy, rather than as a sensational oddity.
As with a dance, someone needs to lead a collaboration. Typically, "the PIO who has the lead author writes the thing, runs it past the other PIO, who adds a quote from their main source, and then the first PIO sends it national," said Deane Morrison, in the public affairs office at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. "The other PIO sends it to their local/regional list. Everybody gets listed as a contact."
Different ground rules may be negotiated to fit the circumstances. I recently coordinated a collaborative release among six institutions and the National Science Foundation for eight related papers published as a cover story in a special section of Science in late May. Early results from one of the largest marine geophysical experiments ever conducted suggested some surprising new details about how new seafloor forms at mid-ocean ridges.
The results were important and made a good story, but the paper titles flunked the easy readibility test and even Science wasn't making a big deal about their cover story.
However, Science publicist Diane Dondershine supported our efforts by noting the availability of a release and visuals on EurekAlert! in their weekly news alert to reporters. (Science also offers PIOs a two-week advance on research from their institutions at EurekAlert! in the PIO member section, under the left-hand button "journals.")
In this case, Brown University was home to the seismic team leader and lead author of the overview report, whose media goal was to share the credit with the other researchers. I also thought the story would be most attractive to national science reporters on the geophysics beat and seasoned regional science reporters, many of whom would be better reached through regional PIOs in California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Massachusetts and Washington, DC.
I wrote the release; my PIO colleagues contributed quotes and background material and provided helpful editing comments. The lead paragraphs mentioned all the universities, and quotes from individual researchers were peppered through the release. My release did not use quotes from everyone, but each institution was free to add or replace quotes with words from its source. Other than that, the versions were virtually identical. I posted the "official" copy to EurekAlert! and sent the release to our national and regional lists. Other PIOs focused on regional distribution, with some of them supplementing the national distribution.
Most important to PIOs is how reporters respond to their efforts. So I asked two reporters who covered that story for some feedback for our efforts.
"One naturally pays attention to an entire cluster of papers about the same thing in a major journal," said Curt Suplee of the Washington Post, who received at least two copies of the release. "Once we've gotten interested in a story, it is likely that the arrival of two or more releases from name-brand research universities or labs will encourage us to write a longer, more detailed story. What's best about those news releases is that the reporter knows that the institution is committeed to making the researcher available for comment. Another small advantage to multiple-institution releases is that reporters are more likely to trust the factual/interpretive information if it has been vetted by two or more different outfits."
The strong local angle and the presence of a similar mid-ocean ridge lurking off the Pacific coast triggered the interest of Richard Hill at the Oregonian, who had profiled a key researchers from University of Oregon in December. "Institutional cooperation indicated to me that the story was deemed important by the science writers at those institutions," said Hill, who saw three versions of the release. "It was actually a bit refreshing to see scientists from the other universities given more credit than they usually get in an institution's release."