A sample chapter from the new NASW publication
A Field Guide for Science Writers
Look in the mailroom of any big newspaper and you will discover one of the telling realities of writing about science for a daily. The mailboxes of the science and medical reporters will be among the most stuffed. If you cover science for a newspaper, hundreds of universities, corporations, think tanks, government agencies, advocacy groups, independent research institutions, museums, public relations agencies, hospitals and scientific journals all want a piece of your time and a few hundred of your well-chosen words. Newspaper science writers are what the academics call gate-keepers, people whose jobs allow them to decide what developments in the real world get into the news and, hence, reach the public. The public relations types at every scientific or medical organization know that if they can win your attention and interest, they will have scored. And they know that if the newspapers do their story, the other media are likely to follow.
Newspapers, in other words, are the front lines of science communication, the places where most science stories show up first, before they appear in magazines, long before they're in books, usually years before television documentaries discover them. To be sure, TV and radio sometimes beat a newspaper to the punch with a brief mention of the latest advance on "fat pills" or "killer viruses" because the embargo system gives them a slight time advantage. But most science stories never make it onto the airwaves at all.
And, of course, no other medium of mass communication covers as many science stories as do newspapers. We cover many advances and issues that never reach the public through any other medium, but that often are more important than the blockbusters.
Something else distinguishes newspaper science writing: It is an educational medium. For the vast majority of Americans, newspapers are the sole source of information and continuing education about science. Most people don't read science books or even popular science magazines, and they certainly don't read research journals. So science stories often must also be short courses in the scientific background needed to understand the news.
The science beat on a newspaper is one of the most varied and rewarding. In most other specialty beats reporters become familiar with a modest body of knowledge (how a city council functions, for example, or the rules of baseball) and turn to the same few, first-name-basis sources every day. The science reporter seldom enjoys this luxury. Today the story may be a claimed advance in treating cancer, tomorrow it may be explaining atmospheric chemistry and, for the weekend, the latest experiment in fusion power research. Obviously, you must be fast, and incidentally, writer's block is not permitted.
... Science stories are among the best read in newspapers, according to reader surveys.
The knowledge and sources you called on today will do you no good tomorrow. To be sure, you'll do another cancer story down the road, and you'll use what you learned today, but with most new stories, you must approach new sources, learn new facts and phenomena, and understand new scientific techniques. The general assignment reporter faces a similar challenge but seldom copes with the most difficult task of the science writer-figuring out how to explain technically sophisticated activities in simple but accurate language to readers who know almost nothing about science.
Yet, amazingly, most of us do a fairly decent job of it.
Moreover, science stories are among the best read in newspapers, according to reader surveys. The readership for medical stories is at least as large as that for sports stories-for a simple reason. Medical stories deal with the human body, which every reader possesses, and with the hopes and fears about the well-being of that body. The readership for nonmedical science stories is not quite as high , but there are signs it is growing.
The stories are fascinating and enlightening for the science writer as well as the reader, which is one reason, I think, that so many science writers are lifers like me. While other reporters typically change beats or bureaus every few years, science writers keep writing science. I think it's because we love knowing what we learn, and we love the process of learning.
As I often tell people, I started out in college wanting to be a scientist but chickened out after discovering that researchers must specialize in some very tiny sliver of a field. I was much too interested in all of science to settle for a small piece of the whole. SoI switched majors to journalism to become a science writer. I've never regretted it. For me, science writing is a lifelong, self-directed process of continuing education. I can call up top experts in any field of knowledge that intrigues me and ask for private tutorials. And, I am amazed to find, the scientists almost always oblige. They do so not for my personal amusement, of course, but because, like the others who stuff our mailboxes, they want the public to know, to understand, and to be on their side in a world too often given to ignorance, fear, and superstition.
The Chief Responsibilities of a Newspaper Science Writer
The most commonly understood duty of a science reporter is to keep readers abreast of important advances in scientific research. Also part of the mandate is to provide scientific background pieces, or "explainers," prompted by events in the news (earthquakes, heat waves, epidemics, etc.) and issues in the news (claims of advocacy groups dealing with environmental, nutritional, or safety issues; politician's proposals with a technical or scientific basis; etc.). A third responsibility, widely ignored because the stories are hard to make scintillating, is to cover science policy-the health of the scientific establishment and the shaping of government policies affecting science.
And, of course, there is the responsibility to your editors. They want the daily stories but also something special for the slow-news weekend papers and maybe the occasional series that gives a newspaper gravitas and cachet. Balancing these demands requires an ability to think of story ideas that go beyond the news-or deeper into the news-and the people skills to keep your editor satisfied that it really does take a little longer to do a science story than he or she might expect.
Remember the mailbox? In it are scientific journals and tip sheets from scientific journals, some of which arrive by e-mail nowadays. The leading journals compete aggressively to get newspaper science writers to cover their articles. Many send tip sheets a week or more in advance of publication, complete with summaries of the most interesting articles and the phone numbers of the scientists. If you accept this advance information, you accept the embargo, which means your story cannot be published until after the date the journal sets. Once disdained by some science writers, the embargo system is now well established and routinely respected with only rare violations. This is a very good thing because science stories are more complex than ever and it takes time, sometimes several days, to do a good job. The embargo system removes the temptation to beat the competition, giving us more time to do our jobs well and giving the readers better-written stories.
One possible complication for the embargo system has arisen with the Internet. Many scientists are fairly casual about discussing new research in the so-called newsgroups. Data that may be embargoed next month or next year, ironically, can be freely available for anyone to read online. Draft versions of major scientific reports may also circulate online. Does the presence of information online, however tentative, make it fair game for reporters? The question is likely to be debated for some time, but one thing is clear now. If you want the information in your stories to be accurate and scientifically reliable, you'll be very wary of what you find online.
The typical newspaper science writer receives Science, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. All are well-respected journals in which you can be pretty sure the reports have passed some kind of peer review system attesting that they are good science. Every week American newspapers publish several good science stories based on discoveries and findings that scientists have reported in these journals. This is not, despite what some editors may claim, simply rewriting material from other news agencies. Journals are one of the main ways scientists use to announce their most important advances. Writing a story based on a journal article is the science-writing equivalent of a political writer covering a candidate's speech or a courts reporter covering a written decision handed down by a judge. In fact, if a scientific claim is announced and it has not been published or accepted for publication in a major journal, that is reason to be suspicious of its validity.
... Objectivity ... is virtually impossible, and I think it best that we not claim objectivity.
Of course, it is possible to be consumed by journal-based stories. I like to be fairly selective, using staff writers for only the best journal stories and using wires for the others. That way, you keep time to do enterprise pieces at your own schedule on the topics that interest you most, or that are more closely tailored to your local readership.
And, of course, science reporters share the responsibility of all news people to be accurate and fair. Sometimes the goal is said to be objectivity, but this is virtually impossible, and I think it best that we not claim objectivity. After all, of the dozens of stories we could do on any given day, we reject most or all possibilities. In this we exercise our opinions as to what is a good story.
What Makes Science News?
I think newspaer science writers use five basic criteria. Not every story has to score high on each criterion, but if it does, it's that much better a story.
-- Fascination value. This is the special commodity that science stories, more than any other kind, have to offer. People love to be fascinated, to learn something and think, "That's amazing. I didn't know that." I sometimes think people have a natural appetite for fascination. It's very much akin to the sense of curiosity. The best way to explain fascination value is to give some examples and let you judge your own reactions. Which would you rather read about, dinosaurs or extinct species of worms? I thought so. Dinosaurs may be the quintessential fascinating topic for science writers. Close behind are black holes (more fascinating than, to pick another astronomical topic, meteors); human evolution (more engaging than, say, mouse evolution); and animal behavior (the more like a human the animal is said to be behaving, the more fascinating). You get the idea.
-- Size of the natural audience. This is the number of readers who already know that they want to read about the topic. If the story is about a common disease that everyone has had or fears getting, the natural audience will be larger than for a rare disease. Cancer and the common cold score high on this criterion. Kreutzfeld-Jakob disease scores low.
-- Importance. This is a subjective factor (another reason we're not truly objective). To judge a story idea on this point, you would try to decide whether the event, or finding, or wider knowledge of the event or finding is going to make much of a difference in the real world, especially in that of the average newspaper reader. AIDS is important; bunions are not. Global climate change is more important than regional climate change, unless, of course, the region happens to be your own.
-- Reliability of the results. Is it good science? Here the single most useful guideline is science's own peer review system. The system is not perfect, but it's the best that's available, and every science writer must understand how it works and why it is critically important to find out whether a scientific claim or advance has survived the peer review process. It is incredibly easy for scientists (as well as anyone else) to come to believe passionately and honestly that something is true when, in fact, it is false. The peer review system is a time-tested way to minimize the odds that a misunderstanding is promulgated to the world at large. Science writers who ignore the system risk misleading their readers and embarrassing themselves.
Once or twice a week, some scientist or advocacy group tries to get me to write that such-and-such a "fact" is true when it has not passed through even the most rudimentary peer review process. Sometimes it's a perpetual motion machine that can be dismissed instantly (because every science writer should know about the Second Law of Thermodynamics), and sometimes it is a cancer cure, the details of which can't be divulged because the tipster's enemies would steal it (another good clue to quackery). Professional science writers pass up these story ideas routinely.
But not always. One of the most famous instances of non-peer-reviewed science getting into the mainstream press was "cold fusion." Two scientists claimed to have invented a tabletop device that caused nuclear fusion at ordinary temperatures, yielding more energy than was consumed in the process. Ordinarily a scientist would repeat the experiment and, if the results still looked good, submit a paper to a peer-reviewed journal. Only after it was accepted or published would the press hear about it.
But not these two scientists. Amazingly, they called a press conference before they had even figured out how to reproduce their own results. Their Utah press conference did not draw the most tough-minded reporters in the business. Their promise of an unlimited source of abundant, cheap energy made the national wires, and a competitive feeding frenzy swept the science writing community.
Because the claims seemed too good to be true (usually a tipoff to something wrong), most good science writers conducted their own peer review process, asking physicists to comment. The dominant response was extreme skepticism. Still, the promise of cheap energy was so tempting that many physicists dropped their own work and tried the experiment, which seemed to be absurdly simple. Most got no sign of fusion and quickly denounced the claims.
Because the claims seemed too good to be true ..., most good science writers conducted their own
Although the press was later criticized as if it had fallen for bad science, the fact is that most science reporters didn't. They simply reported the reaction of the scientific community, which was fascinating in itself. At the time I was in my rotation as the Post's science editor and helped prepare a story with a straight lead followed by "If the claims of the researchers are confirmed and further experiments succeed... . And "Other scientists expressed doubt about the work, however, and one physicist familiar with it said the announcement was 'blown far out of proportion'."
Similar notes of skepticism attended most of the cold fusion coverage, except for that in the Wall Street Journal, which, to the astonishment of many science writers, climbed aboard the bandwagon. Although small bands of researchers continue to work on cold fusion, the vast majority of experts long ago dismissed it as a tantalizing illusion.
-- Timeliness. The final criterion is the old newspaper standard of timeliness. The newer the news, the newsier it is.
Explanatory Writing
If you've found a story idea that scores high enough on these five criteria, you're ready for the even greater challenge of reporting and writing the story. But first, you've got to sell your editor. If you have an editor who knows some science, this can be easy. If, however, your editor doesn't know his acid from his base, this gives you an advantage. The job of explaining the story idea is likely to show you what you need to explain carefully in your writing. And that can help you in your reporting. If your editor doesn't understand, you can bet your readers won't either.
The place to begin the task of explaining the science is not when you sit down at the computer. It's in your background reading before the interview with your source and in the interview itself. Science Writing Rule No. 1: Never try to explain something that you don't understand. Don't be shy about asking your sources to explain something again, if you don't get it the first time. And don't cop out by quoting the scientist's unhelpful explanation. If your scientist source is not a good explainer, ask him or her to refer you to somebody else, maybe one who teaches the field. Once you think you understand something, check yourself by saying it back to the scientist in your own words.
After you've written a lead to your story, stop, temporarily clear your mind of everything you learned while reporting the story, and even put out of your mind all the science you know. Now pretend you're a reader and you know only what you've read so far in the story. This skill is one of the most important a science writer (or any reporter) can develop, and it takes practice. Be literal-minded. Examine each word, and imagine what alternative (and erroneous) meanings a reader might impute to it.
Here is a lead from a major daily that meets my test:
Every cell in the human body, according to a new view emerging from one of the hottest fields of cell biology, is poised to commit suicide. In fact, it appears that all cells are already armed with the instruments of their potential destruction and that every hour millions of them in each person's body do kill themselves.
There is not one word that should be unfamiliar to the general reader. The first phrase says the story is about the reader himself. The next says this is a hot field of research. The third delivers what most should find a startling bit of information. You don't need to know anything else to grasp the first sentence. The second sentence picks up from there and delivers more surprising scientific findings.
Once you are satisfied with your lead, write on. But stop every few paragraphs and reenact the naive reader exercise from the top.
If you have a lot to explain in your story, try to get away from the inverted pyramid as quickly as possible. It's a terrible form for explanatory writing. Far easier to report, to write, and to read is a chronological sequence. It's the dominant form for all good story telling, fiction or fact. Once when I had a huge story to write on a public health mystery (a man died of botulism after eating vichysoisse), I shamelessly imitated Berton Rouche, who wrote the wonderful "Annals of Medicine" stories for the New Yorker. I reread some of his pieces and imitated the step-by-step style. Twenty-five years later, I still meet people who remember that story. It can work any time you're unraveling a medical or forensic mystery, but it does eat up column inches.
When Science Is Used To Grind An Axe
One tricky area for science writers is science that comes from advocacy groups. All advocacy groups have axes to grind, no matter how noble or beautiful their causes are. One of their biggest goals is to keep the public aroused over their cause, and good science writing can conflict with that.
I was reminded of the difficulty advocacy groups have with good news when I did a long explainer on ozone depletion and pointed out another bit of good news. Emissions of ozone-depleting substances were dropping so quickly, thanks to an international agreement, that the worst of ozone depletion would arrive around 2000, much sooner than expected, and that after that the ozone layer would begin a slow recovery.
Environmentalist groups were outraged. The ozone hole was a big, visible, carefully built issue, and envionmentalists said my story would lead to public complacency. They attacked. Some even accused me of reporting that ozone depletion was a hoax. But because the advocates could not challenge my facts, they said my story was wrong in "tone." That puzzled me for a long time until I figured out what they meant. I had taken great care to make the tone of my story as neutral and as strictly factual as possible. And that was the problem. The tradition in environment writing, unfortunately, is to be rather alarmist in tone. Environmental stories are usually bad news, warnings of impending disaster. My mistake, as the advocates saw it, was in pointing out that corrective measures were working very well and that doom was being averted. A carefully built advocacy issue was undermined by straight reporting.
How Do You Ensure Accuracy?
A generation ago, one newspaper science reporter actually referred to researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as "those medical wizards with their magic potions." Also in those days, major newspapers wrote major stories about the development of the Salk polio vaccine without referring to viruses, antigens and antibodies or the immune system and, amazingly, without explaining how vaccines work. Now not only has today's science gotten vastly more complex, the tradition has developed in science writing of explaining things in much more detail. Imagine writing about AIDS without discussing viruses and antibodies. Today's tradition means readers learn more.
But the growing complexity does make it much easier to get a fact wrong in a story-which makes accuracy all the more difficult to achieve. So, how do we do it? The main way, of course, is to do careful reporting and, when interviewing scientists, to check your understanding repeatedly with the source. Science Writing Rule No. 2: Never try to explain something that you don't understand. Sound familiar?
Until recently, I believed the traditional dogma in journalism, still held by many science writers, that it is wrong to let anybody outside the newspaper read our copy before publication. Freedom of the press. No prior restraint. No time. And so on. Finally, after spending far too much time with a reference book or on the phone trying to figure out if my simplification of the scientist's explanation was right, I reexamined my religion and realized that the evil was in letting people change our copy in ways we don't want it changed. If I've got a fact wrong, I definitely want it changed. So I started faxing portions of stories and sometimes entire stories to scientists and asking if I had made any errors. I don't do it all the time, just when I think I'm working at the edge of my understanding.
I found most scientists quite happy to respond quickly without meddling in the story.
Amazingly enough, I found most scientists quite happy to respond quickly without meddling in the story. Now,with e-mail, it's even more convenient. Most of the changes they suggest are ones I am very thankful to make before publication.
Although I advise all science writers to do the same, you should know that a number of outstanding colleagues are opposed. They would never think of showing anyone, especially a source, their copy. I respect that. It's a matter of religion.
The Future Of Newspaper Science Writing
When the future of the newspaper industry is being questioned, you may wonder whether it makes sense to aim for a career in this sector of science writing. It still does. Newspaper science writing is the core of the field and will remain so, even as the medium evolves new forms. Just as so many great writers of literature started as reporters, many of the most accomplished science writers in other media learned their craft at newspapers and moved on.
What you learn as a newspaper science writer is to be a quick study, to understand much about how the natural and technological worlds work, and how to share that information effectively and succinctly with the widest possible readership. That's a service of high calling and a solid preparation for what is increasingly an Information Age.
Reprinted with permission from A Field Guide for Science Writers, edited by Deborah Blum and Mary Knudson, and published by Oxford University Press. Copyright Oxford University Press, 1997.
Boyce Rensberger, with degrees in journalism, zoology, and mental health information, has been a science writer or science editor since 1966 -- first at the Detroit Free Press, then The New York Times, and now at The Washington Post. From 1979 to 1984, he wrote about science for public television and magazines. He has twice won the AAAS-Westinghouse Award.