by Carol Cruzan Morton
My editor is an ignorant dolt.
Good science stories can’t compete with the crime, politics and gossip that take up most of the news hole.
No one at the local stations is interested in running good science stories.
All three seemed to lose their point at the NASW workshop titled, “Beefing up the Science Beat,” in Philadelphia this February.
Convincing the editor that science is important enough to make that day’s news budget is not a problem, reported four experienced journalists willing to share their secrets with their colleagues. With a little journalistic savvy, street smarts and corporate cunning, science can compete successfully with local, national and foreign news.
The science reporter needs to shoulder the responsibility for selling the story, said Shannon Brownlee, senior science writer for U.S. News & World Report. “I don’t think most editors are dolts, or they wouldn’t be editors, but they may not know very much about science,” she said. “What really determines how much science is getting aired is how persuasive the science reporter is.”
Brownlee says she’s learned a few lessons in her eight years at the weekly newsmagazine. When she started, she couldn’t figure out why some story ideas sailed and others sank. Her moment of epiphany came with the Waxman tobacco hearings in Washington DC, when she was convinced of a fundamental ground shift as suggestions arose about the FDA regulating tobacco as a drug. Her editor, however, didn’t share her enthusiasm.
He turned down her proposed story on addiction. Twice. Brownlee constructed a battle plan to advance the story on two fronts—story content and internal politics. Brownlee’s first piece of advice: “Be specific about why the story should run now,” she said. “A story on addiction is boring. A story on new research showing how tobacco works in the brain—how addiction can happen in as little as two weeks—is more interesting.”
Next, give your editor a handle on the story. “A story on cancer-causing genes doesn’t say anything to an editor who doesn’t know what that means,” she said, “but a story that said it’s our own genes that carry the blueprint for our destruction makes an editor sit up and think. By giving my editor that kind of phrase, I’ve given her a handle to take to her superiors to say, this is what the story is about.”
Science reporters need to think in story terms, not about an incremental advance in science. The story needs a bottom line, which does not always have to relate to people. “The bottom line could be something that overturns assumptions about human evolution or new research that pins down the age of the universe,” she said.
Next, look beyond the story to the culture of the organization. As to the tobacco story: it turned out that part of the culture of U.S. News & World Report was that it didn’t think it could go head-to-head on breaking news stories with its deeper-pocketed competitors. “Tobacco was news, and therefore we couldn’t compete with Time and Newsweek,” Brownlee said. “I had to find a way to convince editors that we had a way of putting the story together that was really fresh.”
So Brownlee proposed a story built on the dual strengths of the magazine—an inside knowledge of Capitol Hill and good science reporters. The three-part story would deal with the real science, the real politics and the FDA’s likelihood of regulating tobacco after all these years. On the political front, Brownlee talked up her new, improved story among other top editors and then re-pitched the story to her editor a few minutes before the week’s big story meeting so he didn’t have time to say no.
It worked. Wednesday afternoon, she was assigned the cover story, due Friday at noon. Since then, U.S. News & World Report has acquired a new editor gung ho on science, aiming to transform science from a gee-whiz curiosity to necessary news, Brownlee said. The magazine is committing more pages and hiring more people—including former San Francisco science reporter Charles Petit—in a drive to be first-class in science reporting.
Selling the Science Beat
Hustling science stories doesn’t just happen at the reporter level. At two newspapers represented on the workshop panel, science editors have muscled science into the daily news budget as well as into its own dedicated sections. At the institutional level, the timeline for results stretches. While it took less than a week for Brownlee to maneuver her story to the lead piece, jockeying the entire science beat into a front-runner position against the day’s major local, regional, national and international stories can take years.
Getting a seat at the daily news meeting is a critical step for a science editor. At Newsday and the Boston Globe, the science editors now rank high enough to defend their science news budgets at the daily story meetings.
“As an editor, I had to build a battle plan as well,” said Reg Gale, who joined Newsday as science editor three years ago. “In my case, I wanted to concentrate on hard news. It was important to me that every day, the top editors consider science news in the day’s budget at the same level as national, foreign and local news.”
At Newsday, the science and health beat has a daily page with 1,000 words to cover breaking science news. The weekly special section brings the science & health news and feature hole to 10,000 words a week, Gale said.
“The baby boom generation, which spent the 60s searching for meaning in sex drugs and alcohol, is now searching for meaning in personal health and science,” Gale said. “It’s important that we answer that search in our newspaper pages. The only way to do it with significance, with power, with authority, is to stand and say, news is news. It doesn’t matter whether it’s happening in a lab at Johns Hopkins or in city hall. We have to advance day by day that science news isn’t just science news, it’s news. And we’re going to get it in the paper.”
Gale’s plan added reporters to cover clinical medical care and ethics
in science and medicine. The health and science section has grown out of
the back of the features section to its own weekly section. The top of the
science news—cloning Dolly, landing on Mars—finds a home on the
front page, but day-to-day advances that bring people more information about
their bodies, their lives or their universe goes to the weekly Discovery
section.
Science editor Nils Bruzelius has worked to build a similar infrastructure
at the Boston Globe, pulling the science and medical team together
under one editor, overseeing a weekly section, managing the daily science
news stories for the general news hole of the paper, and seizing opportunities
to place science in other sections of the newspaper.
“If you compete well for page one, everything else flows,” Bruzelius said. “I like to be on the cover of the metro, business and living sections too, but it begins with page one.”
Use your competitors, Gale said. Use the Internet daily to look at the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the major regional newspapers. Listen to the radio, watch television news, read the weekly newsmagazines. When you see a story that’s played better someplace else, take it back to your news editor and ask why your paper buried the story. “If they hear that enough, they will respond,” Gale said.
Plan ahead, he added. Large events can become the culmination of coverage: The Mars landing might be the final step in a year-long series of stories. “One of the benefits of this is that you can look an editor in the eye and say, ‘We were way ahead on this story—we’re not going to drop the ball now, are we?’” Gale said. “You build stories. They don’t just happen.”
Journalistic instincts rule the day. Start with the idea that your constituency are the readers, Bruzelius said, not the experts. He knew he was successfully bridging the three cultures of science, news and a wildly diverse audience when a reporter coming back from another story told him he overheard two workmen with mops talking on a high-rise elevator in the city about a cosmology story in that day’s paper.
To help your editor advance your science story, he needs to hear four important words: “This is important because...,” Gale said. “Be specific, be simplistic. Editors don’t want to hear the details of Dolly’s cloning, they want to hear that this is the first time an animal has been cloned from an adult cell, if indeed it was.”
Bruzelius asks his writers to compose their own budget lines, summing up the story in a sentence or two. This gives both the writer and editor a chance to figure out what the story is and where it’s going. He advises writers to show their stories to editors 4-5 hours before deadline so that any changes can be gracefully integrated into the story structure.
Finally, after a successful pitch, the promised science story needs to sing, sparkle and sizzle. If not, the writer needs to address the problem, Bruzelius said. Find a talented editor who knows how to improve copy, even if it’s not your own editor, and talk him or her into mentoring you. Review stories in progress or evaluate already published work.
Broadcasting—A Special Case
Science journalism is clearly doing well in print news. Science could also be doing well in broadcast, said Ira Flatow, host of National Public Radio’s Science Friday and president of ScienCentral, a science television news service being developed for local broadcast stations.
Viewers rank science as high as crime stories, and news editors will grab sexy science stories when they can, but broadcast stations generally do not hire specialty reporters who can find, pitch and report those stories.
“In the 10 o’clock story meeting, there are no science reporters to argue for science news that day,” Flatow said “In most cases, the closest thing to a science reporter is the weather person.”
One suburban cable channel was lucky to have a savvy meteorologist on staff when a story broke about meteorites apparently crushing the house and car of a woman near New York City. The meteorologist, whose story on a meteor shower the previous Friday had been rejected, was suspicious of the teaser running on a big local network affiliate channel, but now the news director was interested in the story. The weatherman went to the woman’s house and found common Earth rocks and a few dings in the car. After some bluffing, the woman finally admitted that it was likely her neighbors had played a practical joke on her when she told them she was going to watch the meteor shower.
Ironically, Flatow said, the popularity of science fiction television shows, such as The X-Files, and some of the pseudo-science one-hour specials may be triggering new interest from local television news in legitimate science stories.
Flatow recently surveyed 160 news directors across the country and found two thirds of them would run more science on television if they could get it. “If it breeds, it leads,” quipped Flatow about the recent interest in genetic engineering and cloning stories. Ninety percent of the news directors surveyed knew that viewers were interested in science, but only about 12 percent had people who sometimes covered science (mostly meteorologists) and a few more who sometimes kept an eye on the environment, among other beats.
Television producers seem to have trouble recognizing stories as science, but they responded to science pitched as good stories. “In the survey, we asked, ‘Do you run science stories?’ and they say no,” Flatow said. “We asked, did they do the Dolly story? ‘Yes.’ Evidence of life on Mars? ‘Yes.’ Evidence of discovering life hidden underground in the oceans? ‘No, do you have that one, I like that.’ How about snowball asteroids bombarding the Earth? ‘Do you still have that one?’”
Once news directors heard stories with leads like these, they not only thought they were great stories, they wondered why they missed them. They miss these stories because there’s no one on staff saying, this should be in the news budget today, Flatow said.
Flatow is in the process of building a science television news service to fill this gap at the local broadcast level. In the meantime, he said, university public information officers might find the environment reporter and meteorologist receptive to science stories. However, news directors said they were overflowing with video news releases and just don’t trust them.
Stay tuned: Science might just take over television news, the way it’s moving into lead positions on newspapers and magazines.