Ben Goldacre of Bad Science recently asked "why don't journalists link to primary sources?". Science journalists often - but not always - write an article based on a published, peer reviewed scientific journal article.
Sometimes not, though. Sometimes an article is a feature - based on a number of sources. Sometimes it's based on a press release on some pilot or unpublished work, or perhaps a report submitted when a research grant ends, plus an interview with the scientisist involved and (one would hope) another couple of experts. Sometimes it's based on a conference presentation or press conference or similar.
Having seen this from both sides I'd say there are a number of reasons. Some are administrative or technical, some definitely journalistic, some due to laziness, and some done with the best of intentions.
In some cases, the press release was only made available via email. It might be possible to put it up on the newspaper's/journalist's website. I may be misrepresenting this situation - it's possible that all the press releases that come round by email also end up on some website or other - but I'm not sure. Let's say that at least some press releases are not ultimately stored on the web. Certainly, before the embargo deadline, they aren't publicly available.
This leads on to a major category of administrative reasons why journalists don't link to papers and press releases. They have been told not to yet, and they don't have the link yet. If you are writing an article for an embargo of 8pm and you have written it, proofed it, and your editor has signed off on it, and someone else is going to put it up on the website for you because you have to go home/work on something else, it's really unlikely they are going to search out the (non-live till that exact moment, and possibly later) link to the brand new article. Sure, you can edit a web article the next time you are able, but where you've already put in a link to the journal or scientist's website, or both, and you are busy with other stuff, sometimes this might not happen. Plus, there is the whole paywall issue.
Of course, if the article is based on something else such as a presentation or several interviews, there's a chance these aren't available at all - not everyone is happy with their presentations being recorded, not for sinister reasons - some inexperienced presenters are simply shy. There's a big difference between 30 academics hearing your every word and a recording being made for posterity. The slides you write for a presentation might make sense to the audience, but they could be in gibberish for all other purposes.
The second category is the lazy one. Regurgitation of press releases without any further research. I'm guessing errors like assuming "heels" means "shoe heels" fall into this category.
I would imagine a journalist who rehashed a press release without talking to the scientists or reading any articles would not really want this known by all and sundry - especially if the press release is barely re-written. Not all press releases are perfectly transparent (shock horror!) and sometimes this is the fault of a scientist, sometimes a press officer, sometimes just one of those things where no-one involved in writing something considers what alternative meaning it could have.
I do think it's possible to write something informative for the general public based on publicly available materials without conducting any additional interviews. Otherwise, everyone would just go to the primary sources, and there would be no point in journalism. Leaving aside the point that the general public doesn't have the resources to know everything about what is out there happening at any given instant (even in science), it seems pretty unlikely that any one person - even with scientific training - could understand the full implications of scientific articles in every single field. That, as I say, is why we have journalists.
Perhaps if the scientist in question communicated with the reader and explained the article, they could understand it - but given the number of people who contact me with weird queries that make no sense after I either write a popular science article or my own work is reported on, I'm just hoping that there are at least some people for whom the article made sense on its own and who therefore didn't contact me, and thus saved me a bit of time.
I think this point is linked to my third (and you'll be happy to hear, final) reason why journalists don't link to primary sources. They really genuinely think there is no point. Sure, the geeky readers of Bad Science want to read some primary source articles. They might represent, what, 0.1% of the newspaper reading public (that is a random figure plucked from my head, before you ask). But I bet those readers don't bother looking at the primary source article more than, say 1% of the time. And if they do (and I have seen this in the Bad Science comments section, where an article has been in my general field) they often show that they think the article was badly designed/run/reported when in fact they are just displaying they know little about experimental design/conduct/analysis. No offence, Bad Science readers, and of course this is very much not a reason for non-specialists not to read original articles - but though sometimes you have spotted something the author missed, or the journalist tried to sweep under the carpet - sometimes you haven't.
I have noticed that many science bloggers rant about this whole issue, and few science journalists (that's not to say no science journalists, but few). Privately science journalists I've spoken to feel more or less as I have summarised. One thing to note particularly about science bloggers is that some of them - by no means all - don't write in a way that would make sense to a non-specialist. I love some of the debates on specialist science blogs, but frankly, you could not possibly pretend they are for the non-specialist reader. General readers prefer newspaper and BBC reporting because it's aimed at them. That's who the (non-ranty) parts of my blog are aimed at too (and I will write some more evidence-based parenting articles some day, honest).
22 March, 2011
02 December, 2010
A Diet of Worms
I was excited to spot Dorothy Bishop's article about the neuropsychological effects of neglected tropical diseases. I've been working in this field for 15 years now but really stumbled into it by chance. It is quite a good dinner party conversation piece (either that, or everyone's too polite to tell me to shut up - but they do generally ask) so I thought I'd share my almost certainly non-replicable path to this field. I'm writing more for a scientific reader but from a personal perspective - apologies for a few technical terms.
After I finished my undergraduate degree (in Neuroscience, if you're interested) I wanted to go and "save the world", as one does. A volunteer post teaching Biology in Zambia presented itself, so off I trotted.
I lived on the least money I have ever managed (stamps were a stretch), talked to my pupils about sex ("Alcohol causes HIV, madam" "Are you sure?" "Yes madam, when people get drunk they do not mind who they sleep with". Such wisdom from one so young...), learned a small amount about Bantu grammar (but no real conversation past How are you, Fine, and Thank you), and did a little bit of travelling into the bargain. I lost my passport and got it back twice, and crossed from Zimbabwe (at the time, the "rich" country where you could buy stuff and go to nice hotels) into Zambia on just an identity card.
Back to real life, and I started a PhD on motor abilities in language disorders, which I still also work on. In fact, not too surprisingly, it's what most people, if they've heard of my research, associate me with.
About a year before I was due to finish the PhD I spotted a job ad for a postdoc looking at the effects on cognitive development of parasitic infections in children in Tanzania. As the only applicant with my rather unusual combination of qualifications - experience in African schools and a PhD project in developmental cognitive neuropsychology - I wasn't hugely surprised to be offered the job. The other candidates also seemed intrepid, capable, and intelligent, but I got the impression they were grasping at straws when they shortlisted (one had worked on gorilla cognitive development but had had to leave Rwanda due to the war there, one worked on schizophrenia and had taught in a remote area of South America, a couple had been travelling in Africa). My only doubt was whether I would be finished with the PhD in time, and I remember my future boss sounding extremely stressed on the phone when I said I needed to think about it!
Nearly a year later, I'd submitted my thesis and was packing - we all went to the pub and everyone was asking me whether it was exciting to have finished - I was far more excited by my new Swiss Army knife. I flew off to Tanzania and spent the next two years running a huge project (after not too long my bosses saw sense and employed both an additional scientist and a very well qualified local administrator). We had a sample of 1000+ children, about 20 staff, a five room office that needed refurbishing (as did my flat upstairs), two 4WD vehicles, payday each month... I had only just finished my PhD and was used to my hand being held. I learned Swahili pretty quickly once I realised I needed it to eat, get water, electricity, and floors in the building, get the cars serviced, and communicate with the children participating and, indeed, most of the project staff. At least the Bantu grammar came in handy.
In this field, at least 75% of the effort is in developing tests. As Dorothy Bishop says, culturally appropriate tests are usually lacking, and (even once we've developed them) they are not standardised or validated. Another huge hurdle is a lack of psychologists. It's one of the most popular degree courses in the West, but in many countries there are no psychology degrees. This was true in Tanzania, and also in Indonesia and Uganda where I have worked more recently. In Tanzania we were working in a school setting and we tended to employ school teachers as research assistants. In Indonesia, it has been child nutritionists, and in Uganda, nurses and medical officers. I was at a meeting recently in Kampala to set up a network of people working in child psychology - mainly educationalists and psychiatrists, with a couple of paediatricians.
Where psychology degrees exist, most graduates go into private counselling. Any child psychologists also tend to go into private practice, working with the children of the new middle classes. University psychologists have horrible teaching loads, have to run a private practice to make ends meet and cannot get any research done. You're right, you don't know you're born in Europe or North America.
One of my colleagues who has completed her PhD in developmental cognitive neuropsychology is a psychology graduate from her home country but was seconded from her lecturing job to the group we were both working with. Her supervisor found some great postdoc funding but she wasn't supposed to continue research - and she was a government employee - so she's had to be careful to avoid her university when she's in her home country. She could easily have got a good teaching job outside her home country, but she wants to do something for psychology in the country, we're pretty sure they won't re-employ her if she just leaves, so she's juggling for the moment.
Neglected tropical diseases are of course incredibly important causes of delay in cognitive development. But there are many other factors that mean children in developing countries are at risk for neuropsychological deficits and cognitive delay.
One of the most satisfying projects I worked on was a "boring" construction and standardisation of a "bog standard" test of cognitive development - in essence the same as an IQ test - for a project trying to estimate the prevalence of cognitive and neurological deficits (pdf) in a population of children. We made sure that our tests were do-able, at least in part, by children with motor or sensory problems. And we found a group of children who were profoundly deaf, had no spoken language, and weren't in school - because of parents' beliefs that deaf children are uneducable. But these children were performing at normal limits on non-verbal tests. So we arranged for them to go to school.
The main reason I mention that project is because the majority of children who do have neurological deficits in that group are those who have suffered cerebral malaria. The article I've linked to estimates that a million children under five die each year and 250,000 are left with neurological complications or developmental delay. Just as with worms, if this parasite were affecting "our" children, people would be up in arms.
One interesting fact is that, of course, all of these parasites (worms, malaria) did affect "our" children in the past. Malaria was common in the Southern US until at least the 1930s. Hookworm flourishes most places where there aren't enough privies and children don't wear shoes - again very common in the southern US in fairly recent history. Educators at the time recognised that wormy children did not learn well, but had little evidence to back it up.
The thing that all of these - the biological risk factors - have in common is that they occur when people are materially poor. We commonly find effects in our results of relative poverty - the differences between mothers who have managed to go to secondary school and those who have only a couple of years of primary school, between families who can afford a bicycle and a tin roof (and probably enough to eat) and those that cannot. But we find on top of those effects of the biological risk factors we study. Schooling is well known to influence cognitive functioning, and we've got some interesting data on what happens when you try and test children who haven't been to school.
It would be bad enough if we were, in fact, talking about children who have these biological risk factors, but who then went to lovely primary schools and had heaps of Surestart resources and well-trained teachers, enabling them to overcome their disadvantaged start in life. Although some schools in Asia are clean, pleasant, and have at least some equipment suitable for small children, many schools in the developing world struggle to have enough desks, and for the roofs not to leak in the rainy season. Teachers can be poorly trained and equally poorly motivated. Their salaries don't cover their living expenses, so they neglect their classes for outside jobs, spend classroom time working their vegetable gardens, and in some cases deliberately leave crucial subjects untaught so that pupils have to pay for outside tuition to pass Government exams.
Children leave school early because their families need them to work, because another child needs to go to school and there is not enough money for fees or uniform, or because they started school at a relatively old age and have reached puberty. Just a few years at school may teach children to read, but they may not retain it once they have left.
I'm going to have a mini professional moan at this point, just to say that this is the type of field where one works with very large teams of researchers, and rightly the large teams are credited on research papers. Unfortunately, because this isn't common in psychology, it's often not recognised that if you are going to have a great paper in a great journal, you are going to share authorship with 10 other people, and the only way to avoid that is not to be an author on that paper or (which has been suggested to me) not to do this kind of research. Personally, I feel this kind of research is much too important not to carry on doing it.
I started this post to give a flavour of the path I've taken in doing this research and the experiences I've had but - probably because it's something I feel passionately about! - it's taken on more of an educational character! Sorry about that... but anyway, I have had some incredible experiences and worked with some incredible and dedicated people.
It's not every research psychologist that has to arrange for a bridge to be built over the weekend to get the team to the testing location. You don't often get to have a beer watching the sun go down over both sides of the Indian Ocean*. And fortunately you don't in most research psychology jobs lose child participants, research assistants, and a project driver to malaria, HIV, and one of the biggest killers in the developing world - road traffic accidents - respectively.
*before you get confused, not simultaneously, two different research sites widely separated but both with quite undulating coastlines.
After I finished my undergraduate degree (in Neuroscience, if you're interested) I wanted to go and "save the world", as one does. A volunteer post teaching Biology in Zambia presented itself, so off I trotted.
I lived on the least money I have ever managed (stamps were a stretch), talked to my pupils about sex ("Alcohol causes HIV, madam" "Are you sure?" "Yes madam, when people get drunk they do not mind who they sleep with". Such wisdom from one so young...), learned a small amount about Bantu grammar (but no real conversation past How are you, Fine, and Thank you), and did a little bit of travelling into the bargain. I lost my passport and got it back twice, and crossed from Zimbabwe (at the time, the "rich" country where you could buy stuff and go to nice hotels) into Zambia on just an identity card.
Back to real life, and I started a PhD on motor abilities in language disorders, which I still also work on. In fact, not too surprisingly, it's what most people, if they've heard of my research, associate me with.
About a year before I was due to finish the PhD I spotted a job ad for a postdoc looking at the effects on cognitive development of parasitic infections in children in Tanzania. As the only applicant with my rather unusual combination of qualifications - experience in African schools and a PhD project in developmental cognitive neuropsychology - I wasn't hugely surprised to be offered the job. The other candidates also seemed intrepid, capable, and intelligent, but I got the impression they were grasping at straws when they shortlisted (one had worked on gorilla cognitive development but had had to leave Rwanda due to the war there, one worked on schizophrenia and had taught in a remote area of South America, a couple had been travelling in Africa). My only doubt was whether I would be finished with the PhD in time, and I remember my future boss sounding extremely stressed on the phone when I said I needed to think about it!
Nearly a year later, I'd submitted my thesis and was packing - we all went to the pub and everyone was asking me whether it was exciting to have finished - I was far more excited by my new Swiss Army knife. I flew off to Tanzania and spent the next two years running a huge project (after not too long my bosses saw sense and employed both an additional scientist and a very well qualified local administrator). We had a sample of 1000+ children, about 20 staff, a five room office that needed refurbishing (as did my flat upstairs), two 4WD vehicles, payday each month... I had only just finished my PhD and was used to my hand being held. I learned Swahili pretty quickly once I realised I needed it to eat, get water, electricity, and floors in the building, get the cars serviced, and communicate with the children participating and, indeed, most of the project staff. At least the Bantu grammar came in handy.
In this field, at least 75% of the effort is in developing tests. As Dorothy Bishop says, culturally appropriate tests are usually lacking, and (even once we've developed them) they are not standardised or validated. Another huge hurdle is a lack of psychologists. It's one of the most popular degree courses in the West, but in many countries there are no psychology degrees. This was true in Tanzania, and also in Indonesia and Uganda where I have worked more recently. In Tanzania we were working in a school setting and we tended to employ school teachers as research assistants. In Indonesia, it has been child nutritionists, and in Uganda, nurses and medical officers. I was at a meeting recently in Kampala to set up a network of people working in child psychology - mainly educationalists and psychiatrists, with a couple of paediatricians.
Where psychology degrees exist, most graduates go into private counselling. Any child psychologists also tend to go into private practice, working with the children of the new middle classes. University psychologists have horrible teaching loads, have to run a private practice to make ends meet and cannot get any research done. You're right, you don't know you're born in Europe or North America.
One of my colleagues who has completed her PhD in developmental cognitive neuropsychology is a psychology graduate from her home country but was seconded from her lecturing job to the group we were both working with. Her supervisor found some great postdoc funding but she wasn't supposed to continue research - and she was a government employee - so she's had to be careful to avoid her university when she's in her home country. She could easily have got a good teaching job outside her home country, but she wants to do something for psychology in the country, we're pretty sure they won't re-employ her if she just leaves, so she's juggling for the moment.
Neglected tropical diseases are of course incredibly important causes of delay in cognitive development. But there are many other factors that mean children in developing countries are at risk for neuropsychological deficits and cognitive delay.
One of the most satisfying projects I worked on was a "boring" construction and standardisation of a "bog standard" test of cognitive development - in essence the same as an IQ test - for a project trying to estimate the prevalence of cognitive and neurological deficits (pdf) in a population of children. We made sure that our tests were do-able, at least in part, by children with motor or sensory problems. And we found a group of children who were profoundly deaf, had no spoken language, and weren't in school - because of parents' beliefs that deaf children are uneducable. But these children were performing at normal limits on non-verbal tests. So we arranged for them to go to school.
The main reason I mention that project is because the majority of children who do have neurological deficits in that group are those who have suffered cerebral malaria. The article I've linked to estimates that a million children under five die each year and 250,000 are left with neurological complications or developmental delay. Just as with worms, if this parasite were affecting "our" children, people would be up in arms.
One interesting fact is that, of course, all of these parasites (worms, malaria) did affect "our" children in the past. Malaria was common in the Southern US until at least the 1930s. Hookworm flourishes most places where there aren't enough privies and children don't wear shoes - again very common in the southern US in fairly recent history. Educators at the time recognised that wormy children did not learn well, but had little evidence to back it up.
The "widespread prevalence"of hookworm weakened the "bodies and minds" of schoolchildren, declared Virginia state school officials in a pamphlet circulated to teachers. Infected children became "easily fatigued,"unable to study with interest; even with the teachers' determined involvement, children with hook- worms made "poor progress" and probably left school uneducated.It's not just infections, either. Another project I've been involved with has been giving pregnant mothers micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) and comparing outcomes to mothers who got the standard iron and folic acid normally supplied by midwives on their Indonesian island. My PhD student looked at the outcomes of nutritional supplementation on both mothers and their preschool children. We're still analysing the data, but we're interested to see that mothers who were given supplementation improved in their cognitive functioning (pdf) - so we now want to know if they might make better, more attentive and stimulating, mothers for their preschoolers.
The thing that all of these - the biological risk factors - have in common is that they occur when people are materially poor. We commonly find effects in our results of relative poverty - the differences between mothers who have managed to go to secondary school and those who have only a couple of years of primary school, between families who can afford a bicycle and a tin roof (and probably enough to eat) and those that cannot. But we find on top of those effects of the biological risk factors we study. Schooling is well known to influence cognitive functioning, and we've got some interesting data on what happens when you try and test children who haven't been to school.
It would be bad enough if we were, in fact, talking about children who have these biological risk factors, but who then went to lovely primary schools and had heaps of Surestart resources and well-trained teachers, enabling them to overcome their disadvantaged start in life. Although some schools in Asia are clean, pleasant, and have at least some equipment suitable for small children, many schools in the developing world struggle to have enough desks, and for the roofs not to leak in the rainy season. Teachers can be poorly trained and equally poorly motivated. Their salaries don't cover their living expenses, so they neglect their classes for outside jobs, spend classroom time working their vegetable gardens, and in some cases deliberately leave crucial subjects untaught so that pupils have to pay for outside tuition to pass Government exams.
Children leave school early because their families need them to work, because another child needs to go to school and there is not enough money for fees or uniform, or because they started school at a relatively old age and have reached puberty. Just a few years at school may teach children to read, but they may not retain it once they have left.
I'm going to have a mini professional moan at this point, just to say that this is the type of field where one works with very large teams of researchers, and rightly the large teams are credited on research papers. Unfortunately, because this isn't common in psychology, it's often not recognised that if you are going to have a great paper in a great journal, you are going to share authorship with 10 other people, and the only way to avoid that is not to be an author on that paper or (which has been suggested to me) not to do this kind of research. Personally, I feel this kind of research is much too important not to carry on doing it.
I started this post to give a flavour of the path I've taken in doing this research and the experiences I've had but - probably because it's something I feel passionately about! - it's taken on more of an educational character! Sorry about that... but anyway, I have had some incredible experiences and worked with some incredible and dedicated people.
It's not every research psychologist that has to arrange for a bridge to be built over the weekend to get the team to the testing location. You don't often get to have a beer watching the sun go down over both sides of the Indian Ocean*. And fortunately you don't in most research psychology jobs lose child participants, research assistants, and a project driver to malaria, HIV, and one of the biggest killers in the developing world - road traffic accidents - respectively.
*before you get confused, not simultaneously, two different research sites widely separated but both with quite undulating coastlines.
23 September, 2010
On (the) telly
Yesterday I spent mostly trying to stay out of shot, and trying to keep my shadow out of shot, too.
My placement at the BBC has been organised by a presenter who doesn't do much science news, but who's been the contact for a while in organising the BBC placements. In previous years someone was attached directly to TV news and spent about 3 weeks trailing him which though interesting, wasn't massively productive - it just takes so long to learn how to do telly that you can't actually make anything in that time. But watching a couple of interviews in a day is not such a bad idea.
We were seeing two authors for a Meet the Author segment, one at lunchtime and one in the afternoon. Of course we got off to a bad start with traffic, though I have no real idea what London traffic "should" be like to drive in. The cameraman/producer wasn't really sure why I was there, though he seemed impressed and surprised that I would be writing stories that actually get on the website, and that were on non-psychology stories.
Filming was actually pretty efficient, which is really interesting to know - I can imagine it being really tempting to film hours and hours for a 5 minute segment, when really, doing it two or three times and then re-doing the bits you aren't sure about is more efficient - certainly, there will be less editing.
What I really had not realised was how much setup there can possibly be for a filming session. It's not like radio, where the most you have to do is get people to turn off the air conditioning and their mobile phones*. Apart from moving the furniture, the cameras are incredibly heavy, time-consuming to set up, and take up loads of space, and then there are the lights... and like the old-fashioned data projectors, you have to let them cool down before you leave the room. It's been a revelation.
I wasn't much use to the whole enterprise of course, though apparently they had a sound failure recently and the cameraman didn't have his headphones on, so I was In Charge of headphones. And I do have a reasonable memory for conversations, so recapped what exactly had been the questions asked so the interviewer could run them through again. Apparently I should have been given a "real" producer's job and then would have been taking notes on them - which would have been fine - if I get another chance to go out filming, I may see if I can be a bit more useful.
*which I have learned to my cost, though thankfully only on recordings made for note-taking purposes, when I discovered how much interference a phone can cause to a digital recording.
My placement at the BBC has been organised by a presenter who doesn't do much science news, but who's been the contact for a while in organising the BBC placements. In previous years someone was attached directly to TV news and spent about 3 weeks trailing him which though interesting, wasn't massively productive - it just takes so long to learn how to do telly that you can't actually make anything in that time. But watching a couple of interviews in a day is not such a bad idea.
We were seeing two authors for a Meet the Author segment, one at lunchtime and one in the afternoon. Of course we got off to a bad start with traffic, though I have no real idea what London traffic "should" be like to drive in. The cameraman/producer wasn't really sure why I was there, though he seemed impressed and surprised that I would be writing stories that actually get on the website, and that were on non-psychology stories.
Filming was actually pretty efficient, which is really interesting to know - I can imagine it being really tempting to film hours and hours for a 5 minute segment, when really, doing it two or three times and then re-doing the bits you aren't sure about is more efficient - certainly, there will be less editing.
What I really had not realised was how much setup there can possibly be for a filming session. It's not like radio, where the most you have to do is get people to turn off the air conditioning and their mobile phones*. Apart from moving the furniture, the cameras are incredibly heavy, time-consuming to set up, and take up loads of space, and then there are the lights... and like the old-fashioned data projectors, you have to let them cool down before you leave the room. It's been a revelation.
I wasn't much use to the whole enterprise of course, though apparently they had a sound failure recently and the cameraman didn't have his headphones on, so I was In Charge of headphones. And I do have a reasonable memory for conversations, so recapped what exactly had been the questions asked so the interviewer could run them through again. Apparently I should have been given a "real" producer's job and then would have been taking notes on them - which would have been fine - if I get another chance to go out filming, I may see if I can be a bit more useful.
*which I have learned to my cost, though thankfully only on recordings made for note-taking purposes, when I discovered how much interference a phone can cause to a digital recording.
22 September, 2010
Phew!
I spent last week at the British Science Festival with large numbers of other science journalists, and very interesting it was too. Some of the interesting part was the science, and some was learning about how science journalists think, what gets into the news, and why.
I spent four days there and for most of the first three another BBC person was there. So this should mean we shared the stories and either did half each, or one of us did something for the radio (not me) and one of us for the website (me). In practice this did happen, but then I was left on my own for a day and a half... and got very panicky about what seemed to be an important story.
As it turned out, it was an important story for geeky scientists, and the Guardian covered it in quite a bit of depth on their website, but what happened after the interview was that everyone rang their editors (including me) who told them to ring their health editors (ditto) who said, not a very interesting health story. In fact, the BBC Online health editor gave a different reason to some of the other health editors, but I was a bit relieved to see that none of the other papers covered it, since we weren't!
I tended to be a bit random about which stories I covered, partly because I knew I had some backup, if anything was ultra important I wouldn't get in trouble for not covering it, but also because of course I'm not as attuned or experienced in what makes a good story, what's been covered, what's hot... But there were a few stories that were covered by absolutely everyone else (but not me), or by me (but no-one else). I wasn't entirely sure what to make of it when one story I wrote up for the website was mainly ignored by the other papers, but our radio guy decided to put it on the news. More exciting than everyone else thought, or I was over-hyping it to him?
But one thing that I've experienced this week is having soooo many stories out that older ones begin to fade into insignificance. And it does mean I was less bothered when I found a science blogger criticising one of my stories - not sure if that's why, but it was the most-read Science story for 2 days running, and I don't really mind why people are reading my stories!
I spent four days there and for most of the first three another BBC person was there. So this should mean we shared the stories and either did half each, or one of us did something for the radio (not me) and one of us for the website (me). In practice this did happen, but then I was left on my own for a day and a half... and got very panicky about what seemed to be an important story.
As it turned out, it was an important story for geeky scientists, and the Guardian covered it in quite a bit of depth on their website, but what happened after the interview was that everyone rang their editors (including me) who told them to ring their health editors (ditto) who said, not a very interesting health story. In fact, the BBC Online health editor gave a different reason to some of the other health editors, but I was a bit relieved to see that none of the other papers covered it, since we weren't!
I tended to be a bit random about which stories I covered, partly because I knew I had some backup, if anything was ultra important I wouldn't get in trouble for not covering it, but also because of course I'm not as attuned or experienced in what makes a good story, what's been covered, what's hot... But there were a few stories that were covered by absolutely everyone else (but not me), or by me (but no-one else). I wasn't entirely sure what to make of it when one story I wrote up for the website was mainly ignored by the other papers, but our radio guy decided to put it on the news. More exciting than everyone else thought, or I was over-hyping it to him?
But one thing that I've experienced this week is having soooo many stories out that older ones begin to fade into insignificance. And it does mean I was less bothered when I found a science blogger criticising one of my stories - not sure if that's why, but it was the most-read Science story for 2 days running, and I don't really mind why people are reading my stories!
09 September, 2010
It's always nice if someone notices
As I said before, quite a few people ended up reading my story about Arabic. Of course that one has my name on it, but today I was at a press launch for the British Science Festival which all the Media Fellows are going to next week, and someone from the British Science Association mentioned a study that looked at what happens when people disagree with scientific findings.
I spotted this study while I was in the Science Radio Unit and researched it, and got the author, and another psychologists looking at attitudes to science, to come on the programme. You can read/listen here. It was actually broadcast after I left the unit so I hadn't put it up here. So it was really nice to know someone had been listening (or, possibly, reading Ben Goldacre's blog, but I like to dream!).
Another story I researched also went out after I left - and in some ways was the most challenging radio story I did. I not only knew nothing about solar cells, but had to look up what a synchrotron was - I researched this one quite early on so it was a rude introduction to "how to use Wikipedia to your advantage". Don't worry, I checked I had all my facts and terms correct with the scientist in question! But perhaps a lesson for the person who wrote the press release? I'm not a physical scientist, but nor are all science journalists, though I am finding that this job makes you incredibly knowledgeable at a surface level about a wide variety of topics. So I now know about theropods, the Cretaceous, the Palaeolithic etc. etc.
I spotted this study while I was in the Science Radio Unit and researched it, and got the author, and another psychologists looking at attitudes to science, to come on the programme. You can read/listen here. It was actually broadcast after I left the unit so I hadn't put it up here. So it was really nice to know someone had been listening (or, possibly, reading Ben Goldacre's blog, but I like to dream!).
Another story I researched also went out after I left - and in some ways was the most challenging radio story I did. I not only knew nothing about solar cells, but had to look up what a synchrotron was - I researched this one quite early on so it was a rude introduction to "how to use Wikipedia to your advantage". Don't worry, I checked I had all my facts and terms correct with the scientist in question! But perhaps a lesson for the person who wrote the press release? I'm not a physical scientist, but nor are all science journalists, though I am finding that this job makes you incredibly knowledgeable at a surface level about a wide variety of topics. So I now know about theropods, the Cretaceous, the Palaeolithic etc. etc.
08 September, 2010
Carry On And Keep Calm
I used to live and work in London but was never really phased by travel disruptions as I could cycle (or, in fact, walk) to work so if there was a strike I just hopped on my bike. Unfortunately where I'm staying during my placement is a leeetle far from Television Centre, where I'm based at the moment, so I had a slightly lengthy but not too stressful journey to work on Tuesday. I thought it was one of those ironic co-incidences that the strike was on the anniversary of the start of the Blitz.
People were remarkably cool and collected and only a few rude words were heard. My journey home wasn't as easy (although we were going to a friend's house for dinner, the hardest part of it was the bit I would have had to do anyway), and I can see if you don't like London you might find it overwhelming.
Though it's not directly relevant to my placement, I do like London and I'm enjoying working here again - in fact, the two most irritating things about working here are specifically about TVC. One is that it is incredibly easy to get lost here - despite following signs for the Restaurant Building the other day, it took me 10 minutes and a couple of useless changes of floor to get there - it's probably 2 minutes' walk away. The other is the celebrities. How dare they get in the way of our work.
I'd been working on a Health story and wanted to ring up a private clinic to cheekily ask their prices. But outside my office window was, in full flow, the launch of Strictly Come Dancing. Lots of Good Life fans, it seems, as the applause for Felicity Kendal was probably the loudest.
Anyway, although officially I'm on Science and Nature, I think my interests lie a bit closer to Health and I've had one story on how the brain reads Arabic which got a lot of interest over the weekend - and a couple of pretty negative emails! Some were easy to answer but I was told just to ignore one of them... This was a story where I spotted the press release, and checked who else had done it - turns out it was no-one in the UK - before writing the story. It was great then to see that actually I had been right and people did find it interesting.
I had another couple of science stories out last week - and another one this week with some great dinosaur pictures. The hard part about writing that one was struggling to understand the Spanish scientist's English. I don't speak Spanish well enough to talk to someone about their research in Spanish, but at least I had a small clue about some of the things he might be groping for or how a word might be mispronounced.
One of the other Media Fellows told us the other day that she finds one of the hardest things about doing this is talking to people on the phone. I am not particularly phone phobic, but I have in the past tried really hard to make phone calls only in quiet circumstances. I just can't get away with that here. Both here at News Online and at the Science Radio unit the office is highly open plan - our "area" is smaller here but I don't even have a cubicle. I'm getting better at ringing people on the off chance, without having written down every single thing I want to say, and also at not getting a little nervous and forgetting important questions.
Writing this blog, which is one of those things I've been doing in my off moments, waiting for someone to ring me back, waiting for a meeting etc., is a total stream-of-consciousness job. Write, and press "publish" or "save" depending on whether I've run out of things to say or am getting bored or someone calls me. I tend to write my stories quite quickly too but go back and look at them again (you'll be pleased to hear!) but never really do for the blog.
So I was intrigued to see a slightly gimmicky website called "I Write Like". Apparently this blog is like Dan Brown. Urgh! At least my dinosaur story turned out to be like HP Lovecraft. I think that's better!
People were remarkably cool and collected and only a few rude words were heard. My journey home wasn't as easy (although we were going to a friend's house for dinner, the hardest part of it was the bit I would have had to do anyway), and I can see if you don't like London you might find it overwhelming.
Though it's not directly relevant to my placement, I do like London and I'm enjoying working here again - in fact, the two most irritating things about working here are specifically about TVC. One is that it is incredibly easy to get lost here - despite following signs for the Restaurant Building the other day, it took me 10 minutes and a couple of useless changes of floor to get there - it's probably 2 minutes' walk away. The other is the celebrities. How dare they get in the way of our work.
I'd been working on a Health story and wanted to ring up a private clinic to cheekily ask their prices. But outside my office window was, in full flow, the launch of Strictly Come Dancing. Lots of Good Life fans, it seems, as the applause for Felicity Kendal was probably the loudest.
Anyway, although officially I'm on Science and Nature, I think my interests lie a bit closer to Health and I've had one story on how the brain reads Arabic which got a lot of interest over the weekend - and a couple of pretty negative emails! Some were easy to answer but I was told just to ignore one of them... This was a story where I spotted the press release, and checked who else had done it - turns out it was no-one in the UK - before writing the story. It was great then to see that actually I had been right and people did find it interesting.
I had another couple of science stories out last week - and another one this week with some great dinosaur pictures. The hard part about writing that one was struggling to understand the Spanish scientist's English. I don't speak Spanish well enough to talk to someone about their research in Spanish, but at least I had a small clue about some of the things he might be groping for or how a word might be mispronounced.
One of the other Media Fellows told us the other day that she finds one of the hardest things about doing this is talking to people on the phone. I am not particularly phone phobic, but I have in the past tried really hard to make phone calls only in quiet circumstances. I just can't get away with that here. Both here at News Online and at the Science Radio unit the office is highly open plan - our "area" is smaller here but I don't even have a cubicle. I'm getting better at ringing people on the off chance, without having written down every single thing I want to say, and also at not getting a little nervous and forgetting important questions.
Writing this blog, which is one of those things I've been doing in my off moments, waiting for someone to ring me back, waiting for a meeting etc., is a total stream-of-consciousness job. Write, and press "publish" or "save" depending on whether I've run out of things to say or am getting bored or someone calls me. I tend to write my stories quite quickly too but go back and look at them again (you'll be pleased to hear!) but never really do for the blog.
So I was intrigued to see a slightly gimmicky website called "I Write Like". Apparently this blog is like Dan Brown. Urgh! At least my dinosaur story turned out to be like HP Lovecraft. I think that's better!
02 September, 2010
Busy busy
This week I started at News Online in a different BBC building. Apart from the fact that my nice BBC swipe card doesn't seem to work here, and I have to keep getting temporary badges every day, it is going really well.
I sat down at one desk on the first day (it is all rotas and hot-desking here, one part of working life that I'm glad we mainly avoid in academia!) and was immediately handed a story to work on. Then another one. And another one. I also found some pretty pictures (it's nice to use pictures!) and two of my stories went out yesterday. Can you tell I was VERY EXCITED?
Coral reef story
Stone age funeral feast story
These were very much time zone stories - I had to get on to the Australians on the coral reef story immediately before they went to bed (and I ended up begging one for pictures as he was getting home after an evening out) and then wait for the East Coast US researcher to get to work before calling her.
It's a lot more immediate in this part of the BBC, though it's not necessarily a case of getting things out the minute we get a press release - stories can be embargoed for up to a week, giving us plenty of time to call people up. Also, even if we are a little late on a story, if it doesn't get picked up by a lot of other outlets, it doesn't matter if we get it a few days late as we will be first.
And if something is really big news, and then a paper comes out, everyone will remember it. Personally, I am not that bothered by free kicks, but I gather that a lot of people are quite keen on that sport where men run up and down in shorts and try not to touch the ball - so a mathematical formula for a free kick that took place in 1997 is new enough to make the top story as I'm writing this.
I'm just waiting for someone to get off the phone so I can publish two more stories which had an embargo time of 5pm here, however - I finished them about 4.45 but we can't put them out yet then, so sometimes the time is pretty precise.
I sat down at one desk on the first day (it is all rotas and hot-desking here, one part of working life that I'm glad we mainly avoid in academia!) and was immediately handed a story to work on. Then another one. And another one. I also found some pretty pictures (it's nice to use pictures!) and two of my stories went out yesterday. Can you tell I was VERY EXCITED?
Coral reef story
Stone age funeral feast story
These were very much time zone stories - I had to get on to the Australians on the coral reef story immediately before they went to bed (and I ended up begging one for pictures as he was getting home after an evening out) and then wait for the East Coast US researcher to get to work before calling her.
It's a lot more immediate in this part of the BBC, though it's not necessarily a case of getting things out the minute we get a press release - stories can be embargoed for up to a week, giving us plenty of time to call people up. Also, even if we are a little late on a story, if it doesn't get picked up by a lot of other outlets, it doesn't matter if we get it a few days late as we will be first.
And if something is really big news, and then a paper comes out, everyone will remember it. Personally, I am not that bothered by free kicks, but I gather that a lot of people are quite keen on that sport where men run up and down in shorts and try not to touch the ball - so a mathematical formula for a free kick that took place in 1997 is new enough to make the top story as I'm writing this.
I'm just waiting for someone to get off the phone so I can publish two more stories which had an embargo time of 5pm here, however - I finished them about 4.45 but we can't put them out yet then, so sometimes the time is pretty precise.
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