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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

Week 3 - Getting to grips with editing software

My last week at the Science Radio unit and time for me to try and edit some of the recordings I made a couple of weeks ago. I do some sound editing for my day job but this is a whole other kettle of fish. None of the programs do what I think they should and a lot of this week was spent accidentally deleting things or trying to copy or cut the same section of audio multiple times! This was actually something I'd hoped I'd learn a lot more about but one thing I have learned is that audio recorded "in the field" is really different to that recorded in my lab under carefully controlled conditions.

Having collected audio under four headings while I was at my conference, I ended up editing segments and putting together a story for just one of these headings. One of them as I say was pretty plain to me, even, that it wouldn't really be usable as it wasn't very exciting to listen to. One of them I thought was interesting but what ended up being really useful was having the conversations with producers about whether it could be interesting, what could be interesting about it, and why it might not be really. The Hook, as Cat is also finding out about. I did edit that audio down a bit and passed it over to the Africa Service who might end up using some of it, but I'm not holding my breath.

But constructing the story which we're hoping will go out on Health Check was great - really challenging, really interesting, and slightly frustrating in that I knew more or less exactly how I wanted it to sound but couldn't get it to work - and then what I wanted to say never came out right either!

I had recorded myself asking the questions and the two scientists, plus the young people from the street kids' theatre, and I have to say I'd assumed that the questions I recorded would be used as well. But it doesn't really work out that way, especially when you need to rework things to make a shorter and easier-to-listen-to story. The other thing that hadn't really occurred to me was that if your interviewee says something in quite a long-winded way, or says an important thing, followed by a rambly anecdote, and then finishes off the important thing, you're going to have to summarise what they said. So it takes a lot of the following:

Listening to what you've got
Deciding on the overall story
Working out what you can get from the audio that will tell the story
Working out what else you'll need to add
Writing the links
Working out if what the interviewee said really fits with your link
Working out if you've said anything in the background that is unclear or just plain wrong
And then finally recording the links!

Which of course is a learning curve in itself. I am highly aware of my personal tendency to talk much too fast - and my poor students are too. I tend to panic when confronted with a long piece of prose I have to read and try and read it all in one go. Big mistake! Sloooow down... and put more expression into it... and smile... and write in your pauses...

So this story, which I'll link to when I know when it's going out, has a news trailer that should go out the same day on World Service News, also including me. So if/when that goes out I'll be glued to Listen Again.

Although I was involved with the main programme I've been working on, Material World, this week, I ended up working really hard on the other story and didn't go over for the recording. I had been interviewing one of the amateur scientists for So You Want To Be A Scientist who was getting very relaxed at doing interviews, but was a bit nervous - so I made the production assistant promise to hold her hand!
It is pretty interesting seeing the programme recorded so I will try and get back there when I'm back in London in a few weeks' time - apparently there is a free bus from White City to Broadcasting House. I also polished off the notes for the two upcoming issues of Material World this week, though (sneak preview) the poor producers then had to contact me to find out where one of the sets of notes was. I could have sworn I had put it in a public drive but you know what happens when you swear you know where something is...

More in a couple of weeks' time when I am back from my sojourn in the day job and am at News Online. So far, this has been one of the most interesting and exciting things I've done recently, and everyone's been really friendly and helpful. Although you end up getting your writing slashed, edited, and critiqued - no-one is nearly as rude as the infamous Reviewer 2.

Week 2 1/2 - In which my friends appear on the radio

As I blogged earlier, with the programme I've mainly been working on it can be a little while before stories make it out there. I spotted a press release about a story I knew something about and (perhaps because I spoke so clearly and intelligently about it, perhaps because it also appealed to him, or perhaps because he could see I was potty about it and there was no shutting me up) one of the producers let me loose on it. Unlike the other stories I've been working on - including other ones on psychology - I do know all the ins and outs and minor details of this one, so this one came with major warnings about not getting technical and making sure it was all accessible to the general listener.

To start off with we were thinking we'd interview the author of the paper, plus someone who is in the US and does related brain imaging work. But the author is in the North of England - and wasn't at first thinking of coming down to London for the programme - which meant that both of the interviewees would be on a line. It's possible to do that but it's not ideal and you can usually tell. As an aside, I didn't go into the studio for this week's recording but listened to it while it was on - and one of the interviewees was in a studio and kept bumping the mike - it was really obvious, at least to me.

So the plan then was to get a friend/colleague of mine, who is a really chatty and enthusiastic person, who had gushed to me about how great the atricle was, and who works in London, to appear - while the author would be in the Newcastle studio. But in the end everything worked out even better, as the author came down for the day from Newcastle.

I wrote questions for both of them, rang them up and took down their answers - with dire warnings about "forget it's me, pretend it's your granny, or you're showing a school kid round the department, blah blah" - they were both very good when they were talking to me. They were extremely excellent when they came on the show (though I know the Newcastle researcher was a little nervous, she ended up making a joke that was, I think, better than the presenter's) and a good time was had by all.

A lot of the rest of the week was spent trying to find stories for future programmes, again. We had a couple of leads, one of which was a story about fossils, and in fact was research done by someone who'll be doing the same placement as me in a few weeks' time. The producer was fairly sure it would be a very popular story though - it's no good running something that everyone else has run, especially if they do it on a Monday and your show is on a Thursday. This turned out to be the case. Fortunately for everyone, the researcher was bored of going on the radio!

Another one was a story about marine life that was very cool - but there were two problems. One was the same as the fossil story - too much likely media coverage. And the other was the same as the bacteria painting - too visual.

So, I ended up researching yet another story - which isn't out yet. But I'll give you a taster. It's quite a cool story and though it's a psychology story, it's about science in general. I saw an article I really liked, on someone else's blog, and the producer said "hmm, interesting, bit philosophical, and really, stop plugging psychology already! is it topical?". The story was only out last month so that's OK on our programme, and then I spotted a book in the huge pile we have in the office which was by another psychologist, also out last month, and very relevant.

So, I got in touch with the first guy and then waited to see if I'd hear from him - he's in the US. And although working on science radio over the summer is great in one way, because weird and wacky stories get on, in another way it's bloomin' frustrating. How dare scientists take holidays! How dare US universities have 3 month summer breaks?

(Incidentally, if you ever send a book for review to a scientific journal - and I knew this already as I used to do reviews editing - probably about a 1 in 4 chance it will get read and reviewed. And half of them aren't relevant for the journal, so if it's relevant, let's say 1 in 2. If you send it to a media outlet? well let's just say there's a very very long shelf of unread books here...)

Week 2 - In which I stick microphones up people's noses

A conference would usually be a good opportunity to record some interviews of research that's just getting published, but this was even better because the unit I'm working in does World Service and anything coming out of Africa is particularly interesting. I browsed the conference programme and chose 3 topics that might be interesting and for each of them managed to get interviews with both researchers and normal people - the latter for most cases courtesy of an extremely friendly and nice Africa Service reporter based there.

I ended up interviewing 5 researchers - of which 4 were very easy to talk to and sounded quite down to earth, though they waffled no end, repeated themselves, overlapped themselves... you name it... thankfully I'm not expected to edit the audio, or at least not do the fine stuff.

One researcher was I'm afraid to say reeeeely boring and ended up sounding like he was lecturing me - I probably could have got a bit out of it but there wasn't really as much of a story as there could have been. That was a shame as to go with that one I and the BBC man chased around Lusaka trying to find a child selling things on the streets and ended up being chased out of the market, and finding a boy selling doughnuts, who turned out to be pretty good on the recording.

The other two pairs of interviewees both worked out pretty well, as did their "counterpart" people-on-the-street. It was great fun tracking down a grandmother for one of the stories - we asked one nice old lady selling fruit but she didn't want to be recorded on the street, and in the end found a lady living in an area with some smaller houses, who was looking after her disabled husband. We wanted to buy her a present so went for some food for her dinner, and a notebook and pen for her littlest boy. She had previously been looking after five grandchildren too, but thankfully now they are all with other relatives.

I also really enjoyed running round our conference dinner interviewing the entertainers, a group of kids who perform and work with street children - they are all of course dying to be on the radio as they are actORS darling, and hopefully at least one or two of them will get to be heard - of course the magic words "I'm from the BBC" open all kinds of doors.

Lusaka at this time of year is in the middle of winter - after a nice week's break in Greece and warm and humid London, I was pretty freezing! I had fortunately packed one wool jumper and though it was about 25C in the afternoons I ended up wearing my jumper till lunchtime every day and all evening.

In which I pretend to be a journalist

I'm currently spending a few weeks as a British Science Association Media Fellow (see here), one hopes reaping lots of rewards for my loyal reader in improving my skills at communicating science to the general public.

I started at the BBC Science Radio Unit about 2 weeks ago - mainly working on Material World, with side forays into Health Check and Science in Action. Material World is a live programme which is broadcast on Thursday afternoons, meaning Fridays are really quiet and the week ramps up from there. The first week here, the producers were treating me really gently but it still felt quite scary.

With a programme like this guests are interviewed first by us (that's the producers and random know-nothings like me and another work experience person), after we've written a list of relevant questions. We take notes on what the guest has to say, pass it on to the presenter, and a script for the programme is written - then you have to hope that what you've asked makes sense to the presenter, and that the interviewee gives roughly the same answers, and isn't too nervous!

The first interview I was involved with was with an MP, now, it will be pretty easy for you to find out who it was, but I won't mention her by name. In typical politician fashion, she didn't say very much to me (or on the programme) and was full of clichés. Even the presenter, who prides himself on having a way with words, couldn't think of a synonym for "skilled up" once she'd said it to me three times and him twice. As I say, it felt quite scary to have that responsibility but it wasn't a huge job in reality.

Quite a lot of what I’ve been doing has been looking around to see what news is out there. I usually enjoy reading science blogs and feeds and it’s great to have this be temporarily part of my day job – hearing what’s new, getting press releases before things are out on the web, trawling feeds for something new and interesting. A lot of what is actually really new and interesting doesn’t make great radio, unfortunately. Did you know Alexander Fleming painted with bacteria, for example? But pictures aren't that great on radio.

Some of the stories end up being researched quite a while in advance. In my first week I started researching two more stories for Material World, one of which has gone out at the time of writing and one of which will be out in a couple of weeks’ time. The first one was my own “spot”, in fact of a colleague whose really interesting paper was about to come out – I raved about how cool the research was, the producers said “yeah, go for it”, and I talked to the main researcher, and after a bit of indecision also decided to ask another colleague on. The preliminary work on that was in my first week here but there’s more to this story so I’ll leave that for another entry.

After my first week I was due to go to a conference in Lusaka, Zambia – so I was given a digital recorder, tiny, and a microphone, huge, and some quick instructions on how to use it, and some tips for recording (make sure the background isn’t too noisy but isn’t too quiet, push the microphone right up people’s noses, check the volume level), and the email and phone no of the Africa Service’s employee there. I have been to Lusaka, but not for a really long time, so I was looking forward to having someone to show me round.

I'll try and write another entry on My Adventures in Lusaka shortly - it alternates between twiddling thumbs and manic here.