Science and the media

Lee Clippard is known as a “public affairs representative” or “public information officer”. His job is to disseminate information from the college of natural science, to help media connect with people within the college and to help “put out fires”. Lee has been at UT for 5 years and comes from a science background (masters in entomology).

Reasons to work with the media

Improve the reputation of UT which helps recruit faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduate students
Improve your individual reputation within your field
Media exposure is part of US News rankings
Increase funding and donations for the department and the university (state funding accounts for less than 20% of UT Austin’s funding)
Teach/Inform the public (in a large lecture class you reach a few hundred students, an article in the Austin-American Statesman reaches approximately 1 million people)

Basics of the media

Media is interested in news not information. Information only becomes interesting to media when it is related to health, a current event or anniversary, business etc.
Lee sends out news releases to several media outlets as well as making less formal pitches to individual sources. When doing this Lee has to be careful not to wear out his welcome with reporters by pitching too many ideas in too little time.
Students and faculty can also develop relationships with individual reporters and use those relationships to pitch stories themselves (Lee can still help you refine your pitch).
Most of reporting works around relationships, reporters go to people they know and return to people they know.
Many science stories are “evergreens” that can be run at any time. In this case the story may percolate with the media for a while before they decide to report on it. Evergreens may also be kept on hand and not run until there is time/space for the media to fill.
Many papers have cut their science writers/reporters because science sections tend to not generate a lot of ad revenue (don’t know why). Local papers are often owned by parent corporations and run stories from their parent corp which increasingly means stories Lee pitches need to be national stories rather than local stories.
Most news articles require 3 sources so only a small bit of what you say will make it into the story. (Traditionally journalists were also taught to always include 1 dissenting source but this is not always the case these days.)
TV is harder for science than the paper because TV requires visuals which take more work to put together well.
News corporations track what kinds of links people click on and use this as a measure of what topics the public is interested in.

Media timeline

First research is published in a peer reviewed journal. This helps ensure work is accepted. Also some journals have embargoes which prevent authors from commenting on the work until the journal article is published.
Next Lee pitches the story to journalists/or a reporter at a conference picks up the story/or a comment/post on Twitter or Facebook or a blog is picked up by a reporter.
Depending on timeliness of story it could run anywhere from that afternoon to years later. Mark Raizen has an article coming out in Scientific American that will be published 2 years after he submitted it.

How to work with the media

Get to know your local PR person like Lee. Even if you have your own personal relationships with reporters it’s still good to keep Lee in the know so he can help target your pitch, coordinate future inquires etc.
Write a blog in non-technical language. The better you are at explaining things without jargon and with analogies the more reporters will like you. Keep in mind that newspapers write at a 7th grade level of reading comprehension.
- If your blog gets enough traffic you can be your own news source. Bloggers can also be asked to write for larger outlets (Russell Poldrack from UT neuroscience regularly contributes to the Huffington Post).
If you get a new job in a new region of the country you can contact some local reporters to introduce yourself to start building relationships and start establishing yourself as an expert in your field to those reporters.
When talking to the media you are never really off the record. You want to try to talk in sound bites keeping in mind that if you say “XXX but, YYY” often times only the YYY will get quoted in the article.
If a reporter contacts you it’s OK to say you need a few hours to prepare for the interview (you can even make up an excuse). Most reporters will have no problem giving you some time. Some reporters may be willing to send you questions ahead of time while others will not want to lose the spontaneity.
Need to be careful about commenting on others’ work. You don’t want to rave about something you don’t know much about or don’t think is that great but you also don’t want to make enemies by speaking ill of others’ work. It’s OK to say you decline to comment; Mark Raizen often does this.
An excellent book on working with the media is Scientist’s Guide to Talking with the Media which is co-written by a scientist and a reporter.
Robin Gerrow, assistant vice president of public affairs at UT, gives seminars on interacting with the media that cover talking points, how to speak to the media, how to dress when on camera etc.