Quality Matters: Science Translation from Press Releases to News - an Online Survey Experiment

1. Quality Matters:
Science Translation from Press Release to News
Paige Brown
Ph.D. Student, Manship School of Mass Communication

2. Problem Statement
• Poor quality and irresponsible reporting in
areas of science, medicine and
environmental news.
– Bad science? Over-claiming press releases?
Journalistic norms? Lack of science education?

3. Goals
arstechnica.com
• What makes a potential science story
newsworthy?

4. The Role of the Press Release
• Press releases have
been found to serve as
a point of distortion and
hype in the process of
translating peerreviewed research into
news media
• (Brechman et al., 2011;
Brown, 2012).
How can press releases
promote quality science
journalism?

5. Principles for
Health & Science Journalists
1. Don’t report preliminary findings.
2. Communicate the absolute magnitude
of (significant) differences.
3. Include caveats, major study limitations
and conflicts of interest.
Lisa M Schwartz & Woloshin, 2004

6. Methods
• Online survey experience of science communicators
(recruited via Twitter, Listserv, E-mail).
• Participants were randomly assigned to one of four
contrived, written 1-2 page press release conditions*
within Qualtrics.
–
–
–
–
(1) a control press release
(2) a press release containing confirming evidence
(3) a press release containing disconfirming evidence
(4) a press release mentioning important study limitations.

7. Methods
• After reading the 1-2 page written press
release, participants were asked to answer a
series of questions related to:
– likelihood to pursue a story based on the press
release [adapted from (Schmierbach, 2005)]
– perceived newsworthiness of the information
according to a variety of traditional news factors
– Importance attributed to variety of news factors in
general

8. Key Results: News Factors

9. Key Results
• Participants who attributed high
importance to conflict/controversy as a
criteria of newsworthiness:
– Indicated that the news outlet(s) they worked
for would be significantly more likely to write a
story based on the disconfirming press release
than on the control press release
(Conditional Effect = -1.78, S.E. = .69, p = .01.)

10. Figure 1. Graphical representation of Hayes’ Process Analysis, with Mean±1SD Pick-a-Point
conditioning, for importance of conflict/controversy moderation of stimulus effect on Likelihood2.

11. Key Results
• Participants who attributed only moderate
importance to facts/reliability of facts as a
criteria of newsworthiness:
– indicated that the news outlet(s) they worked
for would be significantly more likely to write a
story based on the disconfirming press
release than on the confirming press release
(Conditional Effect = -1.0, S.E. = .48, p < .05)

12. Figure 2. Graphical representation of Hayes’ Process Analysis, with Mean±1SD Pick-a-Point
conditioning, for importance of facts/reliability of facts moderation of stimulus effect on Likelihood2.

13. Conclusion
• This study fills a gap in research on the
direct impact of scientific press release
quality on self-reported news decisions
of journalists, and the moderating
influence of traditional news factors on
these decisions.

14. Questions & Acknowledgements
Follow me, Ask Questions @FromTheLabBench
Thanks To:
• Matt Shipman (*All stimulus articles were originally
written by and created in collaboration with Matt
Shipman, an experienced science communicator and
public communication specialist at NC State in
Raleigh, North Carolina.)
• Manship School of Mass Communication
• NASW-talk, Karl Bates & SCONC Listservs