Part of the MaRS Best Practices Series: http://www.marsdd.com/bestpractices/sept14 These are presentation notes rather than the presentation. The Toronto Star’s science reporter, Peter Calamai, discusses how scientists and the media can work better together to contextually frame scientific and technological issues for the broader public. He also addresses how good science communication helps to better inform both the public and policy makers.

1. SESSION NOTES
Not to be quoted without permission
MaRS Best Practices Series: From Bench to Headline:
Translating science for the media
Speaker: Peter Calamai
Infectious Science:
the media and researchers as agents of contagion
Notes for an address at MaRS
Toronto Sept 14, 2006
I’ve been asked to fill the next 40 minutes with some thoughts about news coverage of
science, and especially scientific research, by the mass media. As well my self-appointed
task is to disabuse you of a few misconceptions that are often uttered by researchers. My
intention is first to provide a half dozen practical tips for when you’re faced with dealing
with a reporter, tips from the worm’s-eye-view of a reporter.
Then I’m going to pull the lens back and look more generally about the general
environment in which such interviews take place. Largely I think it’s an unhealthy
environment because neither scientists nor reporters make enough effort to understand
the culture and values in which the others work. That’s part of the reason there aren’t
more of these interviews and more news about science in the mass media.
Then I’ll deal briefly with ways to improve that environment. This talk is officially
entitled “From bench to headline: Translating Science for the Media” but I had come up
with an alternate title which was considered too risqué. That other title is “Infectious
Science: the media and researchers as agents of contagion.” I think it actually gives some
useful hints about the way forward.
And finally I’m going to offer to tackle your questions. And all of this will be
accomplished without resort to any PowerPoint slides. If you have read Edward Tufte's
paper “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” you’ll know why. If you haven’t it’s probably
too late to save you.
There’s an the old Irish adage which says: “It’s a terrible death to be talked to death, it’s a
terrible death to die.” Even worse if the long-winded speaker isn’t actually dealing with
the audience came hoping to hear. So if my talk doesn’t deal with some of your concerns,
then I urge you to ask questions.
Okay, let’s start with those half-dozen tips from a worm’s eye view. The assumption here
is that a reporter is interested in making news out of research carried out by you, your
group or by someone at your institution who you’re advising. I’m also assuming that you
have some prior warning that this is likely to happen, because a paper is coming out in a
big name journal, or there’s a conference presentation, or the institute or university has
put out a publicity release.
So here’s how I would suggest you prepare either for yourself or in helping someone
else:

2. SESSION NOTES
Calamai MaRS remarks Sept. 14
• Be concise. Condense the main thrust of the findings to no more than 25 words.
Try this explanation out in advance on a tough audience – your aged aunt, a
teenager, a grounds worker at the university,
• Be imaginative. Come up with some colourful (but still accurate) analogies for the
most complicated aspect of your research. Let me give an example. Earlier this
year I was struggling to write about a major advance in self-assembling molecular
corrals, work carried out by John Polanyi’s group at the U of T. In an interview
Professor Polanyi told me that they had “contrived to make molecules ski and
crash down prettily.” I used that quote. When the piece ran in the Sunday Star the
illustrations included a scanning electron microscope image of the molecular
corral. But an imaginative editor also added four small photos of skiers falling
down. The word image led to the photographs and I’m sure drew far more readers
into the story than otherwise. [Microscope, March 26]
• Be honest. Your work may have few immediate practical applications. Then say
so. There is nothing shameful about a finding that advances human understanding
without any immediate contribution to the economy or human health.
• Be helpful. If asked – and only if asked – be ready to provide names and co-
ordinates of other researchers who are familiar with the research but unaffiliated.
In the science news business these are known as “validators.” They’re the people
who say this is ground-breaking work, not you. They’re also people qualified to
point out any limitations or shortcomings, which you’ve already volunteered of
course.
• Be visual. Either have already co-operated with the public information officials to
make available good illustrations – photographs or graphics – or be prepared to
help in making these happen. A rough sketch is often all that’s needed by a media
outlet that’s big enough to have its own graphic artists. This isn’t just my view.
The folk who run the EurekaAlert service at the AAAS asked science journalists
earlier this year about their jobs. The results were presented at the EuroScience
Open Forum meeting in Munich in July. Top of the list of problems was getting
good visuals for stories. [citation here]
• Finally and maybe most importantly: Be a thorough researcher. Check out the
media outlet of the reporter(s) who will be interviewing you. That may mean
switching channels for the national TV news the night before or picking up a
different newspaper in the morning. Believe it or not, most reporters have fragile
egos and they’ll chaff if it’s obvious you’re only aware of their competitors.
All that applies to the best of all possible worlds, where you have some advance notice
and time to prepare. What if the phone rings and it’s a reporter with a looming deadline
who thinks something in your field is newsworthy that maybe you consider is old hat?
The first priority is to clarify what the reporter is looking for. Are you the main focus of
this news story or just one of the supporting cast, perhaps even a validator. Is this a quick
news hit or a mini-feature? Is the reporter looking primarily for information or primarily
for someone to quote or record on tape? We call that the search for the killer quote.
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Calamai MaRS remarks Sept. 14
After determining as much as you can about the circumstances, buy yourself 15 minutes
if possible to run through that check list of six items. Use whatever excuse you like – in
the middle of a meeting, got to call home on family emergency. But do call back in 15
minutes or, if it’s someone like me on the other end, they’ll start pestering you in 16
minutes.
Most likely, it won’t be someone like me. There are about 540 members of the Canadian
Science Writers’ Association today, which is as much of a shock to me, as a founding
member in 1970, as it probably is to you. But the number of full-time science and
medical reporters working in staff positions for major mass media in Canada has, in fact,
fallen over the past 35 years, not increased. It stands today at just 43. So you might get
called by Anne McIlroy the Globe’s science reporter, or Maureen Taylor, the national
medical/health reporter with CBC-TV, or Denis Buckert, who covers science and
environment from the Ottawa bureau of Canadian Press, or Margaret Munro, the science
reporter based in Vancouver for CanWest News. You might, but it’s far more probable
that you’ll be called by a journalist who does not regularly report about scientific research
and also certainly has no prior knowledge of your particular field.
So those worm’s eye view rules apply even more to such general assignment reporters.
Negotiate how much detail they want or need. Keep the explanations simple but not
simplistic. Avoid acronyms like MaRS, abbreviations like PCR, specialized terms like
nucleation sites. Don’t obscure the main story with subsidiary material. Don’t refer to
previous research in the field unless absolutely unavoidable.
Now for a really vexed question. Do you volunteer feedback to the reporter after the item
airs or appears in print? I say yes, always. Certainly if you think the piece covered all the
important points accurately and well, you should say so. But just as importantly if you
think the reporter missed something vital or got something factually wrong. If you don’t
draw such mistakes to the attention of journalists, they are electronically perpetuated not
only by that reporter but by any other journalist whose “research” consists of checking
the files.
However, you should keep two things in mind. It’s quite possible that the reporter did not
omit that one aspect you consider so crucial. It could very well have been cut by an editor
for space. So a non-confrontational opening is to say something like, “too bad there
wasn’t time/space to include the names of my co-investigators.”
As for accuracy issues, just keep in mind that journalists do worry about accuracy but
they’re much less concerned about precision. To spell your name wrong or assign you to
the incorrect university or hospital is a cardinal sin to any reporter. So should be
confusing a virus and a bacteria. But rounding off numbers to one decimal place (or no
decimal place at all) usually isn’t. And referring to polymerase chain reaction as photo
copying DNA is quite acceptable.
You see, what we’re most worried about is that readers or viewers are going to find the
story dull and tune out. The former editor of the New York Times, Howell Raines, used
to refer to the deadly danger of “eat-your-peas” articles, ones which readers were
expected to consume not because of any innate appeal but because they were “good” for
them. Another term in the trade is “learn-until-you-bleed” stories. No one wants to write
them because only nerds would read them. So that’s why the analogies in a science story
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4. SESSION NOTES
Calamai MaRS remarks Sept. 14
might be a tad flashy for your own taste. But are they actually wrong in a substantive way
that does harm to the science. Then say so. [example of greenhouse gas warming, of
gravitational warping of space-time – both wrong]
From the point of view of a reporter with 40-years experience, all of that is good advice.
You can pay thousands of dollars to so-called media consultants and get a lot less. But I
don’t think such advice truly gets to the heart of the matter. The real issue is the mutually
reinforced ignorance which divides journalists and scientists. This divide means that
Canadians aren’t given enough opportunities to learn about the many newsworthy
accomplishments of researchers in this country.
I talk a lot at journalism schools about the failings of the media with respect to science, so
today let me talk here about the other side, the misconceptions about the media under
which too many scientists labour. There are four:
First is the misconception of a partnership supposedly desired between the media and
scientists.
Second is the misconception that the country’s general welfare would be improved if we
simply communicated more about science to the Canadian public.
A corollary to this is the misconception that the public would be more likely to approve
of developments like genetic engineering if they better understood the underlying
science.
The last is the misconception that scientists actually engage the public in any sort of
meaningful dialogue.
These matter because adherence to such ideas helps set most scientists apart from many
of their fellow citizens. And unless scientists abandon these misconceptions I see little
hope for narrowing the gap between the lab and the hearth.
So to the first – the notion that the mass media has any interest in joining a so-called
“partnership” with scientists to help explain their work to the wider public. Few news
reporters in the mass media would ever make such a claim, at least not with a straight
face or without crossing their fingers behind their backs.
A news reporter is not interested in a partnership. We’re interested in exploitation.
Reporters care about the activities of scientists when – and only when – they constitute
good stories, good copy.
Treating scientists like this isn’t discriminatory. Reporters have the same exploitative
attitude toward politicians, hockey players, environmental activists, guerilla leaders,
actors, CEOs, painters, serial killers, Supreme Court judges, al-Qaeda terrorists, the
Governor of the Bank of Canada, and – should he or she be available for interviews –
God.
Let me be utterly frank: a reporter’s overriding focus is, will this story get me on The
National tonight or in the front section of the Toronto Star. Or am I going to be relegated
to hourly recycling on Newsworld or stuck away in the ghetto of the Science page to be
seen by a fraction of the potential audience and have little impact?
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5. SESSION NOTES
Calamai MaRS remarks Sept. 14
A great many people in the world of science harbour a bizarre idea that reporters are
ablaze with a desire to educate the public and that, therefore, they will embrace the idea
of an educational “partnership” with scientists or judges or whomever. My only
explanation for this misconception is that these people must have been listening to
newspaper publishers or network executives. Our bosses often give speeches about the
media’s duty to educate. Reporters almost never do.
As I said at the beginning, I’m concentrating on MASS media and on NEWS coverage.
This focus excludes many efforts that enthusiastically embrace the idea of a “partnership”
between journalists and scientists and often do see public education as a primary goal.
Think of Scientific American, Quirks and Quarks, Daily Planet, NOVA, The Nature of
Things and so on. There are also trade publications, like Chemical & Engineering News,
the slick in-house magazines from organizations like Genome Canada, and a plethora of
information services on the web aimed at narrower and narrower audiences.
I’m not suggesting for one moment that scientists ought not to want their research
featured on Quirks and Quarks or in the pages of Scientific American. So long as they
pronounce or spell your name right and give credit to the proper funding agency, what’s
not to like.
But these are “boutique” media outlets which appeal mostly to people already interested
in science. So it’s a cardinal sin to extrapolate from their interest in “partnerships” and
“education” to any such interest by reporters doing “real” news in the true mass media,
such as “The National” on CBC-TV or the Toronto Star.
My chief task at the Star, and the chief task of my counterparts in other mass media, is to
make news about scientific research appealing to members of the public who don’t
normally listen to Quirks and Quarks, watch Daily Planet on the Discovery network or
leaf through Scientific American. A few statistics will give you a feel for the relative
audiences.
The Daily Planet show is broadcast twice a night, at 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. Eastern. These
airings average 200,000 viewers total each night. There’s no way of knowing but there’s
likely a lot of overlap between the audiences on successive nights. Let’s assume that a
quarter of the viewers are new for each of the four other nights, so that’s 50,000 times
four equals another 200,000. There’s a Best-Of Daily Planet show on CTV on Saturday
mornings watched by about 100,000. So total of 500,000 Canadian TV science viewers
for the week seems reasonable.
CBC’s Quirks and Quarks estimates the audience for the radio broadcast in Canada at
450,000 with something like another 15,000 who download the podcast version plus an
unknown number who listen to live streaming on the Internet or download MP3 files
directly from the show’s own website. So something around a half-million all across
Canada.
There would likely be a lot of overlap between Daily Planet viewers and Quirks and
Quarks listeners. But assume there’s none. Add those two numbers and you have a
maximum of a million across Canada over a whole week. That’s about 700,000 fewer
than the nightly audience for CTV National News and 300,000 fewer than the Toronto
area readers of the Star on a single Saturday.
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6. SESSION NOTES
Calamai MaRS remarks Sept. 14
Numbers don’t tell the whole story here, as anyone who watches or listens to these
programs knows. They both do a tremendous job that isn’t matched in any other country
and I have nothing but admiration for the shows and their dedicated staffs.
And what’s news anyhow? I very deliberately haven’t defined it. That’s mostly because
whole tomes have been written about this vexed issue. By far the best is Deciding What’s
News by Herbert Gans, who is that rarity, a sociology professor who can write clear
prose. Gans devoted 10 years to his study of how senior editors choose news stories at
CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. Last year Northwestern
University Press issued a 25th anniversary edition of the book, with a new preface from
the professor, who is still going strong.
My own definition of science news is far more rough-and-ready than Gans’ scholarly
work. Science news is some recent finding or development that Star readers are unlikely
to know about and that I can convince an editor ought to be in the paper. This definition
does not encompass stories explaining subjects like photosynthesis, which many people
don’t understand because they either couldn’t be bothered to pay attention in primary
school or because they haven’t been curious enough to look it up since. That’s not news
reporting. That’s remedial education … and it’s not my job.
In some cases, news also has the added frisson of being something that somebody wants
to keep out of the paper or off the air. This doesn’t happen anywhere near as much with
news about science as it does with political or sports news but it can. Just to give one
example which you might not have already heard. Under the Liberals, the federal
government produced Kyoto plans which claimed Canada’s managed forests would act as
major “sinks” for carbon dioxide gas through that self-same photosynthesis process. But
research by federal scientists suggested that, at best, it would be a wash, with the forests
as much a “source” as a “sink.” This work was deliberately suppressed, with the scientists
actively discouraged from submitting their studies for publication.
I fear that I’m coming awfully close to killing this first misconception with sheer
verbiage. But I feel it is crucial that you understand that news reporters in the mass media
aren’t interested in “partnership” with scientists … or with anyone else. At the best, we’re
interested in mutual exploitation. I get my story and you get publicity.
In the interests of time, let me roll the second and third misconceptions into one. So that
would be that more science communication would lead to more public understanding of
science which in turn would increase support for research generally and ease the way for
controversial developments like genetic engineering. The end result would be a better
educated society and therefore an increase in general welfare.
Academics who specialize in the public understanding of science call this view the
“deficit model.” In other words, the public are deficient in their knowledge about science.
To put that right, we pry open their heads and pour in information. Thus enlightened,
Canadians will appreciate more fully the inherent cultural and economic values of
scientific research and the days of milk and honey at the granting councils will be with us
forever.
Of course, that model doesn’t work, despite the earnest preachings of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. The U.K. government and agrobusiness discovered this when they tried to sell
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7. SESSION NOTES
Calamai MaRS remarks Sept. 14
genetically modified foods by ‘educating” the British public about the underlying
science. The Ontario government is discovering it right now with public opposition to
wind energy farms, despite the overwhelming weight of favourable scientific findings.
And the federal government will discover it whenever it finally proposes a plan for long-
term management of waste nuclear fuel, despite a public “education” process which
lasted three years.
It doesn’t work because of the fourth misconception. Despite the belief of some in the
research community, scientists in Canada have not really engaged the public in any sort
of meaningful two-way dialogue. There have been attempts, a few of them laudable but
most of them laughable, unfortunately. One of the latest ideas is a European import
known as the café scientifique. The concept is simple. You propose a topic of proven
public interest which has a substantial scientific component. Could be something like
long-term management of spent nuclear fuel or dealing with an insect infestation like the
western pine beetle. The locale is someplace where people already gather that’s not
academic, like a café if you’re in Paris or a pub here in Canada. You bring some experts
to the pub and they have a discussion with people who show up.
I went to one of these recently, put on by a university which will remain anonymous in a
town I will not identify for the same reason. It was a disaster. It reinforced everything that
many non-scientists think about scientists. It was held in an alcove of a noisy pub, yet the
presenters stood at a podium and attempted to deliver a classroom-style lecture using a
PowerPoint presentation. They asked audience members to hold their questions to the
end. Representatives from the university went around the bar chiding patrons for talking.
But most importantly, the scientists never bothered to ask the members of the public what
they wanted to know about the topic under discussion, a topic very germane to the daily
lives of people in that community. They assumed the deficit model and tried to pour facts
into the heads of their audience. It wasn’t just a failure to communicate (to use the words
of Cool Hand Luke). It was a failure to engage.
It hasn’t escaped my attention that I’m also guilty of very similar pontificating behaviour
here. At least I have spared you the PowerPoint. In my defence I can say only that
desperate times require desperate measures. And I believe these are desperate times for
the position of science and research in Western societies.
Consider these straws in the wind. About 40 per cent of Americans believe that Genesis
accurately describes the creation of the Earth. Don’t get smug about those dumb
Yankees. I’ll bet the figure in Canada is at least 20 per cent. Certainly there are more and
more Canadians who express a belief in magic and who appear to have descended into
superstition. Just talk to a university undergrad today and you can gauge the elevation of
emotion over reason, of personal conviction over hard thinking.
Some of this disillusionment was inevitable as science abandoned the Newtonian
universe for what is still the baffling and inscrutable universe of quantum physics. Or on
the biological side, does epigenetics explain why people behave the way they do one iota
better than phrenology. For the Victorians, science made the world easier to understand.
Since then it has made it far more difficult.
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8. SESSION NOTES
Calamai MaRS remarks Sept. 14
We have a paradox. To the greatest extent ever in human history, the world is being
shaped by science. Scientific advance appears to be unstoppable, constant and
cumulative, as has been argued in the recent book Suicide of the West by Richard Koch
and Chris Smith [Continuum]. Yet there is a widespread and growing loss of faith in
science among both the governed and the governors.
It may seem trivial to some but I believe that the International Astronomical Union did a
grave disservice to science last month by demoting Pluto. Most of my non-science friends
had the same reaction: “If scientists can say that Pluto isn’t a planet after saying it was for
so long, why should we believe anything that science says!”
I think much of this disillusionment can be traced to a common public misconception
about science, which is constantly reinforced in almost all mass media reporting about
science and research. That misconception is that the goal of science, and scientists, is to
provide answers. But scientific research almost never yields final answers, as I hope most
here would agree. It does, however, keep coming up with better and better questions.
Unfortunately, most Canadians who aren’t scientists manage to pass through 16 years of
formal education without learning this distinction. As I said so smugly way back at the
beginning of these remarks, I don’t see remedial education as part of my role as a
journalist. But as scientists you could force me to do so, by making it newsworthy.
That’s what I hoped to get at by suggesting that risqué title – “Infectious Science: the
media and researchers as agents of contagion” I was trying to piggyback on the latest
buzz word in government and marketing circles. It’s “viral” and it refers to programs or
campaigns that propagate their ideas like a virus, usually through word-of-mouth.
A good example of this is the idea of demonstrating nucleation sites by dumping a whole
roll of Mentos (those round white candy mints) in a bottle of Coke (or Pepsi). We wrote
about it this past Sunday in the Ideas section of the Star. The demo had done the rounds
of science fairs and shows for years. But then a website called Eepy Bird posted a video
of what happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and more than 500 Mentos.
That was featured on YouTube, which is a free video hosting site. And that meant that
Coke and Mentos experiment was recreated on almost every broadcast and print media
outlet in Britain and in the U.S. Without anyone noticing they were learning about
nucleation sites!
I suspect some of you are muttering something like not in a blue moon, I won’t. Okay
come up with something else, something that makes science so infectious. that ordinary
members of the public can’t help but catch it.
The second string to this bow is called by various names, such as “upstream engagement”
or Science Push. It asks these kinds of questions:
• how do we find out what people want to know about science, rather than just tell
them what we think they should know.
• how do we inform government policy-makers about what the public is thinking
about science.
• how and when do we inform policy-makers about what they want/ need to know
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Calamai MaRS remarks Sept. 14
• how do we avoid nanotechnology becoming the next debacle, where people didn’t
know much about the science but they knew they were uncomfortable with it.
In Britain they’re years ahead of us in this approach, partly because they were so scarred
by the public backlash against genetically modified foods and the public distrust of
government after the mishandling of Mad Cow disease. As a friend in London who works
in this field commented in an email recently:
We could all do with spending just a bit more time thinking about who we want to
talk with and why. All too often scientists, and science communicators, don't
think carefully enough about what the audience is going to get out of an
experience. 'Educating' people is not what science communication in any form is
about.
If you make science “viral” in Canada, the mass media will become your partners,
completely against their natural instincts. We won’t have any choice because what you
will be doing will be newsworthy, by anyone’s definition.
If I was using PowerPoint, this is where I’d throw up a slide summarizing my take-home
messages. The bulleted points would likely shoot in from the sides and flash on the
screen. Then I’d insult your intelligence by repeating the words you are perfectly capable
of reading for yourselves.
So, minus the magic of PowerPoint here are those bullets:
discover what people want to know about your field of research
discover how this differs for various audiences
discover how the media work (and also how reporters do)
discover how to exploit the media to make science infectious
Thank you for your attention and I’ll be pleased to try to answer any questions.
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