UPDATE: If you have any questions you want to ask Faye about science reporting, especially on this topic, feel free to do so in the comments. She’ll drop by and answer some later.
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I was recently talking to my friend Faye Flam, a science reporter, about how I’d just been interviewed by another science reporter and had wondered whether I had the right to ask such reporters what their “hook” was, what they themselves thought about the issue, if I could see what they reported I said before publication, and so on. I added that scientists who talk to journalists could use some guidelines, and Faye kindly agreed to write up a few of those guidelines. Ergo, the guest post below. I think it will be useful not only for scientists who talk to journalists, but for all experts who talk to journalists about their work.
A few words about Faye: she has a physics degree from Caltech, is a former science columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer (>16 years), and is now a freelance writer and and Forbes.com science blogger. She’ll soon have her first piece in the New York Time’s “Science Times” section, scheduled for Sept. 30. Finally, she has an orange tomcat named Higgs (after the boson, of course).
I’m putting this up to coincide with her first piece for Forbes, which appeared this morning: “Salt: Why top experts give wildly conflicting advice and what to do until they figure it out,” It gives a good summary of the disparate advice doctors and experts give about whether salt is good or bad for you, and how much to eat. [UPDATE: She also has another post suggesting that diet soda may play hob with your gut bacteria.]
Faye’s website is here. Without further ado:
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How to talk to a reporter without being misquoted, betrayed or disappointed.
by Faye Flam
Journalists can be great fun to talk to. At our best, we pose challenging and engaging questions and use your insights and quotes to help a diverse range of people understand your field of science. At or worst, we can be annoying, ill-informed, and pushy. Our questions can make you uncomfortable, and the final product could turn out to be a piece of trash not worthy of putting under the cat litter box.
Biologist Jerry Coyne didn’t know which way it would go the first time he got a call from me, a reporter he’d never heard of, writing an unfamiliar science column for the Philadelphia Inquirer. I remember the reluctance with which he agreed, even though the topic was right up his alley. I wanted to talk to him about a statement the Pope had made about evolution. I’d discovered that Dr. Coyne had written a book called Why Evolution is True, and on his website of the same name he’d written something to the effect that science was incompatible with the Catholic belief in souls.
As far as I can tell, Jerry Coyne was pleased with the column that resulted, since he posted a link on his website, and we’ve had many conversations since, sometimes regarding other journalists who want to interview him. In one of those conversations a month or so ago, it occurred to him that I could lay out a few simple things scientists can do to increase the odds of a good experience with an interview.
I know from experience that being interviewed is scary. Though I’ve interviewed thousands of people for stories in Science and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and more recently the New York Times, I’ve also been interviewed a few times – usually about my work as a journalism critic, or about a book I wrote on evolution and sex. I got some very strange questions about the sex book.
The first thing to remember is that you can ask a lot of questions. Feel free to find out what the journalist is trying to achieve. We often just want to explain something important but technical to a diverse cross section of people with varying levels of education.
That diverse readership was something dear to me when I wrote for a newspaper. I had been a news writer for Science, specializing in physics, but I jumped at the chance to write about science for the Philadelphia Inquirer because I believed in the paper’s mission – as it stood back in the 1990s anyway. All kinds of people read the paper – lawyers, doctors, construction workers, artists, hot-dog vendors, students and people looking for work. We reporters were supposed to find ways to write so they could all get it.
People sometimes wrote to me to say they enjoyed my stories, though they had previously been led to believe they lacked the capacity to understand science. When that happened I felt accomplished. I hate the expression “dumbed down” because there are many reasons people fail to get a good education that have nothing to do with being “dumb”. It’s hard to make stories on complex topics easy to read, but it’s worth doing.
When newspapers such as the Inquirer were strong, they gave almost everyone the chance to experience a piece of their community’s intellectual life – arts, business, politics, world events, technology and science.
Below I’ve added a few more specific suggestions.
Try to determine if the journalist is misguided.
The good journalists are like good scientists – driven by curiously and desire to cut to the truth. The bad ones come in several varieties, all similar to bad scientists. Some think they care about truth but are deluded into believing their hunches and assumptions are true. Like bad scientists they seek only evidence to back themselves up. There may also be bad journalists who are willing to distort the truth for a little publicity and attention, though in my experience self-deception is a lot more common than outright dishonesty.
It often doesn’t take more than a few minutes to read a few stories by the person about to interview you. If you suspect you’re about to be interviewed by a misguided journalist, you can still do some good by trying to set the record straight.
As a recent example, a story in the Dallas Morning News portrayed creationists in a very favorable light, suggesting they had some good points. There was a scientist interviewed, and while the story still didn’t come out very well, it would have been even worse without the scientist.
Don’t be afraid to ask a lot of questions before you start answering them
We see interviews on TV or hear them on radio and forget that for a web or print story, most of the conversation will go unprinted. So you should feel free to ask what the journalist thinks about the issue, why she’s writing about it, who else she’s interviewed, what those other sources have said. The creationists made some claims in the Dallas Morning News story that went unchallenged – about the time frame needed to form galaxies, mutate DNA and fossilize dinosaur bones. If you ask what else is in a story, the reporter may give you a chance to debunk those sorts of claims.
A good, truth-seeking reporter would do this automatically but mistakes get made, and shortcuts taken.
You can also ask personal questions. If the story is about science and religion, go ahead and ask if the reporter is religious. Asking questions can make an interview feel more like a normal conversation. Everyone is more comfortable.
Don’t intersperse comments that are “off the record”.
It gets too confusing if we’re interviewing dozens of people. It’s much better to keep it all on or all off. 95% of the time I wouldn’t want to use off the record comments anyway. They usually consist of irrelevant gossip. Or I might try to convince you to say it publicly, if I think there’s a public benefit to having it said. The other thing to keep in mind with off-the-record information is that you’ve got to be sure you and the reporter agree on what it means. It might mean just that it can’t be used in the story. But if Dr. Y tells me off the record that Dr. X made a mistake with a statistical analysis, I might want to return to Dr. X and ask him about the alleged error. The upshot: Be specific if you mean the reporter isn’t supposed to tell anyone.
Suggest other sources, and questions to ask them.
Suggest challenging questions for sources with whom you disagree. Suggest reading. Most journalists like to read and will even plow through whole books. If there’s an important scientific paper, you might need to walk us through the technical parts and the graphs, but we’re usually happy to get a guided tour.
Find out why you were chosen
Why is a journalist after you for an interview? If you know why you were chosen, it can help put you at ease.
I chose Dr. Coyne for the column about the Pope and evolution because I came across one of his blog-like website posts and realized that he’d not just written on religion and science, he’d really thought about it. I also had a feeling he was someone I’d want to know considering that I was embarking on a unique newspaper column devoted to evolution.
Ask to see the finished product, but don’t insist on it.
We journalists strive to be fair, or at least most of us do. And if there’s a perceived controversy between you and a rival, it might not be fair to let your rival read the story and not show it to you. However, if the story requires a lot of interpretation of technical material, we might want you to check for errors or places where we oversimplified to the point of misleading people. I prefer for there to be no unpleasant surprises.
In the story about Catholics and evolution, I didn’t want to show the story to anyone who was in the story, but I told everyone who else was being interviewed and roughly what was being said, so that all the sources had a chance to respond to each other.
The story started with an idea that popped into my head after the Pope made remarks about embracing evolution except when it came to the human mind. I wondered whether the belief in some sacred specialness of the mind or soul, was really compatible with Darwinian evolution. If we evolved gradually from other species, how and when would our lineage possibly acquired a soul?
In the end my column was not a he said/she said. Thanks to the help, openness, and insightfulness of the people I interviewed, I was able to come out and say there’s no good way to square the traditional belief in souls with what we know about human evolution. Attempts to reconcile them lead to the absurdity that there was a stage of partial souls or a generation of ensouled kids born to soulless parents. Talk about a generation gap!
My goal was not to be even-handed but to be fair, to be factually correct, and to give people something thought-provoking to read.
Good advice, though I don’t expect ever to be the subject of such an interview. 😉
“I chose Dr. Coyne…because I came across one of his blog-like website posts…” LOL
I loved “blog-like” too!
Me three. 🙂
I swear, my comment on the latest JayMo post was written before this one!
Faye, thanks for this…and, if I might ask as a personal flavor…could you perhaps help Jerry similarly prepare for national broadcast TV interviews for when The Albatross comes out? I know you do print, not TV, but I’m sure you have friends in TV….
b&
Way to go Ben…put more on Jerry’s plate. 😺
No worries. He’ll be officially retired (is he hired now?) before long, and we’ll have to do something to keep him out of trouble!
b&
What great advice! I wonder if after you do your research and you decide to be interviewed, but see it is going badly what you could do at that point? Could you ask that you not be included in the interview? I imagine the journalist could report that and frame it in a suspicious way.
I’m optimistic that there are a lot of good journalists out there, we just remember the bad ones because they freak us out. I guess it’s good to think of interviews in the sense that you are also interviewing the journalist, just how I consider job interviews as having the chance to also interview the interviewer to see if something is the right fit.
Actually…I think the most important thing you can possibly do, for all interviews, is record every single interview yourself. And don’t rely on the other person to “get you a copy of the recording” if somebody else is making one; always make your own recording for yourself.
Probably every mobile phone sold in the last few years (if not much longer) has an app that lets you use it as a memo recorder. Use it. Set it on the table between you and the journalist. If it’s a phone interview, if the phone doesn’t have a built-in recorder, make the call on a landline (perhaps a speakerphone) and use your cell phone to record the conversation.
That way, if the journalist does turn out to be a propaganda hack out to do an hatchet job, you’ve got the recording to back up your version of how it went down. And just knowing that you’re making the recording will be enough to keep at least a few opportunistically-dishonest reporters on the straight-and-narrow.
And don’t frame it as you wanting to be able to hold their feet to the fire! Tell them that you’ll play it back later that day or the very next day at the latest (something you can’t do with their recording) so you can follow up with them on anything you missed, to correct your own mistrakes, that sort of thing. There may well be an, “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” moment, but one that you yourself may well space about and the reporter doesn’t think is worth following up on. But, with the recording to remind yourself, you can follow through with your promise and you’ll both likely appreciate the fact that you did.
For that reason alone, you’d want to always record friendly interviews (such as the one Kaja did) as well as potentially hostile ones, which just gets you into the habit of always recording everything.
b&
Journalism confuses me. Years ago my sister was interviewed by a food editor regarding her gingerbread houses. I cannot imagine a more innocuous or non-controversial subject.
But when the story ran, it was all made up, and bore no relation to anything said in the interview.
It wasn’t malicious or libelous, just fiction. I know other people who claim similar experiences.
The same happened to me when interviewed by the Wall Street Journal many years ago about a technology issue.
I think that is pretty typical. Long ago I was interviewed about some local archaeology I was doing… same experience… the story ended up being shallow and disappointing.
Everyone I know started turning down interviews with a local newspaper because their reporters were so incompetent. The stories they produced were just made up it seemed or they spun what you said so badly, it bore no resemblance to what you told the reporter. I don’t these folks deserved the title, “journalist”; they should have been called, “bad fiction writers who interview people for ideas to base their bad fiction off of”.
Here’s an example of a story that was supposedly related to some research I’d published. A colleague brought it to my attention recently and I explained as follows:
That Courier-Mail article was more a piece of creative writing than anything else, unfortunately. The guy phoned me from Cairns one morning, mentioned but didn’t give any details about some snake fossils in NQ caves, and wanted to push the Rainbow Serpent angle (which I tried to play down); I checked afterwards with Gil Price (mentioned to me by the reporter) who hadn’t heard from him and didn’t know anything about snake fossils at Chillagoe either. The story came out a bit later, just after christmas. Fossils that actually exist are much more interesting.
I had no idea you worked on Rainbow Serpents.
😀
Of course? She might have named the cat after Peter Higgs. 😃
I was interviewed a million years ago by a science reporter for the New York Times, whose name escapes me at the moment. I answered his questions and thought nothing more about it until a few weeks later (he was doing a story for the magazine) I got a call from his editor who wanted to make sure that he had quoted me accurately, She read back snippets where I was quoted and I informed her that, indeed, his quotes and paraphrases were correct and accurate. I remarked that I could not imagine our local paper, the Washington Post, bothering to do that, which gave her a laugh, being as how the two papers were in competition with each other as the newspaper of record.
After a little research, I found the name of the reporter, one James Gleick, who has also written a biography of Isaac Newton.
Gleick’s best known (or at least, first known, to me) for Chaos.
That was mostly a good book, but the omission of any mention of Thom’s Catastrophe Theory was rather glaring.
Gleick’s best known to me for his book Genius, the definitive biography of Richard Feynman.
Ah yes, the guy who’s now religiously dissed on ScienceBlogs for being larger than life.
p.s. If people have any questions they’d like to ask Faye about science reporting, especially on this topic, feel free to do so in the comments. She’ll drop by and answer some later. I’ve put this as an update above the fold.
I really liked the article on salt. It would be really nice to see a similarly intelligent article on radiation safety thresholds and the assumptions that go into them. Has Faye ever written anything on radiation safety?
I liked the salt article also, but it unfortunately conflated sodium (atomic weight 23) with salt (sodium chloride, formula weight 58, 40% by weight sodium).
Thus, the author talked about the American Heart Association recommendations variously as 1.5 grams sodium (which is what the AHA website says, and which is equal to 3.75 grams salt) and 1.5 grams salt.
There’s a big difference.
She’s not the first person to have done this, because various organizations talk about sodium (the health ones like AHA and WHO seem to – though the WHO recommendation in their 2012 Guideline has salt in parentheses to supplement the sodium number) and popular articles tend to talk about salt.
I think if you’re writing for popular consumption (excuse the bad pun), it’s better to talk about salt.
While the story discusses both salt and sodium, I don’t think the two are conflated. I explain in the story that salt separates into sodium and chloride ions in the bloodstream. All the experimental measurements and guidelines are stated in terms of the sodium and I don’t see any reason to convert that to grams of salt. Most of the sodium we ingest comes in the form of NaCl, so cutting back on salt and cutting back on sodium amount to pretty much the same thing. People can get some sodium from MSG but this, too, is a salt.
MSG is my kryptonite. It causes migraines for days because it is evil.
I fully agree that “Most of the sodium we ingest comes in the form of NaCl, so cutting back on salt and cutting back on sodium amount to pretty much the same thing”, as you say; but I note that you have changed the article since I commented on the inconsistency in the article itself, where my comment was more detailed.
You have changed “The [AHA] recommendation for maximum salt intake of 1.5 grams, he said, is really the minimum amount of sodium that it’s possible to ingest while eating enough food to maintain proper nutrition.” to “The recommendation for maximum sodium intake of 1.5 grams, he said, is really the minimum amount of sodium that it’s possible to ingest while eating enough food to maintain proper nutrition.” [My emphases.]
Fair enough, but it was wrong initially, and admitting to that would have been more honorable than making an unattributed change, so that a reader of the article seeing it now would not realize the reason for the comment, and denying the conflation.
Which radiation? radio waves, short-wave broadcasting, microwaves, radioactivity, UV radiation (sun)? X-rays, Terahertz radiation (body scanners)? You have to be specific.
And cosmic rays, which affects pilots, for example.
Or even non-EM radiation. I think those are often the most dangerous to health, since radioactive isotopes within the body tend to decay by alpha and beta emissions. For instance, the concerns about radioactive cesium around Fukushima.
I remember there was a big media storm about 20-30 becquerels/kg of radioactivity found in babyfood near Fukushima. Somebody pointed out that a banana has something like 15000 bq/kg, and nobody worries about feeding bananas to kids, so the media was blowing things out of proportion. But then, the radioactive material in bananas is potassium and not cesium and maybe that makes a difference. (Excess potassium is removed from the body quickly. Maybe cesium isn’t.) I would like to see a good, trustworthy article about different kinds of radiation too…
Don’t get me started on people who misunderstand between ionizing and non ionizing radiation. They make me so angry because they are determined to be outraged despite all evidence.
This is a very general question, but I’d be interested to know a science reporter’s thoughts: what are the best and/or most effective ways for scientists to engage with the general public? Public understanding of science is something I personally think should be a top concern for all scientists, but it often seems like people are clueless as to how to go about engaging the nonscientific community most effectively.
As a professional reporter of science, do you find it difficult to find well-informed scientists willing to speak? Are there ways to make this process easier? E.g. do you think it helps science reporters (and the general public) if scientists say, maintain websites or blogs, do community outreach (maybe in the form of primary and secondary education outreach), organize public seminars (this normally doesn’t seem like a great way to engage the “public” to me, but I could be wrong), etc.
I’m rambling, I think. Basically, what recommendations would you (Faye or anyone else) have for ways for scientists to get involved in science journalism and public understanding of science?
I defer to Faye to answer how scientists should engage journalists, but as someone who actually organizes those “public seminars” I’ll willingly defend them. Of course you can’t engage the same quantity of people with a seminar as with mass media, but I’ll go to the mat for the argument that in-person events are a more substantive and memorable engagement with science.
Recently a guy came up to me after a talk in which I mentioned our “Chemistry for Adults” programs. He was extremely eager to tell me he was at our Chemistry of Beer program 2 years ago. He went on about how great it was, how much cool stuff he learned, even though he didn’t like chemistry in school, and how he told everyone he knew about it. Now, admittedly these programs are not “lectures” but programs in which adults are led in hands-on experiments. But have you heard anyone being that effusive and engaged about a blog post they read two years ago? I consider it a pretty good investment of science outreach.
P.S. If you’re in Chicago, we’re doing Chemistry of Honey 9/30 and Chocolate 10/28. You can come and decide for yourself!
That’s a heartening story. I like the approach of a hands-on format. I’d love to attend one of those programs, as I actually will be in Chicago next month, but unfortunately I’m leaving just before the 28th.
An interesting development are science cafes, where scientist talk/are interviewed in an informal setting, such as a bar or cafe. Google “Science Cafe” and “Cafe Scientifique” (science cafes appeared first in France during the 1990s.
I’m not sure why I’m coming up as Higgs, but I don’t think Higgs will mind if I write under his name. Good question! You can always email reporters with ideas or alert them when there’s something important that isn’t being covered or is being covered badly. I also depend on certain go-to sources who can steer me in the right direction on various topics. Those people are incredibly valuable. Public talks are great but are not for everyone. Small venues are easier for some people. I enjoy the lectures organized by our local skeptics’ group – Phact. We also had an interesting event in Philadelphia recently with scientists from various institutions giving a poster session set up for the general public. It worked really well.
Do you know who organized that public poster session? I’d like to contact them and get details. Might consider creating something similar here. Thanks!
Thanks for the information!
My newspaper interviews were conducted by the university PR department. I was able to read and correct them (if needed) before they went out. I’ve done a couple of TV interviews, but they were friendly interviews.
Are you an independent science journalist or a pr person? How can you interview scientists for a newspaper that are “conducted by the university PR department?” You can interview the scientists directly, or you can interview PR people of an organisation (not a good idea), but if you do you, you identify them as press contacts or spokesperson people.
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What an extraordinarily useful post. Many thanks for it, Faye. (And sorry to hear the Inky has lost you.)
To sniff out an agenda from the journalist must be a bit hard though, right?
Like an intuitive feeling you get that they have their own narrative they are planning to push, and are merely interviewing you for good snippets of quotes and authority’s sake.
To pick a hypothetical, say Jerry Coyne were interviewed on some biology, but the journalist merely plans to write a carbon copy of the million articles we’ve seen (also discussed and debunked by Coyne) touting the super earth shatteringly amazing revolution of something like epigenetics and how it utterly destroys Darwin and give parents new stuff to worry about in messing up their kids.
What kind of questions are most penetrative in finding out if an interviewer is indeed only planning to push their already formed narrative and are only interested in fishing for good quotes?
Because, as Faye Flam says, a lot can be asked and answered, but not everything gets in the final cut, that’s just how it goes, and so the interviewer could be asking a lot of diverse questions, but then pick out later what they want.
Yeah. I’ve always felt that if I’m ever interviewed – which won’t happen – that I’d insist they either have a transcript of the entire thing or use none of it. Though Ben’s advice above to always record the interviews yourself is good. Helps prevent misrepresentations of you, but not the topic of the article…
I’ve lost all touch with Higgs’ writing but I recall with a smile, a lede to a piece Higgs/ Ms. Flam wrote for Parade Magazine.
“My name is Faye Flam and I am assistant to Higgs the Science Cat.” It reminded me of certain kitteh we know, Hili.
I hope Higgs is still writing.
Flam just recently came off a Knight Science Journalism fellowship at MIT and posted many pieces on their blog, the “KSJ Tracker.” One of many things about her posts as well as those of other fellows that I appreciated and learned from was that fellows would collect as many articles or pieces from other media about and event and compare and contrast as well as commenting on them. Wonderful, critical analyses that helped make me think.
The essay above is wonderfully useful and I’m glad she wrote it–as media types might say—“exclusively”–for WEIT which has a wide circulation.
I’m glad you enjoyed Higgs’ work for Parade. I am hoping he can contribute at Forbes, though I may want to give it a month or so. Unfortunately, the KSJ Tracker is being cancelled at the end of the year. It was a good site.
tomcat named Higgs (after the boson, of course).
Friends of mine have a dog named Boson – his predecessor was called Sagan. Just so you cat people can’t make claim to all the fine science names….
Salutes to Faye Flam and thanks for providing her web site
Ms Flam provided a lot of good advce, but IMO she treated ‘journalists’ rather gently.
In my experiece, the vast majority are venal themselves or are misrepresenting what’s said on orders from their editor or publisher. (Well, in one case the writer privately disavowed what had been published under his name, claiming that ‘his’ piece had been totally rewritten by someone above.)
Of course, the topic was always nudism and the motives of those who opposed us, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised.