Scientists are trying to tell a technical story; they are obligated to do this. All of their training tells them to keep human passions away from their work. The problem is: writers for the general public are trying to tell a human story. They are trying to make scientific work personally relevant and, in order to do this, they invoke human passions; they simplify complex issues; they use hyperbole and metaphor. They ignore important science for the sake of sexy science. This drives scientists nuts.

The thing is- scientists aren’t alone in this treatment from the media. Look at political coverage, sports coverage, business coverage, entertainment coverage, etc. Every other industry has the same issue. But other industries expect it. In fact, they work to use it to their advantage and manipulate it. Scientists don’t do this. PR spin is reprehensible to people who have been trained in the quest for universally validated truths. The very thing that makes someone an excellent scientist can also make him a bad press representative.

Let me also say that short pieces based on a single source (preprint or a press release) is not the only conceivable form of an article. More enjoyable ones attempt some synthesis of many sources, adding some personal perspective of the writer as well. Those are more creative, take more effort, and I doubt one often get scooped on them. They are also much more fun to read (for me). I understand that it is not reasonable to expect such stories from a weekly publication.

Journalists want stories that are interesting: we want stories that are interesting not necessarily to us or you, but to our editors and readers. We’re insiders and what’s most interesting to us is often not what will get a casual browser to read the article. Part of the journalist side of the science journalist job is to find that hook that will catch the casual browser. I rarely found a scientist’s suggestions on interesting-bits, angles or the like to be helpful.

Journalists want statements to be tangible: if you can’t make a concrete straightforward statement about the implications of your research, we will make a best guess at what you were trying to weasel your way around being quoted as saying and paraphrase it for you. The best way to control your quotes is to actually say them.

Think of analogies and metaphors: please don’t. The art of the metaphor is the at the heart of science journalism; It’s what makes good science journalists shine. Let them do their job. Now, if you’re talking to a plain-old journalist, they’ll probably thank you for the help, but in my experience most scientists are too close to their work to make the abstracting mental leap to create a metaphor that truly illuminates it for the outsider.

Use language carefully: and please try to notice the unspoken assumptions behind your language usage. It took a number of very confusing conversations before I realized that some biologists use “gene” and “protein” interchangeably.

Boil it down to the essence: Ideally, that’s the journalist’s job. When I interviewed a scientist I had studied up and done my background reading so I could understand the full unboiled version or at least keep asking the right questions until I did and took the time to go through it all and then think about it and consider what the essence actually is. (Maybe that’s why I couldn’t make a living at freelancing?) If it’s a longer article, some aspect of your research speaks to some angle on the main topic, but that aspect and angle aren’t necessarily going to be in the boiled down essence of either.

Generally, as for the poor general level of science information presented to the public, I think there are several factors working together. Most importantly, most science journalism isn’t being done by science journalists. There just aren’t that many trained and experienced subject specialists around and often the topics get passed over to the political reporters just as they’re getting interesting. A good science journalist just needs to be told the facts and will take it from there, but others will need the hand-holding and gentle education Sean’s hints offer. Know who you’re talking to and work with them accordingly.

I still stand by what I said earlier as relevant here but want to reinforce the timeframe issue that others have also mentioned. You say you have concern “with using preprints that are completely new, a week or two old at best when the story is published.”

A week or two is a lifetime in journalism. If you wait that long, you might as well forget about covering the story at all in many cases. And if you work for a weekly like New Scientist, then you have to have the story early enough to get it through the editorial and layout processes, and then printed and distributed so that when it appears on newsstands and in subscribers’ mailboxes, it isn’t too old and it hasn’t appeared in every other publication first.

I personally think it is great that people are writing stories based on the preprint server and not just waiting for the weekly Science and Nature press packets to come out to dictate what will be written. And this way, the journalists are going to primary sources rather than writing stories based on a secondhand source like a news release that might have dubious accuracy. (As Peter pointed out.)

Now, I could be biased here because I started writing news articles based on the arXiv before it was even called that (about 10 years ago), and it gave me a great advantage in being able to find fresh interesting news that others hadn’t done to death. Of course, I would always get expert advice beyond my own physics knowledge, and it didn’t seem to lead to lots of dubious stories.

Keeping tabs on the arXiv is absolutely essential now if you want to be covering physics for a news organization.

I regularly discuss on my blog the many examples of misleading, overhyped stories about theoretical physics that appear in New Scientist and elsewhere, and not waiting for peer review is rarely the problem. A large number of bad stories actually come from press releases issued by physicists or their institutions at the time of publication of a paper in PRL or another major letters journal. Such papers have gone through a rigorous peer review, but this doesn’t stop people from putting out a misleading press release about what is in the paper and its significance. Whether or not a paper has been peer-reviewed, journalists have to do exactly the same thing: talk to experts in the subject and try to judge for themselves based on this. For most papers, experts in the subject can quickly judge for themselves what the significance is, and in the few cases where this is not possible, they can tell the journalist this.

Some journalists do a good job of gathering information from experts and putting it together into something sensible, some don’t. But, very often, problematic claims being made in these articles are not the fault of the journalists, but of the scientists themselves making claims they shouldn’t be making.

I realize I should make myself more clear. My question (comment 29) was directly specifically to Valerie who is working for New Scientist, and was concerned specifically with using preprints that are completely new, a week or two old at best when the story is published, which seems to be their niche. This is thankfully not a wide spread practice, I did not mean to imply that it is, and as I mentioned I do enjoy quite a bit of science journalism myself.

I’m also glad to hear that “high batting average for significance and accuracy is basically one’s stock in trade”. That is the part I was missing in all the above “realpolitik” comments about being entertaining and competing in the market place etc. etc.

From my perspective, and I imagine it’s broadly similar in science journalism, the main things I’m looking for in a quote is one or more of colour, explanation and authority. Colour is (basically) the snappy quote that provides an interesting perspective. Explanation is pretty self-evident, clarification of a technical point by an expert. Authority allows the journalist to put a contentious or subjective view in an article, by virtue of the earned authority of the speaker. So be aware that anything you say that falls into those categories is liable to be used, even if you consider the comment tangential at best.

Another key issue interviewees have is talking to a journalist for an hour, say, and only getting a short quote. This is inevitable, especially in news journalism. We talk to lots of people about a story, and most of the conversation will be used to inform the content of the article, rather than quoted directly. In a limited space, it can be better to keep the quotes pithy and communicate the facts directly.

Incidentally, the Guardian’s Ben Goldacre over at Bad Science has a lot of things to say about the state of science journalism (mostly in the UK, though).

I have to say that I bridle a little at Moshe’s last comment as well; from where I sit, it assumes more reflection on the part of the anonymous scientist than is always warranted (i.e., I can recall lots of unjustified gullibility in response to seemingly interesting preprints by pros), and a greater willingness to throw caution to the winds than most good science journalists I know display. A high batting average for significance and accuracy is basically one’s stock in trade — and it is a matter of ordinary practice to keep a few Moshes (e.g.) in one’s hip pocket against that time you need a quick reality check on a story an editor may clamor for.

That there are crappy journalists (and crappy scientists) is a given….which leads to the obvious: the best way to protect yourself as a scientist is to pay attention to whom you speak. Get to know the journalists whose bylines you come to respect, and try to work through them. When someone new comes along, google them. Do your due diligence; these are the people, after all, who form a virtual extension of your lab/research into the wide world. Sometimes someone will come along with such urgency that you can’t do your due diligence, but if you ‘ve paid attention to the difference between people who know what they are doing and those who don’t, you will be better armed to further your own goals.

Let me jump in and give one answer to the question you asked Valerie about writing stories based on preprints. But let me start by asking you a question, cribbing your language: Why is it so urgent to write scientific papers based on fresh preprints, not even yet read by the majority of the community, let alone peer-reviewed?

The path from preprint to peer review to publication, especially in physics with the arXiv, is a long process. With 24/7 news reporting, and a competitiveness among news organizations, we simply can’t afford to wait until all research passes through peer review. Waiting weeks (you’ve got an optimistic view of peer review if you think it will be through in weeks!) is too long to wait, or else we end up writing stories that everybody else published weeks/months/years ago.

That doesn’t mean that we as science journalists don’t consider carefully whether a preprint might be likely to withstand the process of peer review. We ask other scientists what they think of the paper (essentially overseeing an independent peer review process), we look at it through the eyes of trained scientists (you might be surprised how many science journalists have been trained to PhD level in the science they are covering), and we use the judgment we have developed through years of covering the field.

But to answer your question directly - it is about competitive pressure, for good or for bad.

Imagine that you couldn’t write a scientific paper based on a preprint and any time you did work that cited the work of a preprint, you had to hold off on publishing the work until the cited paper had passed peer review. What kind of competitive disadvantage would you be at in the world of science research?

David

Off the topic question:
Is there any lower bound from theory on the confinement scale? or from cosmology?
for example is it possible for a QCD-like theory to exist with a confinement scale as low as a few MeV?

Linda

If a journalist wants to make a piece about a new product or development in a company, they are not going to get access directly to the people responsible for that development; they’ll get to talk to a well-briefed communications specialist - a PR person. If they want to talk about an earlier fire with the fire brigade, they will likely talk to the press spokesman. Even if someone wants to write about something involving a newspaper reporter, the paper emplying them will send forth their PR department, not the journalist.

Scientists should realize it might be a good idea to have PR people of their own, and do most press contacts through them rather than trying to do it themselves. There’s good reasons why almost all other organizations use press spokespeople; it’s perhaps time scientists and their employers did that too.

Believe me, there’s heaps of research out there that we reject. Of course, we’ve reported results in physics that has later been overturned but, hey, isn’t that what the the scientific process is all about? It’s true that New Scientist hasn’t always gone back and made it clear to readers that the research has been overturned. And we haven’t always made clear if the work in question is peer reviewed or not - we’re making a big effort to address this.

You’ve got to realise that New Scientist, Scientific American and Discover are “leisure reads”. Their main goal is to entertain, not educate or disseminate scientific results. We’ll leave that to educators and journals, such as Science, PRL and Nature.

Well bless my soul! I thought scientists loathed and despised analogies, considering them unreliable and misleading. But if analogies are OK after all then the sky’s the limit. For example, Veneziano and Gasperini’s pre-Big Bang scenarios could be likened to an Amish drive by shooting (clip clop clip clop clip clop clip clop BANG!)