Posts tagged Media
Time to ditch the press release?
Oct 7th
This entry is part of a series, Bypassing the Press?»
Fixing the newspapers. Photo (cc) Evil Erin.
At the National Astronomy Meeting in 2004 I listened to Dr David Whitehouse, who I think was then Science Editor at the BBC, give advice about feeding science stories to the media. He made quite a few points, but there are three I remember.
- Don’t push a story on the grounds it’s the biggest / oldest / shiniest / crumbliest etc. thing found. It’s a cliché and it’s dull.
- Don’t waste people’s time with the formula for ‘x’ where x is anything which really shouldn’t have a formula.
- Don’t use press releases.
At the time he really didn’t convince me. The biggest, oldest and so on remains a staple news item. Likewise Cliff Arnall has shown you can make money from nonsense formulae. What really undermined him though was the newsroom run by the RAS at the meeting. I could wander in there and see the press releases. The next day I could see the same stories, often with little editing, in the national press. If he were to give the same talk today he might find it even harder. I can go to Eurekalert and pick up a sentence from any press release. If More >
The Drayson / Goldacre Debate
Sep 21st
This entry is part of a series, Bypassing the Press?»
On the 16th of September there was a debate between Lord Drayson, Minister for Science amongst other things, and Ben Goldacre, the Guardian’s Bad Science columnist. The matter under discussion was the quality of science journalism. It stems from a debate at the ABSW meeting where Lord Drayson said that British science journalism was the best in the world. This came as a bit of a surprise to many people. There was a lot of response on Twitter and Drayson agreed to debate with Goldacre about science journalism. Hence the debate on 16th September.
There’s a vote going around as to who won the Science Media debate. Who the ‘winner’ was tends to depend on whether or not you’re a journalist. Goldacre had the much more emotionally attractive position for scientists. All scientists think their work is interesting, but given the space available in the media it’s inevitable that many will be cruelly overlooked. It will be genuinely interesting, even it’s been pitched badly, but being so close to your research will mean you don’t always have the full perspective. Also there’s always someone who’s doing more newsworthy research than yours. There’s More >
If Futurity is the answer, then I don’t understand the question
Sep 20th
This entry is part of a series, Bypassing the Press?»
I’d like to blog about the Drayson / Goldacre debate before the topic gets too cold, but before I do I thought I’d mention Futurity. It’s interesting because it’s supposedly, an attempt to address a decline in science journalism. “In an increasingly complex world, the public needs access to clear, reliable research news. Futurity does the work of gathering that news,” says the about page of the site. That’s fascinating because, if they’re right, I’ve completely misunderstood what science journalism means.
Here’s an example. First up, a press release from the University of Michigan, Researchers find gene that protects high-fat-diet mice from obesity, which starts like this:
U-M researchers have identified a gene that acts as a master switch to control obesity in mice. When the switch is turned off, even high-fat-diet mice remain thin.
Deleting the gene, called IKKE, also appears to protect mice against conditions that, in humans, lead to Type 2 diabetes, which is associated with obesity and is on the rise among Americans, including children and adolescents.
Next there’s the press release on the publicly accessible Eurekalert, U-M researchers find gene that protects high-fat-diet mice from obesity. That reads:
University of More >
Fund your project via the web
Aug 26th
Money Shot. Photo (cc) Jessica Smith
I saw an interesting funding opportunity on ReadWriteWeb and, because it’s only open to Americans, I thought to share it. Kickstarter.com looks like it could be useful for funding small-scale academic projects.
The idea is simple enough, you look through the various projects on the website and if you see an idea you like you pledge some money to it. If a project raises all the money it needs in pledges before a deadline then credit cards are charges and the project gets the money. If the project doesn’t get enough money the pledges lapse. The project gets nothing, but this also means there’s no obligation to fulfil targets on a cut budget.
You’re probably not going to fund a large or even medium-sized Hadron collider with this, but for sub-$5000 projects, it might be a possibility. It strikes me as a good match for some archaeological work. The difficulty is working out what you can give back. Ideally you’d want to publish all your findings, so it’s hard to justify keeping back useful information for backers only. You could give priority to backers like subscriber-only updates live from the field. The difficulty I foresee with this is that More >
-ve on Bonekickers
Aug 13th
Bonekickers has limped to the end of its run and after an epic quest which spanned four thousand years and half a dozen major finds, Gillian Magwilde finally acheived her quest in an madcap manner which sealed Bonekickers in the pantheon of British television alongside such classics as Triangle (a drama based on the glamorous and sexy world of North Sea Ferries) and Eldorado. It’s as if the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation had decided to write a drama as the superficial flaws seem to obscured some people’s views of the fundamental flaws in the series.
Spoilers, and I’m using the word quite wrongly, follow.
The story arc was the quest for Excalibur which cropped up in one form or another each week. To what extent this was a revelation is hard to say. I imagine the audience was divided between those who knew exactly what to expect and those who couldn’t believe the plot could be as shallow as that. Personally I don’t have a problem with that per se. If Indiana Jones can go raiding lost arks, then why not have someone go after Excalibur. The problem is that a drama at least needs internal logic. The writers tried to supply that, but More >
+ve on Bonekickers
Jul 14th
To clarify, I am not being at all sarcastic when I say I’m positive about Bonekickers. The first episode wasn’t brilliant, but first episodes of any series tend to be poor because not only are they introducing a story, they’re introducing characters. The entire first season of Star Trek:TNG and DS9 are poor, but with characters established they improved massively. The perpetual problem with new Doctor Who is that each series introduces a new assistant or new Doctor which causes problems for developing stories. So in light of that, the current shallowness of the characters in Bonekickers is understandable.
It would also be easy to go through and pick every point that made me laugh during the show. I could do the same for 1960s era Batman. Like picking apart Batman I’m not sure there’d be much point to it. There are some problems though. There are certain assumptions about reality which have to hold. It might be possible to have a Bat-microscope which can view inside atoms, but you can bet Batman will have to use his open eye to view it. Similarly there are certain basic archaeological assumptions and this clip shows where they get it wrong.
The line about More >
Would it be better to drop ‘Science’ and use the c-word instead?
Dec 12th
Those following the US Presidential flirting may be interested in Science Debate 2008 campaign. Janet Stemwedel has comments on why it isn’t a matter of knowing facts. Science matters, but why does it matter? Steve Grand had the answer back in 2004.
When I become king, my first act will be to ban the word “science” from all public places. No more will advertisements be allowed to say “here comes the science bit”, as a prelude to 15 seconds of meaningless twaddle. No longer will innocent nerds on natural yoghurt ads find themselves lured into soporific conformity by pretty young women with a fetish for the word “bacteria”. Above all, showing thinly disguised disaster movies under the Horizon banner, as if they were actually science broadcasting, will henceforth become a crime punishable by death. No, make that slow mutilation.
[snip]
Perhaps we should replace the word “science” with “citizenship”. Anyone who doesn’t show a proper interest in the world around them is hardly taking their role as a citizen of the universe seriously. There’s a lot of stuff out there to marvel at, and for an intelligent human being to remain ignorant of it is a deep insult to our own species, let alone More >
TV nostalgia isn’t what it used to be
Sep 18th
Photo (cc) Vik Nanda
Architectural history, landscape history, even coastal history all have their place, but when they so dominate the terrain that history on television is reduced to an endless helicopter shot of the Dover cliffs, then something has gone wrong.
Tristram Hunt: The time bandits via Early Modern Notes
The title is a cheap joke but Tristram Hunt is not a happy bunny. There’s history on the TV that he doesn’t like. “Call it the Restoration effect: a factual programming schedule suffering from a surfeit of cosy, insular and often cloying television.” Yet despite this assertion Hunt, who has his own TV series to plug, is remarkably short of targets. The only TV show I can say with certainty that he dislikes is “The Trench”. From what I briefly saw of it, it was awful but surely it takes more than one programme to have a surfeit.
One short-cut to credibility is to have high standards. A top wine critic is taken seriously for the wines he rejects. Dismissing the participatory history of the hoi polloi is a route to short-term credibility, but it’s not enough. There needs to be reason behind the critique and despite his assertion “…television history, done well, should More >
Does Advancing Product Advance Science?
Mar 15th
I’ve said I’m not writing, but I’m still reading. There’s a rumpus about accreditation for bloggers at Eurekalert! In an ideal world I’d want to re-write this to include references to later posts like More About the EurekAlert! Smackdown. It’s not going to happen for quite a while though, so I thought to post what I have while it’s still timely rather than wait till I can finish it.
Stop, one way. Photo (cc) David Dennis.Coming back to the Eurekalert and bloggers story. The AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) is not allowing bloggers to register for access to embargoed articles. The only way in is to be a reporter in the media. The view among bloggers is unsurprisingly that blogging is important enough to warrent media credentials etc. Therefore how can the AAAS, owners of Eurekalert take this position? I’ll try and give an example with a story from Eurekalert which I’ve not commented on, which really you think I would.
Peruvian citadel is site of earliest ancient solar observatory in the Americas looks like the perfect story for me. I have an interest in South America and an interest in ancient astronomy. This is a particularly interesting story because More >
Taking advertising back to the Stone Age
Jan 29th
Via afarensis and John Hawks is this advertising campaign for an insurance company in the USA. It’s a clever way of playing on how we look at our forebears. There are also adverts at the therapist, on Fox News and at the airport.
One for Cornelius I think.
