Do you want to put science in the headlines?

If you do then the British Science Association Media Fellowships are for you.

Experience first-hand how science is reported by spending 3-6 weeks on a summer placement with a press, broadcast or online journalist such as the Guardian, The Times or BBC.

You will work with them to produce well informed, newsworthy pieces about developments in science.

Come away better equipped to communicate your research to the media, public and your colleagues.

You will develop writing skills that could help you produce concise and engaging articles and funding applications.

For details about the scheme, including eligibility and online application form, visit our webpage.

Application deadline: 11 March 2013

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So I was a British Science Association Media Fellow last year and had so much fun that I briefly considering changing my name and appearance so I could apply again and work at one of the other media hosts. But, unfortunately, science does not pay well enough for facial reconstructive surgery to be a viable option.

If anyone does have any questions about the scheme, please get in touch and I will be happy to help.

After the media fellowship

I recently finished a month-long British Science Association Media Fellowship, spending three weeks at Nature and one week at the British Science Festival in Aberdeen. I’ve talked more about my thoughts on this experience at the Wellcome Trust blog.

I’m now left wondering what on Earth I am going to do with all my newfound skillz. See, I exist at a leisurely gastropod-like pace, whereas the news media seems to be more of a fast-moving cephalopod. Science=three year deadlines that can meander off in an unexpected direction at any point; news=short window until it’s too old for anyone to really care. So using this blog to write about scientific advances (my pre-placement plan) is a pretty stupid idea unless I’m going to add something that isn’t already being said faster and better by a professional news outlet. Mollusc-based metaphors, sadly, aren’t quite enough; I think I’m going to have to develop opinions. We will see how that turns out.

Anyway, I’d recommend applying for a Media Fellowship to any scientists who are interested in how the news works. Then, you too, can be plunged into a metaphysical quandary about your place in the science media world.

Oh, and here’s my big self-aggrandising list of things what I wrote while on my media placement:

Nature News articles and blog posts:

Scientists do the wet dog shake
Nerve growth factor linked to ovulation
Helium reveals gibbon’s soprano skill
There are fewer microbes out there than you think
Resistance to backup tuberculosis drugs increases
Hepatitis C drug trial halted after patient death
Photosynthesis-like process found in insects

Research Highlights and News in Brief:

Rodent that cannot gnaw
Infection breaks truce
Inflamed guts boost bad bacteria
Cigarette smoke boosts biofilms
Hepatitis C halt
Resistance warning

Wellcome Trust Blog articles:

From growth media to news media
No such thing as a stupid question
When the drugs don't work

British Science Association website:

Stereotypes form by ‘Chinese whispers’
Sex and sewage
Cows and cars
Sensing hidden oil reserves
Shock – balanced diet is healthy!

Image: Neurons in the brain – illustration. Benedict Campbell. Wellcome Images

Why I will always hate aphids

 

A 500-word news article on a research paper and two days to write it. You'd think it would be simple. Yeah, right. One week into my first foray into the world of science journalism and I feel like my soul has been severely paper-cut with my own poorly phrased copy.

To be fair, the majority of the responsibility for this probably lies with me. Today's Important Journalistic Lesson was how much writers have to rely on talking to the author of a paper and other experts in the field. Understanding a paper is one thing, but there's no way a normal human-being could absorb enough of the nuances of a subject area in an hour to see where it fits into the bigger picture. What might appear to be a paper about the mating dance of the Irish Pink-spotted squid could be key to the evolution of language to a squid-expert. Or the missing link! Or it could just be a paper about oddly-behaved calamari. Sometimes, the press release gives you a clue to the important take-home message of a paper. Other times, the press release is not entirely accurate. 

This is why science writers call up the author and ask them lots of questions before writing anything. Unfortunately, through a combination of French public holidays and the only author on the paper capable of answering my questions off hiking in the wilderness, I had to make do with a slight language barrier and a giant understanding barrier. And when it came to talking to other experts in the field, my two days of expert-hunting experience failed me utterly and the only person I managed to snare was fairly luke-warm about the paper, which wasn't much help.

Then the deadline caught up with me and it was all 'get it submitted', 'check the facts', 'find related articles for the website', 'work out how to use the complicated submission system', 'panic, panic, panic.' Then it was gone and I was left with a vague feeling of disquiet.

Fast forward a few days and I can see that I could have done a few things better. Such as checking that the copy-editors hadn't removed an integral "-like" from the title. Unfortunately, a few scientists who commented on the post also spotted the flaws. So we had to issue a correction. Then then someone else pointed  out a paper from April that I missed, and we had to correct something else. And I've been in a science-based sulk ever since.

What this did make me realise is that journalists sometimes get an unfairly hard time when science reporting goes a bit wrong. But it's impossible to know everything about a subject and you put a certain degree of trust in the peer review process, the authors accurately representing their work, and the press release not over-selling the importance of the results.

Where do science writers get their ideas?

I’m a week into a month-long placement in a science journalism office made up of real journalists and me – a research scientist who is rapidly learning a new respect for those who write about science in a professional capacity. In the past, I know I’ve Googled ‘where do science journalists get their ideas’ and ‘how to write about science’ and ‘what does it mean when your tongue goes green’, and this post touches on at least two of the above. Only from the point of view of someone who isn’t a professional journalist and doesn’t fully know what they are talking about. Tomorrow I will be giving advice on how to do brain surgery.

But first on to the results of my knowledge-leech/journalist-stalking behaviour...

So where do science writers get their ideas?

• Embargoed papers from the big journals which are available a few days before the papers are published. Science, Nature and PNAS are the only ones I've seen so far and a huge majority of the covered papers seem to originate in these journals. Even then, maybe only one per issue will be interesting enough to cover.
• Daily press releases from Eurekalert and other sources, which are again journalist only resources (I couldn't even register with Eurekalert because I am a working scientist and therefore deemed unworthy/untrustworthy to access embargoed papers). These lists include press releases for papers and important reports and, from what I've seen, contain a lot of dreck as well as the interesting stuff.
• Keeping an eye on the news for disease outbreaks, natural disasters, pharma company share prices, takeovers, policy info, funding announcements, politicians saying silly things about science, and many other things I am yet to fully grasp. Everyone seems to have their own area of particular interest.
• Blogs written by scientists or industry insiders can often turn up mentions of new developments in the field, or point out areas that would be worth thinking about. 
• Conferences can be a good source of soon to be published work and ideas, although some aren't open to journalists. 
• Then there are the connections journalists build up with scientists or companies, or pet subjects they've been watching for years writing for the right paper to come along. A few times, I've heard someone mention a scientist emailing them in quite a non-scientisty bout of self-promotion.
• Finally, there's trawling through next tier down journals for recently released papers that didn't send out press releases and have slipped under the radar. This is harder as generally the really world-changing stuff goes into the super-journals but I did manage to find one really interesting paper and was allowed to write a 120-word summary of it, which was cool.

British Science Association media fellowship

For the next month, I am taking a teeny break from science to pretend to be a journalist at Nature News. It's a scheme aimed at teaching working scientists about how the media works by dragging them out of the lab, bleary eyed with the residual smell of growth media lingering upon their person, into the wonderful world of 10am starts and actual, real deadlines.

Three days in, and I have learnt:

1) Science journalists know much more about science than I do. Sure, they couldn't tell you all the three hundred ways there are to accidentally kill a culture, or the gene number of the TB glycerol kinase. But I'm beginning to wonder why, exactly, I've spent so many years filling my own brain up with all this esoteric trivia while neglecting some of the important stuff. Like science policies that directly impact on my work. Or Exciting Stuff happening in fields that are unrelated to my own.

2) Journalists are not the anti-Christ. From how some people in science talk about the media, you'd think everyone who writes about the news sacrifices babies in their spare time and has no regard for things such as factual correctness or the truth. Yeah, Nature is about as sciencey as science journalism can get - its aimed at actual scientists for starters, not those other bipedal furless mammals I am occasionally forced to interact with. But I was still surprised by how much effort goes into fact checking and writing a balanced story. I will, in fact, write an entire post about the creation of an article at some point.

3) Some scientists don't half moan. Getting a quick peak into another industry makes me realise how small and insignificant I am to the world of science as a whole. I think maybe it's easy for scientists to forget how lucky we are when we are constantly surrounded by others who share our worries and fears. Yeah, there are plenty of things in science that could do with being fixed. But whining doesn't help anyone. Fixing them fixes them. Being in a different work place makes it painfully clear that those bitter, complaining scientists who you can find lurking in every lab are not what I want to become </end bitching>

4) So much science is not news. No one wants to read about the latest advance in understanding membrane signalling proteins in Th96 CD61+ T cells, even if the scientist who wrote it is Very Clever and Important. August isn't the greatest month to work in science journalism as there isn't very much going on. I keep trying to find things to write about but very few papers come out that would work as news. 'Surprise, sensationalism and significance' are all required. Makes me realise how insular my own scientific niche is -  even the biggest, most self-important scientists in my field have rarely done anything newsworthy when it comes to their millions of Nature/Science/Cell publications.

5) Phone interviews can be painful. If an author is busy, do you wait patiently for them? Noooo, you phone them again and again, and their co-authors, and anyone else you can think of and PESTER! And, if they don't give you a good enough answer, you keep asking until they tell you to go away. It's like working in a call centre, only without bonuses. This is the part of the placement that I don't think I will quite get used to. That cringing, 'I can't believe I made a stranger hate me in the name of science'-feeling. Urrrgh, scarred for life. But, looking at the positives, I think is will cure me of any residual shyness still lingering from childhood.

6) The novelty of a free canteen runs out very quickly.