Monday, July 15, 2019
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One of those old, attributed-to-everyone adages about reporting goes: “Journalism is what somebody else doesn’t want you to print. The rest is advertising.” And then, there’s science writing.
After seven weeks with Physics Today (Only three left! Cue the waterworks), I’ve had the opportunity to learn the magazine’s audience, style, and intention. In that time, I’ve been weighing which half of the adage applies more to the science writing I’ve been asked to do here. What follows in this (incredibly late) blog post are a couple impressions I’ve gotten which make me think that (horror of horrors) the old adage might need an update.
One of the Physics Today editors sent me a book that drew a line between science writing, the sort of technical “here’s what’s hot in science”, and science reporting, which is uncovering problems in the institutions and practices of science that somebody (as the old adage goes) doesn’t want you to print. The former is Physics Today’s main fare, though the magazine does have a smaller section for the latter. I may only have a solid month of experience in professional science writing, but that’s a month more than in science reporting, so I’m going to stick with what I (kinda) know for this post.
I recently wrote a piece for Physics Today on how the sun itself makes a popular kind of solar cell less effective over time. I set up a few Skype interviews with various people on the team. I was ready—I had my list of questions and a conversational attitude. It took a few minutes into the interview for me to realize that I needed neither.
I didn’t have to pry information out of the scientists. In fact, they could barely say enough. In one 45-minute interview they told me the history behind their research, the potential commercial applications, what type of spectrography they used—and all I asked were two questions.
The experience of interviewing scientists about their work doesn’t map very well onto news journalism. The closest parallel would be a government official saying shaking your hand and then admitting to launching a coup. It doesn’t, in a word, happen.
Trust between a reporter and a source, the silent protagonist of Spotlight and every other journalism yarn, is a different beast in science reporting. The most important capital a journalist can have is a source’s trust in her ability to get the facts right and treat the story fairly and without biases. Though the image is different under the current regime, we as Americans have inherited an idea of the journalist as an upright truth-teller with a near-mint moral compass. That’s partially, I think, because the stories about journalists that get passed down are of incredible feats of holding truth to power, which typically only happens when you have people close to power who trust you enough to spill the beans.
In science writing, trust is different. Yes, the scientist whose brain you’re picking must trust you, but her trust is less in your moral uprightness than your ability to know what the hell she’s talking about. It doesn’t pay to talk to somebody who nods through an interview, looks at his notes later, and finds a doodle of a solar cell and “conspiracy????” underlined three times. I’m only kind of speaking from experience.
The last way in which science reporting differs from news reporting is really two (forgive me, five-paragraph essay format, for I have sinned): the audience and the impact. News reporting is, in theory, the act of exposing flaws in social systems to the people in those social systems. Ideally, it’s for everyone, about everyone. (I’m adding qualifications because of course news reporting falls prey to elitist, racist, any kind of -ist, really, biases) When a publication limits its audience, or adds barriers to understanding its content, its impact plummets.
Publications like Physics Today do both. To be fair, it’s a very specific level of science that only a certain group with years of training can understand. On the flip side, some of it is science that affects people without years of training. Not to mention, as a science communicator told me the other day, “It’s an obligation as a scientist to share [my work] with the people who are paying for it.” I see the obligation of science writers to help scientists share their work as a matter of public service. It chafes when publications set additional, artificial boundaries on a subject that is at once so gate-kept and so vital to being an informed citizen.
Maybe I’ve watched too much Newsroom. Still, I think journalists should help the broader public to understand things that would otherwise be kept from them, be that through state power or social barriers. That’s a pretty banal thought, and something like it is in most 101 books on reporting. That said, it’s been on my mind while working in a place that often makes pieces with a very high knowledge bar. I understand that it’s a different kind of reporting, and I understand that it’s for a different audience, and I understand it is, to such a gargantuan and humbling degree, not up to me to adjudicate on these things. Still: it doesn’t feel like advertising, but sometimes, it doesn’t often feel like the other thing.
Jeremiah O'Mahony