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Number one piece of advice, get a science writer to write the story, not a general reporter, if you possible can (general reporters cover crime, politics, sports, etc.-not your best fit). Most science writers have advanced science degrees, they will understand you, and yes, there are quite a few who cover social science.(Find them at NASW-http://www.nasw.org/).

Here’s a few imperatives reporters generally have to follow. Knowing these can help you understand why they operate the way they do, and how you can work it to your advantage.

• Deadline-driven writing: Usually counted in hours or days. This means working fast, summarizing, getting to the point quickly, grabbing good, short quotes. Think about your work like this-can you present it yourself quickly, succinctly and simply? Practice.

• Space constraints: Often dictated by advertising space, in newspapers. Stories must fit tat space, or the radio air time, or the TV spot. Reporters can’t fit everything in, so they include the most important parts only, and summarize a lot. Call it tyranny of the technology.

• The news angle: What happened? Why’s it important? Is it new, bigger, or faster? Is it urgent, a breakthrough, or relevant to your community? Tell them.

• The human angle: There has to be a reason someone will want to read the story. What interests most people? Stuff that that has relevance for them. We all want to know “how does this affect me? My kids? My world? My mortgage?”. Reporters must frame what they write around this, and you want to get used to thinking about your work from this angle.

• Writing for the public: For media, it’s the educated (or not so educated) public – depends on the media outlet. What words do they use? How much will they understand about this subject? Writing about science for the public means writing about complexity in a way most people can understand it. Analogies help. So does (sorry) simplification. Numbers get rounded off, quotes get tightened to phrases. Think about your own material in those terms, so it gets filtered through the journalist the way you want it.

Concise writing: The opposite of academic. In general, the conclusion comes first (think inverted pyramid), the rest follows in as few words as possible, just enough to get the job done. No jargon, no buzzwords.

Remember, more words don’t mean you’re smarter.

Cheers,

Merry

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Writing a press release is not that hard. Writing a press release that results in media coverage may be.

The basic rule of press release writing is to realize that you are offering an editor a news story and your job is to make it as easy as possible for the editor to get it into print. So you write it like a news story, using the classic inverted pyramid form. The lead sentence is the foundation from which everything else hangs. Ideally, it should communicate the whole story in one line. Here “whole” doesn’t mean every detail; it means that if the audience reads or hears nothing else they will still be able to tell someone what the story is about.

The hard part is coming up with a story that people who are not included in the handful of folks already interested in the esoterica of your research will also find interesting. A classic test: Could you say that sentence to your mom and have her eager to hear more instead of having her eyes glaze over?

Why do archeology and paleontology get good coverage? Just about everybody is interested in where they or others in whom they are interested come from. So a story like, “New missing link found in Ethiopia” or (from this morning’s Japanese newspaper) “Carbon dating confirms that skeleton found in Okinawa is 25,000-year old paleolithic human” taps a broad vein of human interest. Here in Japan, where what it means to be Japanese is a perennial hot-button question, archeology stories regularly make the front page of national newspapers. “Excavation in Nara could be Himiko’s palace” is hot news.

Cultural anthropology can be hot news. Whatever scholars now think of the research, Margaret Mead’s _Coming of Age in Samoa_ tapped into a widespread anxiety about teenage behavior. But it’s harder these days to find that kind of hook, in a world where everyone who watches TV or browses the Internet already know that people behave in all sorts of different ways.

The right place to start is likely to be audience research. Do you know what concerns or excites the people who read or watch the medium in which you want your story to appear?
Can you talk about your research in a way that THEY will find interesting?

If the answer is, “Yes,” and you can squeeze that down into a strong lead sentence, the rest is just filling in the details; how much depending on the amount of space you have.

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EXACTLY. There is a lot of debate out there, but much of it tends to gravitate to the extremes–and a lot is lost or overlooked in the process. But then, that’s because so much “debate” is actually about one-liners and making political points. I think that there is a lot of fertile ground for some re-framing/disruption of this whole stream of public political discourse. Why not? I think that the usual polemics need some disruption.

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Point 1 and 2… wow ! It makes so much sense. And it would make a great difference too.

I was especially interested by Point 3. Granted, it’s something that is a good exercice for any scientist. But as far as anthropology is concerned, I’m always amazed by the distance factor that seem to inform the perception of the discipline among many people – I often hear people say that anthropology is about the distant past, the geographically distant, etc. So point 3, or the art of making it relevant as you say, is about providing links and bridges to bring anthropological input closer to people. I liked your thoughts on learning to articulate different scales and temporalities, it sounds like it’s the right way to do this.

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