Corporate Public Relations

Public relations is not just sending out a press release or invitations to an event. It is the profession of managing communications between an organization and its audiences. As a public relations professional, you develop and execute communications programs that consider and support such corporate goals as reputation, the selling of products or services, recruitment of employees, or encouragement of investments. You can do this as an in-house professional at the company or as a client service if you work in an agency. If you want to apply your science journalism skills to corporate public relations, they will be highly prized by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device, technology, and related companies. You not only comprehend the facts about environmental, physical, or life sciences, you can make them understandable to others. You can accurately and efficiently translate the function and value of a product or service to audiences as varied as customers, stockholders, regulators, and journalists, all of whom have different levels of scientific understanding. But being savvy about the scientific process and journalism is not enough. You also have to understand the business. Yes, it is about the money or, rather, commercial decision-making. To do your job well, you must know how the company makes money, who runs the show, who are the customers, how the business will grow, how it is regulated, and who are the existing or potential partners and competitors. And you should know these aspects as well as you know the company's research and development pipeline, patents, or marketed products or services. As someone who made the transition from managing public relations about medical research for academic and governmental organizations to that of Pharmaceuticals and biotechs, I can say that mastering “the business stuff” is possible. Many excellent resources are available, but start by skimming business magazines, checking out Hoover's Online (www.hoovers.com), and reading the annual reports of your company or clients. To manage corporate public relations, you need a program, which is the blueprint that captures the vision and the means to obtain it. Programs are very structured and have goals, objectives, strategies, and measurable tactics to achieve them.

Universities

Science writing at a university has to be one of the world's great jobs. If the institution is serious about its research, you're a kid in a candy store. In my case, at Ohio State University, with more than 3,500 faculty, the question is what to write about first—not where to look for stories. Big universities are that way, but the same rules apply for smaller places that are intent on doing great research. Let's begin with the basics. While public information officers at universities face a buffet of varying tasks—from covering boards of trustees' meetings to athletic scandals to student riots—the role of the science PIO is more focused: Concentrate on university research; explain what is new and why it is important to the public. Stated that way, the job seems simple, but science writers at a university may have to jump from astronomy to immunology to psychology to anthropology all in the same week. That represents a lot of intellectual gear shifting; but remember, the rules about reporting on research generally stay the same from field to field. What is the news? Why is it important? What is the context for the research? That is, what are the questions that drive it? Why should the readers care? And last, do the findings point us somewhere new? The only things that change from story to story are the researchers' language and the culture specific to their fields. Nearly every time I give a talk on university science writing—and there have been dozens—someone asks the classic question: How do you find your stories? The glib answer is “Everywhere;” but in truth, that's pretty accurate. Some people envision situations where top researchers have a “eureka” moment and then immediately get on the phone to the campus science writer to get the word out. Or perhaps the researcher's department chair or dean, ever attuned to their colleagues' work, is the one to pass along such news. I wish that were so; but sadly, it's more likely that researcher, department chair, or dean will never think about calling a writer until long after everything else is done.

Earth Sciences

In August 1999, I stood in the ruins of a collapsed apartment building near Izmit, Turkey—one of 60,000 buildings destroyed in 40 seconds by the most powerful earthquake to strike a major city in nearly a century. It was a modern building surrounded by trees and greenery. A couch and a table stood intact in a room bright with potted flowers, now open to the air. A woman's coat had been carefully draped over the remains of a wall. As the stench of death rose around us, I wondered if the coat's owner was buried in the rubble beneath my feet. I was sent to Turkey to chase the science—to bring home lessons for readers who live near a strikingly similar fault system in California. But as I surveyed the damage with a team of scientists and engineers, there was no separating the science from the politics. Covered with a fine film of sweat mixed with dust from crumbled buildings and lime that had been scattered to prevent the spread of disease, we saw firsthand how corruption and greed had conspired with the forces of nature to kill more than 17,000 people. Some buildings were constructed right on the North Anatolian Fault. Its mole-like tracks plowed through barracks that had collapsed on 120 military officers, a highway overpass that fell on a bus, a bridge whose failure cut off access and aid to four villages. Researchers found concrete that was crumbly with seashells, chunks of Styrofoam where reinforcing metal bars should have been. Yet some well-reinforced buildings nicked or even pierced by the fault came through just fine, including an apartment building that moved 10 feet and had its front steps sliced off. Another home was cut in two; half collapsed, the other survived with windows intact. “How the hell?” marveled one engineer. “There's no way that building should stand in an earthquake.” That blend of science, politics, and human nature is just part of what makes earth science so compelling. It goes far beyond the academics of geology and plate tectonics to embrace earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, landslides—natural hazards that affect thousands of people and change the course of civilization.

Human Genetics

Genetic research is moving faster than a nematode poked by a platinum needle. Every week, the scientific journals report a score of new gene discoveries made in mice, worms, and men. How can a science journalist cover it all? It's hopeless, of course. So one thing I always keep in mind is it's often the methods or scientific tools behind these molecular discoveries, not the discoveries themselves, that present the best story possibilities. Examples of topics for such “tool stories” include DNA chips, proteomics, and new imaging technologies like the green-fluorescent protein used to make zebrafish and other laboratory critters glow. In writing about the technologies that drive biological research, I've found a formula that has worked well for me, time and again. Of course, not every story fits the same mold, and the best ones break it. But it's important to be familiar with how a tool story typically comes to be, and how to write one. I like to think about biology as a big onion that's rapidly being peeled. There are tens of thousands of biologists peeling away every day, figuring out all of life's working parts. But I never saw much sense in inspecting every peel for its news potential. (And some editors I know refer dismissively to the latest uncovering of a gene for heart attack or schizophrenia as “gene-of-the-week” stories.) It's better, sometimes, to focus on the new techniques and ideas for peeling the onion. Tool stories are big-picture stories that can be newsy, but the trends tend to have a long shelf life. They endure through numerous news cycles, and ultimately nearly every outlet in the journalistic food chain will cover the big ones. Your decision is when to catch the wave. Some reporters put a big emphasis on being first, but others will be content to watch the story unfold and cover their piece of it when it's right for whatever market they happen to be writing for. Either way, a tale of how a new technology is changing biological research is a great way to teach your readers—and yourself—about how science really works.

The Biology of Behavior

In 1970, Nobel Prize winner William Shockley made a dramatic declaration: that the average IQs of black people were significantly lower than those of whites, and that blacks of low intelligence should be paid by society to be sterilized. Shockley's Nobel was for work he conducted at Bell Telephone Labs that contributed to the discovery of the transistor. He was not an expert in genetics, biology, sociology, or anything to do with the human mind, behavior, or reproduction. Yet he was able to use his status as a “Nobel laureate” to get vast amounts of media coverage for his sterilization plan. Why did journalists give Shockley so much ink? Would they—or their editors—send a troubled child who needed help to a TV repair shop, or send a broken computer to the office of a psychologist at Harvard University? Why, then, would they quote a physicist like Shockley when writing about race and intelligence? The subject of the biology and genetics of behavior raises many questions like these. It is a fascinating field to write about, but it will take you into some pretty tricky terrain. You'll often find yourself (and your sources) moving back and forth across two vastly different scientific domains—the laboratory, which has traditionally been based on chemistry, biology, and experiments that can be duplicated and proven, and theoretical science, which aims to uncover and explain broad concepts about life. The people you encounter will have specific areas of expertise, but some may (consciously or not) attempt to make grand statements about how a particular idea or discovery may affect humanity. This is a huge, complicated, controversial subject just waiting to suck journalists into its hungry maw, from which it will spit us out in little pieces. Okay, I'm exaggerating (a little). But it can be overwhelming to figure out even how to begin. There's Darwin and cell biology, psychology, sociology, religion, and politics. There are historical figures such as B. F. Skinner and current stars such as Noam Chomsky at MIT and Harvard's E. O. Wilson and Steven Pinker. And there's the whole issue of racism at the edges.

The Science Essay

The essay is a genre-buster. Nonfiction genres—article, book review, memoir, news report—form a kind of taxonomy, like that a biologist imposes on the animal kingdom, or an astronomer on celestial objects. Yet the essay is a genre that subverts the idea of genre. It's not news. It bears a personal stamp, demanding something of the writer's insights, experiences, or idiosyncratic take. But once past these slim criteria, to call it “essay” says precious little about it. The science essay can be formal, even stately, as in Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy's long, sustained argument on climate change, originally presented as a lecture. It can be amusing, as in Alan Lightman's reminiscence of how a failed college electronics project made him, a budding physicist, an ex-experimentalist. It can suffocate with language, as in Richard Selzer's sense-rich explorations of anatomy in “Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery” (1976). . . . I sing of skin, layered fine as baklava, whose colors shame the dawn, at once the scabbard upon which is writ our only signature, and the instrument by which we are thrilled, protected, and kept constant in our natural place. . . . It can deal with life and death, the cosmos and infinity. Or it can be a slight thing, as in an elegy for the slide rule that I wrote around the time the pocket calculator was supplanting it: . . . Long nights spent working physics and chemistry problems would reveal each rule's mechanical idiosyncrasies, the points in its travel where the slide slipped smoothly and those where it snagged. No two rules were alike. Borrow a friend's—same brand, same model, perhaps purchased minutes apart at the student bookstore—and you'd feel vaguely ill at ease. It wasn't yours: The rough spots were different. . . . The science essay can be spartan and simple. Or it can delightfully digress, as Stephen Jay Gould's so often did. “To the undiscerning eye,” Gould wrote once, barnacles are “as boring as rivets.” . . . This is largely attributable to the erroneous impression that they don't go anywhere and don't do anything, ever. The truth of the matter is that they don't go anywhere and don't do anything merely sometimes—and that, other times, barnacle life is punctuated with adventurous travel, phantasmagorical transformations, valiant struggles, fateful decisions, and eating. . . .

Explanatory Writing

I remember with some precision when I began believing that there is nothing so complex that a reasonably intelligent person cannot comprehend it. It was a summer day, when I was 15 or 16, and my best friend, Ron Light, and I decided that we wanted to understand how a guitar amplifier works. We both played in a mediocre I96os-era garage band. While Ron went on to become a fairly accomplished guitarist, I was slowly learning that any talent I had didn't lie within the realm of music. Already the aspiring little scientist, I was able to learn enough of the logic of basic harmony theory to execute the mindlessly simple algorithms called bass riffs, and if pressed I could even fire off a bass solo, the dread of concertgoers everywhere. But my approach to the performance was purely intellectual. I didn't have rhythm, or maybe soul. Poring over the symbols on the circuit diagram of Ron's Fender Deluxe Reverb amplifier seemed infinitely more interesting than trying to read music. I wanted to know what that impressively convoluted blueprint really meant, how electricity flowing through the labyrinth of wires and components could cause the tiny vibration of a guitar string to be multiplied so many times that it rocked the walls of the living room, inciting the neighbors to call the police. This was still the era of the vacuum tube, before those glowing glass envelopes were replaced by coldly efficient transistors and microchips. Electronics was pretty simple to understand. I had already learned some basics from The Boys' Second Book of Radio and Electronics and the guide for the Boy Scout electricity merit badge (the colorful embroidered patch was decorated with a human fist clutching zigzag lightning bolts). In a typical circuit, there were resistors that, true to their calling, resisted electricity, pinching the flow of electrons. There were capacitors, also aptly named, that stored electrical charges. There were tightly wound coils of copper wire called inductors that would hold energy in the form of electromagnetic fields. Finally, there were the vacuum tubes themselves, mysterious pockets of illuminated nothingness inside of which the actual amplification took place.

Gee Whiz Science Writing

A couple of years ago I learned something: I learned that black holes spin. And as they spin, they drag the fabric of space-time around with them, whirling it like a tornado. “Where have you been?” you ask. “That's a direct consequence of general relativity! Lense and Thirring predicted that more than 80 years ago.” It had escaped my notice. It made my day when I (sort of) understood it. I wanted to tell someone—and by a wonderful stroke of luck, I'm paid to do just that. Days like that are why I'm a science writer—a “gee whiz” science writer, if you like. A lot of my peers these days consider the gee whiz approach outdated, naive, even a little lap-doggish; investigative reporting is in. “Isn't the real story the process of how science and medicine work?” Shannon Brownlee said recently, upon receiving a well-deserved prize for her critical reporting on medicine. “I'm talking about the power structure. I'm talking about influence. I'm talking about money.” I'm not much interested in those things. I agree they're often important—more important, no doubt, in breast cancer than in black hole research, more important the more applied and less basic the research gets. One of the real stories about medical research may well be how it is sometimes corrupted by conflicts of interest. Power, influence, and money are constants in human affairs, like sex and violence; and sometimes a science writer is forced to write about them, just as a baseball writer may be forced with heavy heart to write about contract negotiations or a doping scandal. Yet just as the “real story” about baseball remains the game itself, the “real story” about science, to me, is what makes it different from other human affairs, not the same. I'm talking about ideas. I'm talking about experiments. I'm talking about truth, and beauty, too. Most of all, I'm talking about the little nuggets of joy and delight that draw all of us, scientists and science writers alike, to this business, when with our outsized IQs we could be somewhere else pursuing larger slices of power, influence, and money.

Deadline Writing

The moment I walked into the newsroom, I could tell that something was wrong. A group of editors were huddled around the city desk, talking. The televisions were on. People didn't just look tense; they looked genuinely worried. As I walked over to my desk, I saw the image of a burning building. It was the World Trade Center. I was standing there when the second tower fell. I had the same thought that I'm sure a lot of people had: How could this be happening? But I'm also a newspaper reporter, and I realized that there was a science story to be done: Why did the towers fall? Six or seven hours later, I needed to have a finished story that answered that question. It is hard enough to successfully translate the arcane jargon of science into a story for the general reader. A ticking clock makes it that much more difficult—the words “exciting” and “terrifying” come to mind. For a science reporter, this type of breaking news situation doesn't happen very often. One of the great surprises when I moved to science writing a few years ago was that many of the news stories that appear in daily papers were not, in fact, written on deadline. I used to be in awe that someone had the ability to boil down some complex journal article on human origins or supernovas, reach all the important people, and write a clear, elegant article in a day. Many of the big journals, of course, operate on an embargo system, in which reporters are given advance copies and allowed to report ahead of time on the understanding that they won't publish a story until the journal appears in print. But there are still times when science news must be delivered on a daily deadline, either because news breaks or because you have a scoop you don't want to lose. In these cases, I think that everyone who does this for a living develops his own set of tools for coping. Success requires a ruthless attention to where you are in the process, where you are in the day, and what you still need.

Writing Well About Science: Techniques From Teachers of Science Writing

1. Read your work out loud. You will be able to hear rhythm and flow of language this way, and you really cannot hear it when reading silently. 2. Don't be shy. Ask other writers to read a draft for you. Everyone gets too close to the story to see the glitches, and a dispassionate reader is a writer's best friend. Good writers gather readers around them for everything from newspaper stories to whole books (which require really good friends). 3. Think of your lead as seduction. How are you going to get this wary, perhaps uninterested reader, upstairs to see your etchings? You need to begin your story in a way that pulls the reader in. My favorite basic approach goes seductive lead, so-what section (why am I reading this), map section (here are the main points that will follow in this story). That approach leads me to my next tip, which is 4. Have a dear sense of your story and its structure before you begin writing. If you think of a story as an arc, in the shape of a rainbow, then it's helpful to know where it will begin and where it will end so that you know in advance how to build that arc. 5. Use transitions. A story has to flow. Leaping from place to place like a waterstrider on a pond will not make your prose easy to follow. 6. Use analogies. They are a beautiful way to make science vivid and real—as long as you don't overuse them. 7. In fact, don't overwrite at all. And never, never, never use clichés. If you want to write in your voice, generic language will not do. In my class, there are no silver linings, no cats let out of bags, no nights as black as pitch. A student who uses three clichés in a story gets an automatic C from me. 8. Write in English. This applies not only to science writing but to all beats in which a good story can easily sink in a sea of jargon.