Your Research in the Headlines: Dealing with the Media

Talking to journalists for the first time is often a sink-or-swim experience, but preparation can improve the odds that your scientific work is disseminated accurately to the public.

Final-year Ph.D. student Molly Crockett got more than she bargained for when her first-author paper was published in Science last June. Her university circulated an embargoed press release about a week before publication, and within a couple of hours, “I started getting tons of e-mails and phone calls” from journalists, Crockett says. All told, she appeared in four radio or podcast interviews, a dozen newspaper stories, and five magazine articles. “The week the research went out [was] pretty much devoted 9 to 5 to dealing with the press,” she says. It was “crazy.”

Crockett received some coaching from her supervisor and feels she prepared for her interviews fairly well. Still, entering the limelight was “a sink-or-swim learning experience.” That hardly makes her unique; few scientists have the luxury of training before they confront the media for the first time. Yet an understanding of how the media work, an awareness of what could go wrong, and a bit of preparation can help you deal with a sudden tide of media interest and ensure that your scientific work is disseminated accurately to the public.

See the full article by Elisabeth Pain here.