This has been a really interesting discussion, and points, I think, to the importance of
having a good working relationship (perhaps a "critical friendship") between scientists and those who play an essential role
communicating science. It's also reminded me to write about an experience I had which may be a little relevant.
From 2001-2004 I worked in the (well funded) Office of Public Outreach (OPO) for the Hubble Space Telescope. OPO is the group
charged by the Space Telescope Science Institute with the task of communicating the scientific discoveries made by astronomers using the telescope
At the time OPO had about 30 staff, with members of the team including astronomers, journalists, graphic designers ,
teachers video producers, photographers and programmers.
In my view this integrated team approach worked well, and on occasion not only did a reasonable job communicating exciting results, but the 'critical friendship' which developed between
the communicators and the scientists actually helped improve the science. A good example of this occurred with the first measurement of the size of Quaoar,
an (at the time) recently discovered object in the outer solar system which (again, at the time) was thought to be possibly bigger than Pluto, which would of course be a story of immense general interest.
Some astronomers applied for and got time on Hubble to try and measure Quaoar's size directly, and then submitted a paper with the results to a journal; at the same time they sent a copy of the paper
to our group, since they knew that potentially finding an outer solar system world as large as Pluto would be a big story. Unfortunately when the paper arrived, the astronomers in
our group realised that the error bars were so large that the result was ambiguous, and following a team discussion where both scientists and communicators agreed that this was a really important story
that needed better resolution, we lobbied both the scientists and the institute management to get another set of data which would reduce the error bars, and thus
give a somewhat more precise value for the size of Quaoar and thus help better understand the story. When this was done, unfortunately we realised that Quaoar wasn't as big as first thought, but it was still an interesting finding.
The final draft of the scientific paper, made after the second set of observations can be seen at this link.
http://hubblesite.org/pubinfo/pdf/2002/17/rel/paper.pdf
And the news releases and web pages prepared by the OPO team concerning the same release can be seen at this link.
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2002/17/
Considering all of the above took place in a very short timescale I still look back on this as an example of scientists and communicators working well together.
Over the years the group developed a guide (aimed at scientists!) for releasing news items to the public
which you can read below. Of course this was prepared some years ago, with a US focus, and is somewhat dated, but is still, I hope, interesting.
http://outreachoffice.stsci.edu/news/newspolicy.shtml#a
Sincerely
Ian
On 26/07/2010 11:47, "Bruce Etherington" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi All,
This story and discussion has reminded me about something that I mull over every few months:
In discussions about where the hyperbole enters a media story, the focus always appears to sit with the PR officer or the journalist. There never seems to be any investigation into the paper itself. New researchers are taught that they must include something about the importance/potential implications of their work and, in order to help with acceptance, there must be a pressure to talk this up. I am sure that some peer reviewers will attempt to filter this out, but I have read many papers that make claims for their work that seem to be beyond a reasonable justification. How much does (do others think that) this conrtibutes to the exaggerated claims that end up appearing in the media?
Bruce
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