THE headline guided by student blogger
It’s a rather miserable looking Saturday today so I’m sticking indoors for now, instead choosing to catch up on reading this week’s Times Higher Education (THE). There’s a great example here of new media influencing traditional media, and showing that what gets said on a blog – even just a passing comment – can influence one’s reputation on a wider scale.
The article, introducing the new Chief Executive of the BBSRC, Professor Douglas Kell, is delightfully headlined ‘New BBSRC chief “Olympic gold medallist” of research‘. Great headline for the BBSRC and Professor Kell, hey? However, the really interesting thing from my point of view is that the headline was influenced by a simple statement on a student blog:
If research were an olympic sport, the new chief executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) would win gold for “weightlifting with citations”, at least according to one online blogger.
The article goes on to mention how Professor Kell engaged with the discussions on the blog that ensued, thus showing him to be ‘keen to engage with students, colleagues and the wider public’.
I think this says a lot about journalism when the source that influences their headline is a student blog, but it also speaks volumes about Professor Kell himself. Go Professor Kell! Let’s hope more academic leaders can be celebrated for engaging with publics in this manner.
Digital Media for Business
As part of the work we’ve been doing for Ideas for Life TV, we were recently involved in a conference on digital media for business hosted at Alton Towers (18 March). Working with Ember Regis, we interviewed the key speakers from the event. Two of them were specifically speaking about how digital media can be used to communicate science and can be used by business. Both videos are available below. The first features Magic Lantern Chief Executive, Anthony Lilley, while the second is an interview with Adam Rutherford, online editor for Nature.
Why does the British public trust doctors so much more than scientists?
A lot of my work is around communicating science, or working with education bodies. So, every year I am interested to see how certain professions fare in MORI’s annual survey of trust in different professions.
Catching up on reading my backlog of publications that have fallen on my desk over the past few weeks, I was delighted to see that February’s edition of Profile magazine (the CIPR’s main publication) featured the results of this year’s trust survey, announced on 5 March. I wasn’t quite so delighted, however, to see that public trust in scientists has fallen by 7 per cent since last year’s survey – the largest change in any of the professions.
The poll asks respondents whether they would ‘generally trust them to tell the truth or not’, and lists 16 professions to compare. Doctors come out top in this survey, with 90 per cent of respondents saying they would trust them to tell the truth. By comparison, just 65 per cent of respondents claim that they would trust scientists to tell the truth.
This difference insterests me and I think its a challenge of those involved in science communication to address this. Is the difference in perception caused by the public’s exposure to these professions? It’s highly likely that most of the public know their doctor and see them every so often, but how many members of the public know a scientist or someone that they would call a scientist? To some extent we might also question why doctors are even separated out from scientists in this poll. Aren’t doctors also scientists, afterall?
Perhaps if we could communicate the work of scientists and science-related professions more effectively, and put a more human face on science, there wouldn’t be such a marked difference in trust between doctors and scientists.
Fast Forward to the End
Tomorrow we’re holding the final of the Fast Forward series for Ideas for Life TV. Not only have I been production manager for this project, but I have also had to be event manager too pulling together all the various strands to make it work. I have to say, I’m feeling quite sad that it all wraps up tomorrow (with the exception of one further piece that we need to film with another company). On the plus side, I will be able to stop working silly hours for a short while, my house actually might get cleaned this weekend, and I will really get to see just how far our teams have come along. It’s been an interesting experiment in science communication and I’ll reflect more on that soon, but for now I need to get back into those last minute preparations for the final. The prizes for the kids have started to arrive at my door now and I think there’s another delivery man knocking at the door right now …
Science and the Media: You and Yours
There was a really good 12 minute segment on You and Yours yesterday on Radio 4 (Friday 15th February) on Science and the media. Definitely worth a listen.
Fast Forward launches on Ideas for Life TV
The Fast Forward series that we are working on launched this week on Ideas for Life TV.
I’ve embedded episode 1 directly from Ideas for Life TV below. It might take a little while to play (don’t forget to hit the play button!) but bear with it to meet the kids and find out about their challenge!
The rest of the series is progressing nicely and we now have some exciting judges lined up for the grand final to the challenge on 22nd February. Episodes will be released roughly speaking every week from now until March.
Fast Forward
The Fast Forward series that we have been working on for Ideas for Life TV is now coming along nicely, with just 5 days until the site and series launch – it’s all really rather exciting! We now have episodes complete introducing the teams, and showcasing the University of Warwick’s eco-one project. Filming was complete on Monday at Coventry-based Modec, and this weekend we’re off to the Autosport Show at the NEC to finish our item on the Westfield hybrid sportscar and hopefully start working on a piece on the Concept Climax car. Then it’s back for an update with our school teams on Monday. It’s all happening!
Dealing with the Media Session for PhD Students
Here are the slides used at our recent session for University of Warwick students on “Dealing with the Media”. There isn’t a great deal of detail in here as I’m not a great believer of putting everything you say in a presentation onto the slides itself, but I thought it worth publishing them anyway. There is a click through link on the Warwick iCast story slide too so you can see the example.
PR for Medical Research
Last week I attended a discussion event hosted by the CIPR’s Health sector group. The event focused mostly on the impact of media (print media in the main) on patients and patient groups. However, a speaker from the Parkinson’s Society through up an interesting point. Discussing their reactions to stories about medical developments or “breakthroughs” she mentioned that one of the first things she would also consider in those stories is at what stage the research is at – is it still in petri dishes or is it in clinical trial.
Having worked on many medical research news stories over the past few years this got me pondering … at what point should universities and research organisations press release medical research stories? On the one hand there is a danger of releasing something early. The research might still be in the lab, or even a theory, and might not work at all in clinical trial. Announcing it to the world at this stage could raise false hopes and create all kinds of problems for GPs and health workers with patients demanding treatments that don’t yet even exist. On the other hand, however, releasing stories at this early stage just might help researchers to raise the profile of the research enough to encourage funding to enable further development and clinical trials. It’s a fine balancing act between the impact on patients and health professionals, and the need to raise the profile of research in order to further it. Tricky one. I think there’s a whole other event just in this subject alone.
