Joann Ellison Rodgers RODGERS PHOTO: PHOTO COURTESY OF KEITH WELLER

PIO FORUM

by Joann Ellison Rodgers

Familiarity and contempt: a different perspective

In the preface to a small guide I co-authored almost a decade ago, journalist-turned-journalism professor Jon Franklin described the typical encounter between scientists and journalists as potentially worse than a nuclear event, at least for the scientists. “Whereas you can only be nuked once, generally speaking,” he wrote, “you can be blown all out of proportion time and time again.” By way of exegesis, he noted that “the two worlds are almost a perfect mismatch. The best academics think not in years but in decades or centuries, while for too many reporters, ‘tomorrow’ is a strategic concept.” The best scientists, he explained, “painstakingly match theory and data, while reporters think in gestalt and write in quick broad strokes.” The former, “not without feelings, live the life of the mind; reporters, though generally quite intelligent, are almost without exception adrenaline junkies.”

This “two cultures” paradigm, widely accepted by both camps, has spawned a mini-industry of communication anthropologists who sniff and sift the sands of lab and newsroom for confirmatory artifacts, not without some success. (All those trashed news releases from our offices, for example.)

Along the way, it also informed the role of the public communicator, whether in the academy or government. Like everyone who wants to operate successfully in a traditional culture, practitioners of science PR and “sponsored” science communications who bought in to the paradigm also bought in to the behaviors defined as culturally acceptable. Thus, we PIOs still exhort the scientists we work with to, as Franklin put it, “devote serious thought” to the tricks of the journalistic trade to “gain a distinct advantage.” And we still exhort our journalist colleagues to consider the academic or political context, or “spin,” if you like, to gain access to information and get help in explaining a complex world in one minute 30 seconds in prime time.

If the best paradigms, like the best theories, survive because they work and explain a lot of stuff, then this one, too, has been an evolutionary winner. It has successfully informed our role. We get paid well to model these behaviors. But I’d like to suggest that it also has, in some ways, belied, misshapen, or at least limited our role and our relationships with the press, scientists, and the institutions that provide our paychecks.

Exhibit one in my hypothesis is: reality. Although scientists and journalists, not to mention us, revel in war stories about each other’s unacceptable habits and behaviors (secretiveness, competitiveness, stonewalling, flacking, hyping, etc., etc., etc.), experience tells a somewhat different story when it comes to communicating science. Our telephones and e-mail don’t ring and pop scores of times each day because journalists and scientists find our services distasteful. Both camps may use our services judiciously, and even cynically, but both camps also know we all have some common interests and common ground in serving the public interest. We might do better yet for our careers and our bosses by promoting facilitation more than combat readiness.

Exhibit two: data. In a recently published series of government-funded studies by researchers at Hopkins* the authors described a series of interviews with 20 journalists and 15 scientists seeking their perceptions of the science news-making process. (In this case, news about genetic discoveries.) What struck the investigators—but tellingly neither the scientists nor journalists themselves when told of the results—as highly unexpected was that both groups tended to describe each other not as combatants or clods insensitive to each other’s cultures, but as “cautious collaborators.”

Although scientists were more likely than journalists to expect the press to “educate” the public, and although the scientists and journalists had somewhat different motives for seeking out each other on the communications front, their motives were not only compatible, but shared a common goal of informing the public about an enterprise both saw as important or interesting to the public.

For example, journalists said one goal of their collaboration was to explore “ethical dimensions” of a piece of research; scientists, for their part, said they sought out journalists to try and communicate the limits of their work and to help recruit volunteers for further research. Different language, different perspectives, but common cause. In the interests of full disclosure, I was a co-investigator in this study. But it doesn’t sound to me like war, nuclear or otherwise.

Exhibit three: more talk and less posturing among all camps. Dialogue among the stakeholders in science communications is also a mini-industry these days, with scientists invited to journalists’ meetings, journalists welcomed at increasing numbers of scientific venues, and we institution-bound wretches invited to declaim at both. As our colleague Boyce Rensberger made clear at one such outing last year, science journalism is not the same as science communications. But there is serious overlap of skills, career paths, and even goals, if one goal is to inform public policy and a second is to stay in business.

Well, yes indeedy. These are increasingly common goals and they underpin increasingly common behaviors. Consider the big-time investment in so called “public journalism” by news organizations looking for news-based launch pads into community activism, advocacy, and the hearts of advertisers and readers. And consider the big business look-alike aspects of science-based institutions. News organizations always were serious business enterprises, big and otherwise, of course. But as more and more science-based organizations seek relevancy and revenue, I suspect growing sympathy among them for the trials and tribulations of journalists whose news organizations must still buy paper by the ton and get advertisers to pay the expenses.

The longtime director of one of our most distinguished nongovernmental scientific institutes told me that not a single one of its hundreds of scientists was without a tie to a corporation or sponsored project. At Hopkins, and its peer institutions, managing the conflicts of interest involved in such work is a full-time job for a whole office full of experts. Increasing numbers of academic enterprises are investing serious time and/or money in direct-to-the-public communications heavily involving their scientists (Hopkins is) and increasing numbers of publishers, broadcasters, and cable outlets are determined to feed the public appetite for medical and science information with programming sponsored by source institutions, as well as corporations and the taxpayer. In short, the institutions of science and journalism are co-evolving and, as is the case with all of organisms competing for the same niches, cooperation buys as least as much, if not more, than combat.

My final exhibit is one that at least deserves more attention than I’m giving it here, and I hope it will spark some among my colleagues on all sides of the conventional paradigm: crossover careers.

Once upon a time, it was news of the man-bites-dog variety when a journalist went over to the dark side of public relations, or a scientist became visible, fergawdsakes, by writing for non-scientists, or hosting TV shows. Then it became a cause for the kind of sotto voce criticism generally reserved for lapsed religionists. More recently, it’s more likely to be a cause of utter confusion. Q: What, exactly, do you call someone who works for XYZ University’s Office of Public Affairs, writes pieces for a big city newspaper, and publishes books about science? A: An associate member of NASW. (Sorry, a bad joke.) But more and more of us are PIOs and journalists and scientists, at the same time, sequentially, simultaneously, and in reverse order, too. Some are published in the NEJM and participate in scholarship and write magazine articles and books. Medical residents and lab scientists visit offices like mine regularly to seek guidance about how to become writers, broadcasters, and advocates. Some card-carrying members of journalism organizations are advocates who ply their trade on behalf of the environment and other causes. There are growing ranks of those unable, with any ease, to be pigeonholed in any one camp, carrying portfolios of skills and comfortable in all the cultures involved. Where and how future generations of science journalists, science communicators, and scientists will acquire those portfolios are likely already a hot topic for science and journalism educators.

Meanwhile, where all of this familiarity with one another’s tricks and trades will lead is hard to say. Contempt is certainly an historic option along the perimeters of the scientist-journalist-PIO triangle, although I don’t see the future that way. I welcome argument. In any case, I humbly suggest that PIOs might do better for their institutions, the press, and ourselves if we spent more energy circulating inside the triangle and less on its sometimes nuclear edges.

*References

Tambor ES, Bernhardt BA, Rodgers J, Holtzman NA, Geller G. Mapping the human genome: An assessment of media coverage and public reaction. Genetics in Medicine 2002; 4:31-36.

Geller G, Bernhardt BA, Holtzman NA. The media and public reaction to genetic research. JAMA 2002; 287:773.

Geller G, Tambor ES, Bernhardt BA, Rodgers J, Holtzman NA. Houseofficers’ reactions to media coverage about the sequencing of the human genome. Soc Sci Med 2002; 56; 2211-2220.

Mountcastle-Shah E, Tambor E, Bernhardt BA, Geller G, Rodgers J, Holtzman NA. Assessing mass media reporting of disease-related genetic discoveries: Development of an instrument and initial findings. Science Communication 2003; 24:458-478.

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Joann Ellison Rodgers is director of media relations in the Office of Communications and Public Affairs at Johns Hopkins Medicine.