News releases can play a significant role in shaping how news stories cover research findings: if a news release exaggerates aspects of the work, stories are more likely to do the same. By the same token, if releases incorporate important caveats, news stories are more likely to follow suit.
Those are some of the interesting findings in a new paper from the journal PLOS ONE, which I wrote about for HealthNewsReview.org. The paper is worth a read. Hopefully, my piece is too. Check them out.
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Chanapa Tantibanchachai, a public information officer (PIO) at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Keep reading to learn what tips Tantibanchachai picked up at EurekAlert’s 2016 seminar for PIOs. Continue reading “Communicating Science in the Clickbait Era: Tips and Lessons From EurekAlert’s 2016 PIO Seminar”
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Iara Vidal, a Ph.D. student based in Brazil whose work focuses on altmetrics and scholarly communication. If you’re curious about altmetrics, or how they may be relevant to science communication, read on.
Being overwhelmed by information is not a new phenomenon, but it is a very real problem. We struggle to keep up to date with all the discoveries, papers, and books in our fields of interest. It often seems as though new fields of study, methods, and/or tools are created every month. Buzzwords are all around, and it can be hard to know if there’s anything useful behind the buzz.
One of these buzzwords is altmetrics. Continue reading “Altmetrics, ‘Altmetric,’ and Science Communication”
A photograph taken at a Trump rally has been making the rounds on social media recently. It shows a man wearing a t-shirt that reads: “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required.” It is a direct reference to lynching, and it should piss you off. Continue reading “If You Love Democracy, Buy a Newspaper”
Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren, is one of the best books I’ve read in recent years. It’s a book about science. And about plants. And about people. As I wrote in a review earlier this year, Jahren manages to find a balance between entertaining popular science and compelling memoir. That’s a tough combination to pull off, and a hell of a read.
And I was far from the only one who enjoyed Lab Girl – it’s garnered positive attention in outlets from the New York Times to PBS to The Guardian.
Recently Jahren – who has relocated her geobiology lab from Hawaii to the University of Oslo – let me pick her brain about writing, blogging and how she balances her writing with her work as a scientist. Continue reading “A Voice with an Audience: an Interview with Hope Jahren”
I thought many in the science communication community would want to know about a security breach at EurekAlert!, and what that means for the service. I’m running the update from AAAS in its entirety below (retrieved from this page), and will run any updates as I receive them. [Multiple updates added. See below.] Continue reading “EurekAlert! Security Breach (with Updates)”
Hey there, folks. This is some inside-baseball ruminating about the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), so feel free to skip this one if that’s not up your alley. Continue reading “Some Questions and Thoughts on the NASW Officer Debate”
