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Learning that less is sometimes more
22 December 2009
By Elizabeth Dodson
A week or so ago I attended a truly excellent training session. I have been offered media training a few times and could never find the spare day, but recently I decided the time had come. I occasionally deal with media enquiries, I’ve spoken on the radio once and I now write regularly on this public access blog. I’m not overwhelmed with media attention but nevertheless thought the training would help me to prepare for any future opportunities. In fact, I would now recommend this course to anyone who wants to communicate their work anywhere – and that includes within meetings and conferences.
The course was run by former BBC journalists who required all participants to submit details about themselves and their research. They then gathered further information about the research specialisms of every attendee, identified related media reports and designed interviews specific to each person. I was impressed by how personal it was and I think this was very motivating for everyone involved.
We practiced giving soundbite comments, approaching newspapers about our current research and defending our work in a television interview. The main thing that I learnt from this was the importance of having clear messages and getting to the point quickly. In a world where we routinely take time and trouble to go into the fine details – being succinct and direct are important skills that are surprisingly easy to lose. I’m a detail person, but I know that there are times when it can pay to lose the minutiae. For example: when networking you have just a few moments to make an impression and at a job interview, a compelling piece of research can be lost on the interviewer if over-described.
Having to practice describing work in brief soundbites was a great exercise in recognising what is important in the work we do, why people should be interested, and why it should be funded. I hadn’t realised how challenging this can be to do well and how important it is. So although detail is essential in my everyday research life, I will now be more keenly aware that I must also be able to communicate without it – and as the saying goes, practice makes perfect!
Matthew Salois28 December 2009 at 05:15 PM
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Sounds like a great experience! One of the most challenging aspects of being a professional researcher is trying to explain your research to a lay audience in just a few sentences. I could certainly benefit from attending a similar training session.
Simon Smith04 January 2010 at 06:32 PM
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Being able to communicate your research succinctly is a very important skill, as long as it doesn't cross the line into the kind of short-cuts that lead to misrepresentation. And that's particularly dangerous when talking to journalists - who then go and write their own story based on what you've told them. Did the training cover how to minimise these kinds of risks, or how to maximise the airtime or column inches you can get!?
Elizabeth Dodson04 January 2010 at 06:58 PM
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This problem of misrepresentation is summed up well by Jorge Cham: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174 The training did cover the issues you raised with lots and lots and lots of tips! One of the main points was that you must always prepare thoroughly as you can take the time to think about how to be succinct yet entirely accurate and to consider soundbite type information that you can provide that doesn't require masses of context to be correctly interpreted and understood - always consider the potential impact of your message being shortened and therefore make it as simple as possible. We were advised to always have 3 well prepared key messages and coached to steer any interview towards our own agenda. The opinion given was that most journalists are not looking to make work for themselves and if your soundbites are good - they'll gratefully use them. Of course none of this is foolproof but it improves your chances of getting across the actual story that you want to tell. To maximise airtime or column inches you need to have a good story - and we had a lot of discussion about what makes us want to read or listen to something - such as topicality, human interest, breakthrough findings, controversy and of course all things unusual.
Mashhuda Glencross08 January 2010 at 10:39 AM
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Sounds fab, you have inspired me to look out for courses like that in the future!
Sarah Davies10 January 2010 at 08:08 PM
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Let's not pretend that 'misrepresentation' is entirely the fault of journalists - researchers often have their own axes to grind as well. I was reminded of this thread when looking at a recent abstract from colleague who looked at the relationship between asteroid astrophysicists and the media - see http://pus.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/19/1/16?etoc.