9. Jacinta Bowler on how to be a journalist's best friend
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Today's episode is a deep dive with science journalist Jacinta Bowler.
Jacinta has well over 1,000 articles published for outlets like the ABC, SBS Science, Cosmos, the SMH, and Science Alert... And they've also been published in Best Australian Science Writing in 2021 and 2022.
Our conversation covers —
Preparing for your interview
Building an ongoing relationship with journalists
Mitigating risks
Writing about your work for a general audience
How to approach different mediums
And a whole lot more...
Enjoy, and stay tuned for next week's episode with ...Woodman on engaging on behalf of your field. We'll be releasing weekly for the first 12 episodes, and then switching to every other week to give us a bit more time to release some of the other exciting Amplifying Research projects we have in store for you.
Find Jacinta Bowler online:
https://twitter.com/jacinta_bowler
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacinta-bowler-ab3a64103/
Best Australian Science Writing 2023
https://unsw.press/books/best-australian-science-writing-2023
Best Australian Science Writing 2022
https://unsw.press/books/the-best-australian-science-writing-2022
Find Chris online:
https://www.amplifyingresearch.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrispahlow
Resources mentioned:
Adrian Smith (the "bug guy")
https://www.youtube.com/antlab
Credits:
Hosted and produced by Chris Pahlow
Edited by Laura Carolina Corrigan
Consulting Producers Maia Tarrell and Michelle Joy
Quotes:
"So for me it's responding quickly. So if I send you an email in the morning, respond as soon as possible, as soon as you can, and tell me whether you can talk to me today or you can send me some responses."
"So in journalism we talk about the smart questions, where you ask questions that make you seem like you are really knowledgeable to the scientist, and that's fine. Except the person who you are writing this article for hasn't read the paper, hasn't talked to the scientist, and so needs it to be much more simple than what I'd be able to get. So, although I've read the paper, although I probably understand this in more capacity than most people, I still need you to answer me in really simple ways because that's what the best quote's gonna be."
"You need to have descriptive language... So maybe you tell a story about how the person who discovered citrate fungus, for example, was walking through the forest and then was seeing these frogs upturned in the riverbed, and they knew that upturned frogs meant that they'd gotten the disease. So you are trying to tell a story in the same way as you would a fiction story. You've got your intro, your middle, and your end. And throughout that you're keeping the reader interested with these interesting characters and these like descriptive languages of place. And that's what you would do for these like longer features where science writing really comes to the fore..."
"It's similar to maths. Everyone thinks that they can't do maths, they don't have a brain for maths. Like you don't have a brain for writing in this way. I don't think that's true. I think really it is, you have to work on it. You have to get better at it. But most people can tell a pretty good story. They can probably write a pretty good story too."
"I think a lot of people in science just assume that you should use the jargon because that's what people have used before. But we actually did a study looking at lawyer speak, so the idea of why lawyers have this ridiculous form of writing that they do. And turns out lawyers don't like it. No one knows why they use it. It doesn't make any sense and it's really hard for anyone else to read. And so then it's like, okay, well let's get rid of that then."
"So firstly, the thing you wanna focus on is what do you like doing? Are you a person that listens to podcasts all the time? Do you like the radio? Do you like watching tiktoks? Are you more of a Vox-style, longer video guy? Think about what you really enjoy listening to or consuming. And that is probably where you wanna start."
