Siri Carpenter began her science writing journey without a playbook. She was working on a Ph.D. in social psychology and ended up being awarded a AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship where she got critical experience in the field. From there, she took on assignments, pitched stories, and tried to figure out how to do the job of a science journalist.
In trying to figure things out, she talked to experienced writers and thought other people would benefit from what they had to say too. And thus The Open Notebook (TON) was born. It's been a powerful resource for science writers, providing free access to articles and interviews about the craft. The website also includes courses and a "pitch database." In 2020, Siri's edited book "The Craft of Science Writing" was released, featuring new and established articles from TON.
In our conversation, she shares her journey and offers advice for aspiring science journalists.
You can find the rest of this summer's science communication podcast series here.
For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/
Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.
Siri Carpenter began her science writing journey without a playbook. She was working on a Ph.D. in social psychology and ended up being awarded a AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship where she got critical experience in the field. From there, she took on assignments, pitched stories, and tried to figure out how to do the job of a science journalist.
In trying to figure things out, she talked to experienced writers and thought other people would benefit from what they had to say too. And thus The Open Notebook (TON) was born. It's been a powerful resource for science writers, providing free access to articles and interviews about the craft. The website also includes courses and a "pitch database." In 2020, Siri's edited book "The Craft of Science Writing" was released, featuring new and established articles from TON.
In our conversation, she shares her journey and offers advice for aspiring science journalists.
You can find the rest of this summer's science communication podcast series here.
For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/
Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.
Hello again. Happy July still, but, more importantly, welcome to another edition of Hot Psycom Summer. My guest today is Ciri Carpenter, and she's played a big role in one of the great resources for science communication. She helped found the open notebook. Let me just read from their mission statement because it's so good.
Speaker 1:It's a quote non-profit organization that is widely regarded as the leading online source of training and educational materials for journalists who cover science. They're dedicated to fostering a supportive, diverse and inclusive global community that enables reporters and editors who cover science to learn and thrive. Through their comprehensive library of articles on the craft of science journalism and extensive training and mentoring programs, they empower journalists at all experience levels around the world to tell impactful, engaging stories about science. Like you're inspired, right, I'm inspired. I mean, just go to theopennotebookcom and you'll find hundreds of articles, interviews with science reporters, a database of hundreds of article pitches that became published stories, masterclasses on a bunch of topics. It's all there.
Speaker 1:Plus, in 2020, siri released a book she edited of popular pieces from the open notebook. It's called the Craft of Science Writing, and so funny story or, like I don't know, interesting story whatever. I was reading the Craft of Science Writing last year because it's the kind of thing that I would read, and as I was reading Siri's introduction, I realized I was already familiar with her. So back in July 2020, I talked to social psychologist Mazurine Bonashi from my main podcast, opinion Science. She's one of the key figures in how we understand implicit bias, so I was very excited to talk with her, and she ended up telling a bunch of really great stories about her journey as an academic, and then, after we wrapped up, she told me that telling the stories behind her influential research reminded her of something that her former student has been up to.
Speaker 2:My student, siri Cartman, who became a science writer. She runs something called the Open Notebook, where she interviews journalists who have written a major piece about the story behind the story.
Speaker 1:So I knew about this before I knew about it. And here we are, three years later, closing this inception style loop to get the story behind the story behind the story behind the story. You get it. I was excited to talk to Siri about her own story going from a social psychology PhD student to this key player in science communication. By the way, as some very quick background, we start out talking about Siri's early days as a social psychologist and her work with Mazurine on implicit bias. She mentions this thing called the IAT, and if you've never heard that particular acronym before, it stands for Implicit Association Test, which is a popular way behavioral scientists attempt to measure implicit bias. So now you know what that is when it comes up.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm happy to share our conversation with you, so let's just get right into it. I was like I was wondering when you were in grad school and so when I looked up when you wrapped up working in Mazurine Banaji's lab at Yale, it's like it was like the thick of IAT time, right, like, wasn't it like right. Then you were like right there in the pocket of this whole thing kicking off and so like what, what were you doing as a social psychologist? Like if we start the story there like what were you expecting your life to look like when you walked into that lab on day one?
Speaker 2:When I went to grad school. So back then Mazurine Banaji was at Yale and so I went to grad school. I had been as an undergrad, I had been studying prejudice and stereotyping in the lab of another researcher at the University of Wisconsin and I was interested in this, then felt like pretty new area of implicit bias research and and went to study with Mazurine. And it was during that first I think that maybe it was that first semester of my first year that Mazurine and Tony Greenwald got to talking and and he had just cooked up this idea of the IAT and she came back to our lab talking about it and and we all started doing research one by one, kind of converting our research into using this new tool, the IAT, that was in development. And a number of years ago Mazurine told me that actually my dissertation was the first dissertation to use the IAT Because I just happened to fall in that that right time where it was brand new and I wasn't already working on my dissertation when the IAT came into existence.
Speaker 2:So anyway, when I got to grad school I was really interested in the subject of prejudice, stereotyping, implicit bias, racism, this whole intersection of ideas. I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life. I just knew that I was really interested in those ideas and I felt very passionate about about that work. And it was two or three years into my grad school that I learned, figured out about the existence of this, this field called science writing, and I had already started to feel like, although I was really interested in this work, I wasn't sure that I wanted to be a professor. I felt like you know, maybe I'm too much of a dilaton for that, maybe I want to be able to be spending my time thinking and working on lots of different things and not just kind of diving more and more narrowly into one area of thinking. And but I didn't know what that might look like for me Until until I had this kind of brainwave that science writing was, was a thing.
Speaker 1:So so, like how much of a thing was it at the time? Like, I'm trying to sort of like imagine this moment when probably the number of like online outlets for doing this kind of work like it just seems like now there's like a million different places and ways you could do this, where, where my guess is, it wasn't quite the same culture then. And so, like what, what were you sort of imagining like the work of it being in those earliest days?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's exactly right. It was very early. Internet, google didn't exist yet. I remember that at the moment where I thought, no wait, everybody who's writing these articles on Tuesdays for the New York Times, that seems to be their job Seems like this is a job. I think that's the job I want.
Speaker 2:I went home of course, I also didn't have a laptop or a cell phone, but at the end of the day I went home to my computer and I used this search engine called Alta Vista and and typed science writing into it and you know, lo and behold, yes, it's a thing, it's a profession. There's a whole national association of these people, and, but at the time, science writing and all of journalism, you know, the internet was was not the primary place where where science writing was taking place. It was still in print and in fact, I remember that the National Association of Science Writers had a page on their website that was called Science Writers who have Email. So that's that's the kind of context that we were working in, and really the first task for me was to figure out what is this thing Like starting with.
Speaker 2:Is science writing the right term for it? Oh, yes, it is Okay. Well, how do you get into that. What does it mean? What happens, what? What does it mean to be a science writer? I was very, very fortunate much more so than a lot of people and that my advisor, maasareen, was extremely supportive of my desire to become a science writer and and helped helped me foster that and gave me the space and time, particularly over the next two summers, to do internships in science writing, and that's that's how I got my start.
Speaker 1:It might just be because these are the stories that I focus on, but I get the sense that nowadays there's at least a good number of academics turn science writers and I'm curious at the time was was that path like fairly charted out, or were you mostly joining, like classical, like journalists who are doing science writing?
Speaker 2:I think there have always been a lot of people who have gone from science into science writing as opposed to going from some other area of journalism into science writing. It's, I think it's always been a mix, but I think it's it's often been a field that has, I mean, for decades, been a field that has attracted people with scientific training who are somewhere along the trajectory of becoming a scientist either they're an undergrad or a grad student or a postdoc or a working scientist and who start to feel like gee. You know, I love science. I'm interested in thinking about the science and talking about the science and writing about the science, but I'm less interested in like working at the bench, as they say, and so I don't think I was particularly unusual at that time and certainly not now. There's, you know, I still.
Speaker 2:Every day I talk with people coming into the field who are in grad school or postdocs or are just out of you know, kind of early career scientists and looking to make a career change. I think one thing that I think or I hope has changed is that it used to be very common to hear people talk about alternative careers, you know, if you were interested in getting a PhD in any field of science but then not becoming an academic scientist or an industry scientist. That was referred to as an alternative career and I have always pushed back against that idea because I just feel like this idea that you know, academia is the default and the only good option of what to do with an education in science is incorrect, and so to treat it as the as the default, and that everything else is kind of a lesser than alternative, is problematic.
Speaker 1:I don't know what it is, this set of interviews that I'm doing for this summer's series. I keep coming back to this question of what makes science journalism different from other forms of journalism. So, rather than as an alternative to academia, I'm curious to get your take on one. How do you define science journalism? What is this job Then? Also, is it different from other forms of journalism? If so, how?
Speaker 2:That's a really great question. The way that I think about it is that science journalism is a very multifaceted thing and it means many different things to different people in different contexts. So there is one kind of classical type of science journalism that means really specializing in some, perhaps some specific beat within science and writing for a specialized publication that's aimed at a public that is particularly interested in science. So think, for example, of somebody who is a reporter or an editor for Scientific American or for the front of book of Science Magazine or for Discover Magazine or any number of publications, media outlets, that are specifically focused on science in some way, either more generally or more specifically in one area of science, and are aimed at what you might think of as a science interested public. And then another strand of science journalism, another kind of classical strand, is newspaper journalism, like you see at the New York Times, the Science Times or the Washington Post or the LA Times or the Dallas Morning News. These days it's mostly the larger major metro papers or national papers that have a science section and have dedicated science reporters. It used to be the case that there were probably up to a couple of hundred newspapers that had a science section and that had a science desk, and that has really gone away and that number has dropped from. I think many years ago I read that the number had dropped from something like 150 newspapers to 19 or something that have a science desk, so that has really changed. Of course, for a long time now, we've been in an era where the internet is very mature and there are tons of online-only media outlets that are very prestigious. They win Pulitzer Prizes and they win national magazine awards and they garner a lot of respect, rightly.
Speaker 2:And then something that I think about a lot is I think that we should be thinking of science journalism not as just being stories that are 100% about science, but rather to think about the fact that science is part of every story and that local journalists TV journalists, radio journalists, people who work for local media outlets or hyper-local media outlets, regional magazines these are the places where most people get their news.
Speaker 2:Most people did not get their news about COVID, for example, from specialty publications. Most people got it from their local TV stations, radio stations, newspapers if they're lucky enough to have a newspaper, a local newspaper, and so I think it's really important that we not keep the coverage of science in a silo over here, where it's people who really seek out science news, will go and subscribe to this publication and read it. But rather we think about the ways that we can incorporate scientific information into many other kinds of stories, and that's something that we're spending a lot of time focusing on at the Open Notebook. I guess we haven't talked about the Open Notebook yet, but that focus on local journalism. It's always been true that science is part of every story. I think that it has never been more acutely obvious than since 2020.
Speaker 1:So it raises this other question of like. So in terms of the content maybe that's different, but in terms of the skill it takes to report science stories, do you think it's fundamentally different from other kinds of reporting? Because, particularly if we're looking for this kind of fusion, now all of a sudden everyone's a science journalist and so is that just. Oh yeah, you just like swap out who you're talking about, or do you have to put on an actually quite different hat when you're doing that kind of work?
Speaker 2:Certainly, there are technical challenges that come with reporting on science.
Speaker 2:If you are completely lost when it comes to reading a scientific paper or understanding basics about the scientific process, understanding the nature of statistics, the difference between an experiment and an observational study, there are core things about understanding science that play into covering science effectively, whether you're doing it in a really focused way, all the time it's your beat, or whether it's something that you incorporate into stories now and then.
Speaker 2:There are also a huge number of overlapping skills and necessities that come into being a science journalist or being any other kind of journalist being able to weigh claims in a way that is not overly credulous, understanding how to check facts, understanding how to represent diverse voices within your stories, understanding how to recognize conflicts of interest and where they might play into a story, those are things that are universal to all of journalism, or should be universal to all of journalism.
Speaker 2:So, yes, I think that the act of doing science journalism can sometimes feel different just because the subject matter can be so technical and can involve a lot of having to parse out meaning from jargon and so on. But if you think about it, every field of journalism has its own jargon. If I were trying to cover the US House of Representatives as a political reporter, I would be absolutely lost in the jargon, I'm sure. And whether you're covering travel, or politics, or education, or science or crime, all of these fields have their specialized material that you need to understand. So the same is true of science journalism. I would argue that these are not. That is not an unclimable barrier for journalists, but it is the case that it can feel like it, and so we need to try to help people find those points of connection in order to feel less overwhelmed by the prospect of covering science.
Speaker 1:So, to go back to your story, you finally decide all this stuff sounds great, I'm going to do it. What are you doing like first step? Like I am now a science writer or at least I get to call myself that, whether or not anyone else does what are those first steps that you take to do this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I can tell you about my path and even though that was like 20 years ago, it's still quite a familiar path for a lot of people if they're coming out of academia into science writing. So I mentioned that I started by Googling or not Googling there was no Google but searching for it and finding out that there's a national association of science writers. My first step was I went to that page that said science writers who have email and, like I emailed everybody on it Maybe it was like 20 people or something and I had very unfocused questions, but basically my question was like what is this and how does it work, and which is not the way that I recommend approaching an informational interview type of situation. But what can I say? And one of the people who I emailed was a young journalist named Charles Seif who now is a journalism professor at NYU. But back then he was a young journalist who had graduated, I think, with a math PhD from Yale and I think maybe he took pity on me because I was also at Yale and he felt an affinity or something, but he wrote back a very generous, long email. I wish I still had it. I don't have it, but I remember that he really just kind of explained how it works, how there are different areas of science writing, and he told me about this AAA mass media fellowship program which is still going today very strong. It's a really wonderful avenue into science writing for people in the sciences who are coming who are interested in science writing. And I was fortunate enough to get one of those fellowships.
Speaker 2:So the next summer I had my first internship in science writing. That was really my first foray into the field. I guess my first foray was I went to the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers, nasw, and for the first time got to meet other science writers and I was thrilling, I just absolutely loved it. And I roomed with a couple of other prospective science writers who I forget how I met them, but somehow we found each other and three of us shared a hotel room and then we'd come back and compare notes every night about what we had learned by talking to other science writers, just trying to figure it all out.
Speaker 2:But then that summer I had that internship at the Richmond Times Dispatch in Virginia through the AAA mass media fellowship and that was where I really got my start. I had this amazing mentor, aj Hostetler, who was the science writer for the Richmond Times Dispatch at the time and she was just a terrific mentor taught me a huge amount and by the end of that summer, or probably by the end of that first week, I just felt convinced like yep, this is what I want to do. It was great.
Speaker 1:And this is while you were in grad school.
Speaker 2:still right, Sort of yeah, I was still in grad school, feeling it out and, like I say, mazarene, one of the ways that she supported me was by letting me go often, have a summer of interning at a newspaper instead of working on my dissertation, and then she let me do the same thing again the next summer at a different internship Science News Magazine. That was to have that kind of running start, to get some training and experience. Get my feet wet in science writing while I was still working on my PhD was really a gift.
Speaker 1:Were you in those first four days? Were you only covering social science or were you whatever they threw at you? You had to, Whatever they threw at me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was all over the map. I did cover a little bit of social science, I think, but not much. I covered medicine and astronomy and space and physics and chemistry and study of the weak kinds of things and a little bit of more featurey kind of work and yeah, it was a real hodgepodge and as someone who had been feeling like oh I don't think I want to be so narrowly focused, like you have to be in academia then to go to like anything in any field of science could be part of my beat, was really thrilling.
Speaker 1:So that was an exciting part of it for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just the variety and the idea that you could take these sort of esoteric sounding studies and turn them into a story that you hope people would actually want to read and learning how to do that. Learning how to write in a way that wasn't the term that AJ, my mentor at Enrichments used, was muscle bound. To learn to write in a way that wasn't really academic and stilted and muscle bound, it was just a. It was a really thrilling experience. I had the time of my life that summer.
Speaker 1:Okay, I think it's probably about time we talk about the open notebook, and so, after getting your feet wet for a while, you start this like amazing thing that still is a resource for so many. So walk me through sort of like the initial idea for what this would end up as, and also kind of like what is this thing that you've been growing?
Speaker 2:Sure, well, I didn't start the open notebook right away. I was actually working in science writing for about 10 years before the open notebook came about. So I had a job for a couple of years out of grad school and then I was freelancing and freelancing, writing for various different publications, various topics, and I had gotten to be friends with Jeannie Erdman, who is a science and health writer in outside of St Louis, and Jeannie and I would chat on the phone regularly and kind of acted as accountability buddies for each other and talk about what we were working on and what we were procrastinating on and so on, and oftentimes we would find ourselves saying you know, I just read this really great story in the New York Times, I really just read this really great story and whatever publication, what a great story. I wish I had thought of that story, or wonder how they did that. I always say that for me, the open notebook was kind of born in a moment of flailing and procrastination, going in the sense that although I was doing work that was interesting to me, I felt like I wasn't maybe reaching my full potential as a reporter. I felt like I was, you know, struggling to understand how to pull ideas together and make them viable as stories that I could sell. And I was more often taking assignments from editors and then reporting those stories and writing them, but they hadn't originated with me. And I had a couple of experiences of doing stories that did originate with me and that were really meaningful, but I also felt like I couldn't replicate that, like they kind of felt like they dropped into my lap and so I really felt like I was troubled by this idea of just not really feeling like there was a secret out there that other people knew about how to find ideas and bring them to fruition as science stories. And Jeannie, I think, kind of felt the same way.
Speaker 2:And then one day I was, I will admit, completely procrastinating. I had some story that I needed to be working on and was procrastinating and I had this idea I had just read this story by Malcolm Gladwell about ketchup in the New Yorker and it was such a you know kind of quirky story, like I think the premise of it was sort of like there's all these kinds of mustard, but there's only one kind of ketchup. Why is that? And I just felt like I don't get like how do you approach a story like that, like, I know how to approach a story by reading about studies in journals and then writing about them no-transcript. You know, did you read the Journal of Ketchup studies? Like, where did this idea come from?
Speaker 2:And I had this idea that if I could just talk to Malcolm Gladwell about how he got the idea for that story and then what was the first thing that he did, that I would like understand how to do it all. It would solve all my problems. And so I emailed him and I thought, you know, he's a like famous writer, he's not going to write me back and I was just procrastinating, but he did have an email address on his website and so I emailed him and then, to my surprise, he wrote. He did write back and he said, sure, he would talk with me about that story. And he gave me a cell phone number and we had a call and I talked with him for just very generous of his time, like 45 minutes or something and he told me about the origins of that story and that conversation kind of extended from there to talking about, you know, the ins and outs of being a science writer and his experiences and how he finds stories and so on. It was great and it just kind of left me with this feeling like I want to do more of this, like I want to talk to more people about their stories, and so that, combined with those conversations I've been having with Jeannie, kind of, are what led to this idea of let's interview a bunch of people to get the story behind their story.
Speaker 2:And at first it was just we just wanted to do that for ourselves, just like we would do these interviews and then we would understand more about how to be good journalists. And it was only as we kind of got underway working on that that we thought maybe these are really interesting, maybe some other people would want to read these interviews as well. Maybe we should put them on a website somewhere. And there wasn't really a website to put them on. So we were like, well, maybe we should. Could we really? Could we spend $150 or whatever it was to buy a domain name and create a website?
Speaker 2:And so we did and that's how the Open Notebook was born was really just this idea of we're going to do some of these interviews. I think we thought maybe we would do like 15 or 20 of them and then that would be it. How many could you possibly need? And now it's almost 13 years later and we've published more than 500 articles at the Open Notebook. It's not just those story behind the story interviews, but lots and lots of deeply reported articles about the craft and we have multiple mentoring programs and workshops and courses and we're just a whole different beast. But it really started out with this idea of we're just trying to figure out how to do it.
Speaker 1:It's so funny. I mean I mentioned this before, but it just reminds me of doing this series where I was like I like this thing and I just want to talk to these people. Just figure out, how did you do that and what did you learn in the last? Like you're so much more experienced than me and you go and kind of like the same thing. Like honestly, I just want to talk to these people but like I guess I might as well share them. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:I'm able to record them. Yeah, I think there's kind of a secret sauce there that you know when a story, any kind of story, is born out of a situation where you are also the ideal audience, you know like you're doing it. You know when the questions have been sufficiently answered because they've been sufficiently answered for you. I think that is that's a real secret to success.
Speaker 1:Do you recall, like in those earliest ones, like insights that kind of changed the game for you, like did they help you? So, yes, you've built this resource for the world, but what did it do for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean ironically. Now my full-time job is running the open notebook.
Speaker 2:I'm not actually reporting and writing feature stories for magazines, but it did help me a lot. I think it took time. It wasn't like there was any one story that I read that interview or did that interview and then felt like, ah no, I get how to do it. One of the early insights really was that there are just many good ways to report a story and to tell a story, and so my idea that we would do you know 15 of these or something and then that would sort of cover it, was just wildly incorrect, because you know, every time that we interview somebody new about the story behind their story or we annotate a story to really dig into what makes it so good, it's different from every other one. And so, in a way, I think that experience of just seeing, like interviewing these people who I admired, and seeing that they too sometimes felt like they were flailing, they too sometimes procrastinated, they too, you know, had a lot of, you know, anxieties over whether they were good enough, whether they were cut out for this was it called me down and, you know, gave me more confidence. Generally it didn't. There was no like single magic key that then I unlocked it and knew how to do this other, this thing that I had been struggling to do, but I think it did give me a greater sense of I think I belong in this community. I don't. There's nothing. There's nothing broken about me that makes me the one person who struggles to figure these things out.
Speaker 2:And something that my good friend, julie Ray Meyer, said to me one time along many years ago was you know, this feels like it's hard because it's hard, not because there's something wrong with you, and I felt like that was an epiphany for me. I repeat that a lot to other people because I think it can be really easy to feel like if something is feeling hard to you, it might be because you're not good enough. So one of the things that I hope we promulgate through the open notebook is this sense of this is hard. It's a set of complex skills. It takes time to learn them. You probably will be learning them for the rest of your life, but you can do it. And there's a community of people here who, as it has borne out, are extremely interested in, and happy to, and motivated to, hold out a hand to help others find their way as well, and that's what's happened.
Speaker 2:I mentioned we've published I don't know the number, but it's, you know. I know like a year ago or something, we started saying more than 500. So maybe it's like more than 560 or something. These are stories with you know, there are hundreds, thousands of science writers who have contributed to these stories as sources and as writers and who are collectively offering up. You know, this vast amount of hard one insight about how to be a good science journalist and that's, you know, tremendous act of community generosity. That is really inspiring to me.
Speaker 1:What I love about too, that all that there's just so much on there is. You know, usually we say we don't know what we don't know. But it's a great way to be like, oh, these, like now I know what I don't know, because it's like there's all these articles that, like I wouldn't have even thought that this would be something I'd need to think about.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right.
Speaker 2:I remember starting out at one point when we started doing these reported features, so we were thinking about topics, not just interviews about a specific story, but topics that we might want to cover.
Speaker 2:I had a list of, like a spreadsheet of, you know, like kind of five general topics and three ideas in each of them or something, and somehow I thought that there was just like going to be a finite list of topics that you could possibly cover, and then the thing would have run its course. And I don't know, maybe that number is finite, but every day I'm having to turn away pitches for great story ideas, but we just, you know, we don't have. We publish one story a week, we don't have the resources to do more than that and can't do everything. So, you know, I don't have any sense that the ideas are slowing down. What is happening is that we're able to go deeper and, you know, to tackle more granular ideas, because we've now, we've covered some of the, you know, we've done some of the low hanging fruit. So to me, the stories just keep getting more and more interesting because they're getting, you know, just more and more finely honed.
Speaker 1:And speaking of pitches for stories, that was one of the things, so one of the.
Speaker 1:I'll plug the book up top, which is in large part a compendium of things that have been on the open notebook in addition to some other stuff, but the section on pitching was the one thing as an academic that I come to and like. So what is this mysterious process that has to happen before any of this takes off? And I remember my favorite entry that I read last when I had the book last summer was an interview on common errors, where it was like an interview with editors from different outlets, and it was just like, oh God, like how useful is this to just talk to the people who are combing through these constantly to be like what are the you know the sins of a bad pitch? But so, in addition to that, the open notebook also has this pitch database, which also strikes me as quite a useful resource. That is otherwise like how else could you possibly come to a resource like that if it weren't for someone or some organization collecting them? So what is this and how could people use it?
Speaker 2:Sure, so maybe I'll talk a little bit about just what is this pitching business all about, and I think the thing to that you have to know about science journalism in particular. This is also true of some other areas of journalism, but in science journalism it is a field that is heavily dependent on freelancers, people who don't work on the staff of any particular publication, but they are self employed and they write stories for a variety of different publications. That's what I did for 10 years, and I don't think we have the solid numbers, but I would guess that at least half of science journalists are freelancers, if not more. And so if you are going to be a freelancer, that means that you have to be able to sell editors at publications on your story ideas. If you want to write those stories and get paid for them, you have to convince someone to actually publish them. It's not like if you just worked for it, for the New York Times, and you can just tell your editors your ideas for the next stories and they'll tell you which ones to go for and I've never worked for the New York Times, so I don't really know. But you have some sense of like I'm going to be writing stories for the New York Times and they have to get approval, I presume, but it's a different process. But if you're a freelancer, you need to always be selling story ideas to editors, and you do that by writing what's called a pitch letter or a query letter, and it's just an email that tells an editor I'm proposing a story idea to you. Here's what the angle is on the story and here's what the story is all about. Here is why it's timely. Here's what makes it original. Here's why your publication or your readers would be interested in this story. Here's why I'm the person to do it.
Speaker 2:And so pitch letter is basically a piece of persuasive writing and it can be anywhere from a few sentences. If you're real familiar with a publication, or it's a real short story or something and you already have an in there, it could be as short as a few sentences. More commonly, it's in the realm of two to five paragraphs describing your story and why they should hire you to do it, and I had never seen a pitch letter by anybody else before becoming a freelancer. I was just completely guessing what it should look like when you email an editor to pitch a story, and I think that's probably true for most freelancers. We just that's not something that's publicly available normally and we don't know what it looks like and we just kind of we might ask friends for ideas or something, but we're kind of stumbling around in the dark trying to figure out what that should look like.
Speaker 2:And so the pitch database was actually Jeannie's idea that we would create. We would solicit other freelancers to share pitches that they had written that were successful, and then we'd also share the link to the published story and like the open notebook as a whole. It's something that I think we initially thought of. As you know. Maybe it would have I don't know what we thought maybe we thought it would have like a dozen or 15 pitches or something, and now it has close to 300. And we actually are looking actively to expand it to be more inclusive of other kinds of stories that aren't represented in the pitch database right now, like radio stories and podcasts and so on, for example.
Speaker 2:So that's what the pitch database is all about is you can go and you can search by publication or by news versus features, versus profiles, or you can just browse things and look for inspiration and understanding about how other writers have written pitch letters, as the article that you talked about reading in the book.
Speaker 2:It was one of our very early stories. I think it was written in 2011. And it's a roundtable discussion amongst a bunch of editors led by Laura Helmuth, who now is the editor in chief of Scientific American. She interviewed a bunch of editors about what their pet peeves are, about pitches that they get and what not to do, and that article actually has for many years been the most popular article on our website. It was a no brainer to include it in the craft of science writing when we were coming up with this book, because we just knew it would be so popular. And even though I think maybe every single one of those editors who were part of that roundtable no longer works for the same publication where they worked at the time, it's still, you know, it's really evergreen and I think people freelancers feel like it's a breath of relief to have the curtain pulled back and understand what editors are really thinking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's super valuable, especially when you just have no concept right and you would otherwise just be guessing. And I have to imagine that these editors get a bunch of bizarre pitches, not because the writer doesn't have anything to say, but because there's these like unwritten norms.
Speaker 2:There's so many we talk a lot about.
Speaker 2:We think a lot about issues of equity and inclusion in science journalism, and one of one area where that's an issue is that there's this sort of unwritten curriculum.
Speaker 2:You know, this is true in many, many different fields, but in science journalism there is an unwritten curriculum about how you approach an editor and it has to do with you know. A lot of it is sort of just issues of etiquette, like how soon can you follow up if you don't hear back from them? Or something as basic as should your pitch be like a word document that's an attachment in the email, or should it be in the body of an email? Should you link to your writing samples or should you include them as PDFs, like how would you know if you don't know? And one of the things that we are overarching goal at the Open Notebook is to demystify what can be a field that feels like it has a lot of barriers to entry, particularly for people who come from marginalized backgrounds, other historically underrepresented backgrounds or places in the world where there is not a robust infrastructure for training people in journalism.
Speaker 1:Okay. So to wrap up and get to something that I think might be a tangible takeaway, a theme that I see in stuff that you wrote in the book and also just throughout the Open Notebook, is there should be an emphasis on story rather than topic. That sort of strikes me as a mantra, that's maybe like a guiding one, and so could you explain a little bit like what that means and how you could navigate being better at finding stories and not topics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. That is something that writers hear from editors all the time Pitch me a story, not a topic. And then writers can be like what do you mean by that? And you know, I think for a long time I didn't understand what does that mean? I'd like throw something at the wall and see if it sticks. And if they said great angle, I'd be like super, but I don't really know.
Speaker 2:But when we talk about pitching a story and not a topic, or writing about a story and not a topic, what we're really saying is that there has to be every story has to have some kind of central driving idea. What I often say when I give workshops is just like every bus needs a driver, every story needs a central driving idea and basically it is a question or an argument or a piece of news. That is the core reason for being of that story, where, if you had to just tell someone in one sentence what the story is all about, you would be able to do that and your sentence would have a verb and it would be a complete sentence. So an example of a topic might be climate change or COVID, vaccines or chat, gpt, or there's a bazillion topics out there, but a story is something more than that. A story is a small sliver of that topic that encompasses some question or argument or happening, you know, piece of news that is worth telling people about on its own.
Speaker 2:In your judgment, and that art of understanding what is a story is a really core piece of being a science writer. Because, for example, there are thousands of scientific journals publishing articles every single day, but not every scientific development adds up to a story. For a general reader it might be very important science. It's very often very incremental science. But just because it's science that needed to be done doesn't mean that in itself it's a story. So figuring out what is a story is a core capacity that a science writer would want to develop.
Speaker 1:And it seems like story doesn't necessarily mean like a narrative right, like your. Story means something a little bit different. Uh-huh, am I into something?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you are. So it's a really important point that you make, because sometimes what people we've learned? There was a journal article that came out in the last six months or so and I'm kind of blanking on where but it turned out that when journalists and writers talk about storytelling, what they mean is crafting a piece of text or it could be an audio story or whatever but crafting material in a way that is going to engage people's interest and hold it and that has some kind of arc to it, there's a beginning and a middle and an end and that makes meaning out of disorder and so on. It turns out that a lot of people, when they hear journalists talking about storytelling, they think that that means making things up. So it's actually can be counterproductive to talk about storytelling as a journalistic goal, because to the extent that people think that you're saying you know, we're just presenting our alternative facts, that's a problem.
Speaker 2:But yeah, so when we talk about stories, oftentimes it is the case that the best stories have narrative in them, that there's a protagonist, that there's some source of tension, that there's an arc that pulls you through the story, that there are scenes, action, dialogue. These kind of classic elements of story are important, but that doesn't mean that the form of every story, every journalism story, needs to be a pure narrative. Oftentimes, you know, there are many, many great stories that are mostly explanatory stories.
Speaker 1:What is an explanatory story? Could you elaborate on that a little bit?
Speaker 2:Imagine, you know, early in the pandemic, when you were trying to understand whether you should get the Pfizer vaccine or get the Moderna vaccine, and maybe you read a story that explained how these two types of vaccines are similar and how they're different and helped it helped you make a decision, perhaps, about what to do. So that was probably an explanatory story. It wasn't a narrative in the sense of like learning about the life history of the founding CEO of Moderna and the role that Dolly Parton played in the vaccines development and blah, blah, blah. It was just explaining information to you in a way that you could use. So that's an example of kind of a service-y type of explanatory story. Other types of explanatory journalism could be.
Speaker 2:You know, next year we're going to have a total solar eclipse in the US again, which is going to be fantastic and I hope everyone who has the ability to go see it. There are going to be a million stories out that just explain about eclipses and how they work and, you know, and probably other stories that are narrative and like let a thousand flowers bloom. They will all be great. But there's a real place in journalism just for explaining things to people, telling them about a new finding and what it means, or telling them about an event that has happened or is going to happen. And there might be little bits of narrative in some of those stories, some more than others.
Speaker 1:But yeah, so I'm getting sort of like it. Rather than being a reference piece where I could just sort of pick up and put down wherever I need information, a story is something that is its own unit, right, that carries me through from the beginning to the end, and that's what makes it a story and not just like well, here's six things that I've learned about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you think about the difference between a really engaging magazine article and a Wikipedia article, you don't want a magazine article to read like a Wikipedia article. Wikipedia has its important place in the world, but it is not, by and large, storytelling.
Speaker 1:If you were to encourage people to build this muscle particularly, my guess is academically minded. People are kind of a stick to the facts and this is what they did and this is what they found. What more do you want from me? Are there ways in which people could try to flex that story muscle?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and one of the points that we harp on a lot at the Open Notebook is just that there are many things that can draw people into a story and that you can use narrative in very small ways, even in the shortest stories.
Speaker 2:And narrative is not antithetical to factuality. And I think maybe that's the most important thing is that if you have a story about science to tell, telling it in a way that involves people and human decision making or motivations or drama or challenges or whatever, does not take away from the factual validity of what you're talking about. It just makes it something that people are more likely to be interested in actually reading. And a really kind of important thing to remember if you're interested in telling science stories is that most of the time nobody has to read them. So if you want to write something or record something or make a video about something and you want anyone to actually read it or listen to it or watch it, you've got to make it interesting. And that's really what it's all about is to be accurate. Accuracy, of course, is the lowest bar. We have our story. If they're not accurate, they're not journalism. But facts are not what motivate people and change people's minds. That's what stories do.
Speaker 1:Well, this is great and I appreciate all of it, all the work that went into making this open notebook resource available and thanks for taking the time to talk about it.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for talking with me, I enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:Thank you to Siri Carpenter for telling her story and talking about her work. If you haven't already, what you need to do now is just plug in theopennotebookcom into your internet machine and poke around. Then you'll order Siri's book the Craft of Science Writing and be better off for it. If you're too distracted right now by the car in front of you or whatever, just don't worry, like links are in the show notes.
Speaker 1:This series on science communication is a special presentation of my podcast, opinion Science, a show about the science of our opinions, where they come from and how they change. You can subscribe any old place where they have podcasts your Apple's, your Spotify's, your st well, stitcher's out of business now, actually, so you'll have to find something else and be sure to check out OpinionSciencePodcastcom for all the episodes and everything else you could possibly dream of. And again, whoever you are, I hope you're enjoying the show and I'm hoping this summer series will reach folks with a keen interest in science communication. So please tell people about it. Just online, email a friend, I don't know, tell your babysitter, anyone who would be interested in boosting their own communication skills, especially scientists who would like to reach beyond academia. Ok, thank you so much for listening. My birthday was the other day, so happy birthday to me, or whatever. I'll go eat some more Secret Birthday Cake and I'll see you back here next week for another look at the work of science communication.
Speaker 3:I think the reason why they're so delightful is because they're talking about the thing that they probably love the most or that they know the most about, and they're probably so delightful because no one ever cares as much as we do about what they're talking about.
Speaker 3:Like for the most part, someone who studies barnacles is probably jokingly told like don't talk too much about barnacles. But then they come on my podcast and I'm like you tell me everything you know about barnacles. I was going to say here you fire hose me about barnacles, and they're like yes, and so I think you're catching them at like a moment of someone walking through the gates of Disneyland, where they're like here I go, I'm good to do my thing, and so I think that feeling celebrated is a great way to bring out the best in people. My name is Allie Vord and I'm the host of the Allergy's podcast and I'm a psychomer and a TV presenter for shows like Brain Child on Netflix and Innovation Nation on CBS and Science Channel and some other stuff, and I'm talking to you from a shed in my yard.