About a month ago, Lee suggested I write a post about being interviewed by the press. It came up because I had recently used up a minute of my fame (“in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes”) on a BBC World Service piece about my observatory. It’s a complicated but fascinating topic that sends out little threads in a dozen directions.

The talents needed to do science are rather orthogonal to the talents needed to explain science. The best scientists are not necessarily the best interviews or popularizers. (Or bloggers!) Sometimes, of course, they are… like Richard Feynman.

But it is important that someone do the interviews. Our astronomy takes money; the money comes from the general public, in one way or another; the people who ultimately pay our salaries, and give us the cool toys to play with, deserve to know what we’ve done with their resources. 

While it is claimed that the Space Program gave us Teflon (not true, by the way) or that astronomy improves the Gross National Product by encouraging young people to become engineers (a stretch, with an element of truth), those aren’t the reasons why astronomers are paid to do astronomy.

Our culture supports our work because, ultimately, we are here to feed a common human hunger to Know. In a real sense, we’re in the entertainment business. The cool photos of the Horsehead Nebula satisfy something in the human soul. But the Astronomy Picture of Day stuff is like the flashy top-ten song that makes you go buy the CD; the hope is that eventually you’ll also listen to the more subtle but ultimately more beautiful song further down the list… which in astronomy would be, say, the details of plasma physics that explains the colors of the nebula. I think the physics is even more beautiful than the image, but it takes a lot of work to get there.

And that physics can’t be explained in a 30 second sound bite. 

Thus we get to the frustrations of media interviews. You, the scientist, have a wonderful story to tell. But explaining it may make you sound like the guy who can’t tell a joke, who gets tangled up in the details and never gets to the punch line.

And you have little control over how it gets told. You’re at the mercy of an interviewer who, if they ever took even one university level science course, probably didn’t do very well in it. (I speak as someone who has had to try to teach astronomy to journalism students.)

From the journalist’s point of view, of course, life is no easier. This crazy science story that their editor told them to cover is one of five completely different stories that they have to pretend to be experts on today. (And it’s probably on a topic they hated, because they never understood it when they had to take it in college.)

Worse, the editor doesn’t want it good; the editor wants it now. Stories are the filler between the advertisements, and today’s newspaper will be lining the bird cage tomorrow. (I also speak as someone whose first career choice was to be a journalist, working three summers as an intern on a newspaper before I learned that it was easier to do astronomy than to interview strangers.)

So the path of least resistance is to cycle up the same clichés; if a phrase has become used so often that it has become trite, then it probably means it won’t offend anybody and so it is safe to use again. And hearing it over again brings a certain comfort of familiarity to the audience. Who cares if it isn’t true, or even logically self-consistent?

What this actually means, of course, is that there is an opportunity here for both the astronomer and the journalist. If the astronomer can come up with a new sound bite, everyone’s life is a lot easier. The journalist has a story; the astronomer has a chance to actually sidestep an old established half-truth. (And create your own new cliché!)

But that means the burden is on us, the astronomers. Writing a popular version of our science is as much work, and just as important to do, as writing up a scientific paper. It takes a special set of skills. If you aren’t good at it, admit it: and ask for help. And give help to the one doing it who asks you for help.

I’m the glib one at my observatory. I know that; that is one of my jobs here. (Also, at the moment, I am the only native English speaker in our Rome headquarters, which is an issue when half the interviewers coming here work in English.) That’s why I am the designated blogger. 

But that’s also why I have wound up, for instance, recently writing half a dozen articles about Cosmology — including the entry for the next edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia — even though my field of astronomy, meteorites, is about as far from the Big Bang in space and time as you can find in astronomy. 

But that may also be why I am not a bad choice for such articles. I am far enough removed to see the forest for the trees, to see the shape of the story that an outsider — like me — finds interesting; but at the same time I am close enough that I can ask the real experts and have a chance of understanding what I was getting wrong, and how to put it right.

It’s easy to complain — as I too often do — that reporters keep asking us the same questions. (That’s like complaining that every year, first year students keep making the same mistakes!) In fact, that is an opportunity. Every time I get interviewed, I have my own comfort in knowing what is likely to be coming, and knowing from experience what sort of answers work. Like a vaudeville performer who’s done the same act for years, I know how to pace the story, what details can be skipped over, where the laugh lines are. 

That BBC interview was spur of the moment. They just wanted to film “something interesting” as background for a different interview, saw my meteorites, and had me step in front of the camera. I didn’t even have time to change out of my jeans and sweatshirt. 

The most common question I have been asked, about that interview, was “what did your sweatshirt say?” It was a gag Christmas present from my friend Dan Davis, given my job at the Vatican Observatory. It reads, “Protons have Mass? I didn’t know they were Catholic!” 

I’m not sure the BBC reporters got the joke… but some of the viewers might have. That’s “guerrilla” journalism; and a topic for another post.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 7th, 2009 at 9:50 am and is filed under Daily life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.