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Epi Wit & Wisdom Resources
“Dos and
Don’ts” in Dealing With the Press
This article was prepared from
remarks made by Dr. Jay Winsten at last month’s
meeting of the American College of Epidemiology in Boston. Dr. Winsten
is Director of the Office of Health Policy Information at the Harvard
School of Public Health and has been involved in a project to improve
the quality of science and health policy news reporting. He has
conducted over 20 separate interviews with journalists from the
nation’s leading newspapers, magazines, and networks. These interviews
have provided information on factors which influence news judgements
and which constrain the quality of science and health policy news
coverage.
Some specific do’s and don’ts
were suggested by Dr. Winsten to help scientists work more effectively
with the press.
1) Be Prepared
If you are planning to publish a
major study, it’s essential that you coordinate its public release
with your co-authors. Your colleagues may be very fastidious in the
conduct of their research, but may be rather freewheeling in their
extemporaneous comments when it comes to talking publicly about the
importance and implications of their findings. In the same way that
you negotiate what to include in the published paper, you ought to
negotiate and come to a consensus as to what you are prepared to claim
publicly. Don’t wait to discover conflicting attitudes on this
question when you pick up your morning newspaper! It sometimes can be
helpful to identify one public spokesman for the study; on the other
hand, you may prefer to share that burden, particularly if a
substantial number of press inquiries is anticipated.
2) Be Available
Make a special effort to keep
your calendar open at the time that your major study is scheduled for
release if there is reason to believe that it may attract significant
media attention. You may have to go out of your way to determine the
precise release date. For example, the weekly release date of the New
England Journal of Medicine is Thursday. Reporters who have pledged to
respect the release date receive their copies of the Journal by first
class mail on Monday or Tuesday. They will be writing their stories by
Wednesday for publication in Thursday morning newspapers. Hence,
Wednesday should be kept open on your calendar. (If the calls don’t
come, you’ll have the luxury of time to catch up on your mail!)
3) Second Wave
After the initial set of press
inquiries coinciding with the release of a newsworthy study, there
will be an immediate second wave of inquiries from television
stations, radio stations and newspapers which did not have advance
knowledge of the study. These people will be playing catch-up. They
often will have 1 - 4 hours to write their stories. They will
frequently be general assignment reporters who may well have not seen
your paper but only a wire service story, and they are at high risk of
making errors. Your own reputation is at stake, and many of your
friends and colleagues in other fields will get their first exposure
to your work through these press reports. If you’re intending to
assist them, they will require a rapid response on your part.
4) Prepared Statement
It can be useful, particularly
if you’re not accustomed to dealing with the press, to prepare in
advance a formal statement which summarizes your study in lay terms
and which includes statements about the importance, the relevance, and
the implications of the study. That prepared statement can serve as a
vehicle for negotiating with your co-authors what you’re prepared to
claim publicly.
5) Ask Questions
When you receive a telephone
call from a reporter, there are a number of important house-keeping
chores which should precede the actual interview. Before an interview,
find out who the reporter is--who he or she works for--and write it
down. Is this person a staff writer or a freelancer?
6) More Questions
Before an interview, try to
determine the degree of sophistication of the reporter with regard to
your subject matter. Is he or she a science writer, or a general
assignment reporter? Has he read your paper? Try through various
questions to gauge the degree of familiarity of this reporter with
research in your field so that you will know how much knowledge to
assume in your answers.
7) Ground Rules
Prior to proceeding with an
interview, negotiate ground rules--and be careful here--you must take
the initiative to negotiate any ground rules you want to negotiate. If
you don’t do so, the assumption of the reporter will be that
everything you say can be quoted. In most cases, if it’s an interview
about your research, there is no solid reason for declining to go
on-the-record. You simply make the reporter’s job that much tougher if
you don’t. The reporter can’t put himself in the position of being the
expert, and, therefore, has to quote others. On the other hand, if
you’re called for comment on another investigator’s work, and if you
have concerns about that work, you may or may not want to talk for
attribution. But it’s critical that you talk, because that reporter,
if he’s going to perform his job effectively, needs to know about a
range of attitudes and views towards that work, if such a range
exists. You can negotiate a rule whereby you will talk not for
attribution, stating that your name must not be cited; you may also
wish to insure that the name of your institution will not be cited,
because in some cases it’ll be obvious to others in your field who was
speaking, if the institution is cited. So you want to negotiate
attribution. Parenthetically, if you’re called about a controversial
matter in science, such as an alleged case of a fraud involving one of
your colleagues, and if you have not worked previously with the
reporter such that relationship of mutual trust has developed over
time, be very careful if you decide to talk with that person; be
careful to restate the ground rules in every conversation. If there is
something that you don’t want to see in print, either from you or
others, follow carefully the dictum, “If you don’t want it known,
don’t tell anyone.” A reporter, once told something by you on
background, may attempt to convince others to tell him on the record
what you said on background; he would not have known to look for this
if you had not disclosed it.
8) Call Backs
You may want to negotiate what
are called “call backs” or “check backs,” whereby a reporter will
agree, if asked and if time permits, to call you back and read you
direct quotes attributed to you. And to also read you the lead-in to
those direct quotes. (Some reporters will occasionally go even
further, and read back the entire story although this is uncommon.)
9) Typical Questions
As the actual interview on your
research progresses, these are the kinds of questions the reporter
will be seeking answers to:
• What led you to undertake this
study?
• Have similar findings been
reported elsewhere?
• From what other directions are
researchers attacking the same questions? Who are the pioneers in this
field (in addition to yourself!)?
• What are the general
limitations of your research approach?
• Are there risks associated
with your research?
• Are there alternative
interpretations of your data?
• What future directions can be
anticipated in your research?
• What are the next steps?
• Who else in this field can I
call for comment?
• What are the possible
applications of your research?
• What might it lead to that
would be of interest and benefit to the public?
In all of these questions the
reporter is trying to gauge the true face of the research, making the
assumption that you are presenting the best face.
10) Final Check
As you proceed through the
substance of the interview, don’t make the false assumption that only
the reporter can ask questions. Check from time to time to make sure
that the reporter is hearing correctly what you are saying. You can
ask him to repeat what you have said--but be careful that your tone is
not condescending because many of these people have been in the field
10 - 20 years, and many of them are very very good. At the end of the
interview, you can ask the reporter to sum up the key points as he or
she has understood them.
Published October
1994
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