A: Learning how to communicate with the media is something that takes time. It's not something that we train people to do. It's not something that I think people are instinctively very good at. And I think, early on in your career, you can make a lot of mistakes. I think the one thing I will say, having worked with the media a lot over the years, is that usually if something is in the press, that you read about yourself or your work and you say, "I didn't say that," it's almost certain that you did. The journalist usually gets it right, and what happened is that you weren't paying attention, you weren't being careful when you were speaking to the journalist.

So, one tip that I learned early on is that when you're starting out and you get a call from a journalist to talk about your research, the best thing to do is to say that it is not convenient to talk right then, and to please find a time when you can set up a meeting to talk. Then you have time to gather your thoughts, write down some things that you want to be sure say. It's a bad idea to wing it; that's when a lot of mistakes get made.

A second thing I think is to understand that in today's media world, things are released as sound bites, and therefore, you don't want to give some long complicated, elaborate, technical answer to a question because it can't be used very well. You need to learn how to speak in clear, direct, and simple statements that capture the essence of what you want to say.

Sometimes researchers will have a finding that they want to go to the press about, instead of waiting for the press to come to them. So, the third lesson is if you want to do a media campaign, you have to step back and strategize about how to frame the issue. What are the talking points going to be? You have to learn to say the same thing over and over and over again. I don't think it's wise for us as scientists to shy away from the media. I mean, our work is funded by the public for the most part. They have a right to know what we're finding, but you really need to practice and to think about what you're doing.

A: Yes, and I think the problem is believing that your study speaks for itself. Studies don't talk. People talk. And in working with the press is somewhat like marketing in the sense that you have a product which is the result of your study that you're trying to place out there. And, you know, we're deluged with news every day. It's very hard to get people to pay attention to what you want them to, and so it needs to be framed and presented in a way that's going to appeal to the media or appeal to the generalist.

One thing that we do in our work is cultivate long term relationships with journalists. Over the years you develop a group of friends in the press whom you can go to in advance. And so, if we're about to release a study and I know that I want to get it on NPR, I will call those reporters and say, "I think this is something that you might be interested in covering."