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My family still thinks it a bit strange that I'm a journalist. When I was younger, I was shy, and as a big ol' introvert, I'll often need a break after spending time with big groups of people. So it's strange to them that I've chosen a job that involves picking up the phone and cold calling people or approaching strangers and asking them questions.
The longer I've been a journalist, though, the more I've heard and collected comments from other reporters-great reporters-who are shy or who hesitate to approach subjects. There are lots of them. John McPhee, for instance, told NPR last year: "When I first go to interview someone is something I'm not very found of... it's hard to walk in through the door and start talking to somebody."
He gets around this problem in part by writing long stories, in which he gets to spend time with his subjects, instead of meeting new ones every day. For me, one trick is to remind myself that, always, inevitably, picking up the phone or going out the door will get me better, more interesting information. Often, I'll get it more quickly than if I tried to find it noodling around the internet. Plus, some of the best information isn't out there yet.
Last year, I was covering green technology, a topic which can get pretty geeky. There's a lot of research aimed at improving biofuels, for instance, and most of it has to do with finding better enzymes to digest different plant-based sources of energy more efficiently. (The more efficient the process, the more affordable and commercially viable biofuels will be.) This idea for this post started out along those lines: a team at Tulane had come up with a quirky fuel source: newspapers.
As they were aiming to get press attention, highlighting newspapers was a smart move. Journalists are suckers for newspapers. The real focus of the research, though, was a bacteria, called TU-103, which produced the biofuel butanol in an aerobic environment. And what I found more interesting than what it ate was where the team had found it-a bit of information that I learned only when I got on the phone.
The bacteria, it turned out, had come from New Orleans' Audubon Zoo. The bacteria that live in the digestive tracts of animals are really good at breaking down cellulose and other plant material into simpler compounds. Scientists are looking for bacteria and enzymes that do exactly that. In practice, that means that this particular team picked up feces samples from zoo animals and profiled the bacteria they found there.
But other teams, it turned out, had gone to Costa Rica to source bacteria from the guts of the many species of termites that live there. A team in Mississippi had look to panda poo. Less exotic creatures, like cows, had also had scientists poking around their rumens to find promising specimens. I thought the idea was fun enough that I wrote another post on it. (The New York Times thought it was an interesting idea, too, so I feel safe saying I was right!) It's experiences like these that remind myself of when I'm sitting there, convincing myself that I have enough material, that I don't need to call the next person on my list of potential interviewees. There's always another great fact out there.
