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Scientists love revealing secrets about the world that no one else knew about before, and science journalists are the same way. So how might a science writer go about doing that? Find an obscure backdoor.
Science journalism typically focuses on major journals such as Nature and Science. These journals each give journalists who have written at least three stories for major news outlets what is known as embargo access, a sneak peak at papers about a week before they are formally published. This lead time is supposed to give reporters time to ask scientists questions about their work, since science is seen as a trickier to cover than, say, a city council meeting. Publishing a story on embargoed research before its embargo date and time can suspend that writer's embargo access for weeks to months, which is why people generally don't violate embargo.
The problem for science reporters who would like to write about something no one else knows about is that journals give every reporters equal access to stories. Everyone usually writes about the same things.
There are loopholes, however...
So the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science sends out an email to reporters that highlights about six to eight embargoed papers appearing in that journal the next week, giving a paragraph-long press release on each of these papers, as well as contact info for the corresponding authors of the papers and any images, video or audio that might be available. These are the PNAS papers that science journalists usually write about week to week.
However, PNAS puts out more than six to eight papers per week. Just because the others don't get highlighted doesn't mean they're not newsworthy...
What I generally do is hop on the password-protected site PNAS has for journalists with embargo access and look at all the embargoed papers the journal has coming out the next week. Well, those with interesting titles, at least.
One example was "Stone tool production and utilization by bonobo-chimpanzees (Pan paniscus)." Bonobos are with chimpanzees, the other living member of the genus Pan, our closest extant relatives. They too are remarkably smart, and endlessly of interest given how they often use sex rather than violence to solve their problems. Investigating tool use on their part is interesting, since it's a way of understanding what mental capabilities our last common ancestor might have possessed, shedding light on what talents the founders of the human lineage may or may not have had.
The researchers discovered that bonobos could produce "a significantly wider variety of flint tool types than hitherto reported," and "such tool production and utilization competencies reported here in Pan indicate that present-day Pan exhibits Homo-like technological competencies." An intriguing find, if true. The research also involves Kanzi, a bonobo that past studies found had remarkable language and tool skills, and having such a memorable character in a story is a good way for the average reader to remember other facets of that story.
I wrote an email to an editor pitching this paper as the kernel of a story. The body of the pitch just consisted of two sentences: "The apes known as bonobos can make a significantly wider variety of stone tool types than previously known, up to what researchers say are human-like technological competencies. While this will appear in next week's PNAS, it was not mentioned in their press release." The first sentence revealed why the story might be interesting to readers; the second showed that the information was new ("new" being the operative word in "news," after all) and that it might not widely get written about, giving the editor a scoop.
And so mine was the first story out on this research. As is often the case with science, the key here was to take knowledge everyone has access to and look at it in a different light and mine out insights. A scientific background is key here as well—knowing that bonobos are interesting apes, and that stone tool use on their part might be relevant to better understanding human origins.
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Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
