 Dr. Esme Fuller-Thompson is a professor and director of the Institute for Life, Force and Aging at the University of Toronto. She is cross-appointed to the faculties of social work, medicine and nursing. Her research has been widely cited in the media including the New York Times, Forbes, Time Magazine, Toronto Star and the CDC. Her recent publications using the CLSA data are on immigrant health and depression during the pandemic. So now I will pass it along to Dr. Fuller-Thompson. Thank you so much, Jennifer, for that kind introduction and I'm really delighted to be here with you. I was approached about doing a presentation and I realised this is the presentation I would have liked to have received in my first five years out of my PhD and because it turns out that press releases are super straightforward and easy, it's just nobody tells you about them or at least nobody told me about it until I was several years in. So what happened was media relations, maybe I've been 27 years at U of T, so it was probably like 20, 25 years ago, media relations at U of T came by to one of our faculty meetings and they said, pitch us stories. What kind of papers do you have coming out? We want to do a profile. So I pitched a story and they wrote a press release and they spent a whole week on it because it's not their area. So they read it, they developed quotes, they sent it back, there was back and forth like three times and I was like, okay, there's a press release. And then within a year or two, two other journals that I was publishing in, they also approached me about a paper that was coming out in their journals and did a press release and it was the same process, it was back and forth and it took a week and it was a big process. But then when I sat down and I looked at these three press releases next to each other, I realized there's a formula to it and now that you know the formula, then it's not going to be a problem, right? It's just a matter of doing it. So the media relations officers in your university, their job is to get your research out there and their metrics are how many articles people get, how many media articles are covered. But they have dozens and dozens, hundreds of people that are producing articles and so my theory is if I make it really easy for them to publicize my research by doing the first draft or pretty comprehensive draft, then they spend half an hour, maybe an hour tweaking it, improving the words, making it a little couchier and send it out. So it's a win-win on both of our parts because otherwise at University of Toronto, I don't know how many media relations people they have, maybe 20 but we have thousands and thousands of professors. So how do you make your rise to the surface? It's just to make it as easy as possible for the media relations officers to do. So first of all, why even bother? Now 94 of you showed up today so I know that you're interested in doing this but we really have a moral obligation to disseminate our data over and above just in the academic ivory tower world. We're all at public universities and really benefit from the fact that the government funds our universities and the CLSA is an amazing data set but the government has invested heavily in providing it for us to be able to use. So it's just a moral obligation, I think, to disseminate beyond just academia. Why? Because there's 1.8 million published articles each year. So even as academics in our narrow areas, it's hard to stay on top of everything but can you imagine what a journalist is trying to see if they're not going to go to the primary journals? I mean they're not going to go and read it themselves. This is like trying to drink from a fire hose. So if we can make it clear and presentable in 500 to 700 words, that's what they would prefer to look at. So we're going to talk about how to create it that way. And I'm assuming all of us are doing research because we really want to move the field forward and it's hard to move the field forward when you've got this much competition. It's the small fish in a big pond kind of idea. So that's about getting it out to the people and making a difference for older adults with depression if that's your area or older adults who are struggling with stroke or anybody that's in your area, you actually want the people who are experiencing these problems and their healthcare providers to know whatever you raise. But it also surprisingly, perhaps surprisingly, it actually there's a research indicating that by this Anderson that the more citations that citations are strongly correlated with media attention. But is it cause or effect if you have a fantastic article, maybe you get more media and that's also why you get citations. But I did a little experiment. So theoretically, if a great article should have lots of coverage and lots of citations and poor articles should have less coverage, less citations or poorer, less influential. But I did this a little experiment with just two articles. So normally you send the press release out the day or maybe the day after the article comes out. But just due to a variety of things, including being too busy, I didn't do that in this last autumn. So Andy McNeil, my master's student who was the first author on a paper on trajectories of depression during COVID. Both of these articles were published in public in open access. So journalists could have had access to the whole paper. So we didn't send a press release for nine days. Usually nine days after a paper or a press release goes out, there's zero coverage. So in other words, it's new or nothing happens. So anyway, I was nine days late. And we could see when we got media coverage, we had zero articles covering it for the first eight days. When the ninth day came out, 62 media articles picked it up. And this one was even longer. So the Mabel Ho is a doctoral student. This is part of her dissertation. And she was looking at factors associated with successful aging, again, in the CLSA. So she published again, open access in, I think it was October, but the press release didn't go out for a full two months, 10, two months later, zero media coverage. And then she sent out the press release and she got 51 media coverage pickups. And remember, the really top quality journals don't actually cover old news. So even though people had contacted Mabel about some media coverage, when they found out it was two months old, they said no, like places like US News and World Report or Health Day, they don't cover old news. So this is despite the fact it's being old. In other words, I'm thinking that the media is very much waiting for us to hand things to them on a platter. And one would hope that that also has an impact in that people can't keep up with the journal articles, but they see an article in the media, even people in the field, if you're talking to medical doctors and you want them to be screening for depression, they're much more likely to see it here than in an epi journal or even in their own discipline specific journals. So we're lucky in gerontology because almost everything we do is relevant and of interest to the general public and media in general. We're competing against people that are trying to see what's going on in worms and mice. So we already got a head start for sure on this. And we're using the CLSA. It's the best longitudinal data ever available of Canada. It's naturally super interesting. We're looking at people and their change over time. How could it not be interesting to people? So when you start, believe it or not, I start thinking about dissemination as I'm writing the papers. I'm doing the analysis because if I said to you, refugees have two points lower on a social support scale, that doesn't really mean much to you, unless you really know that scale. And even in this audience of like 100 researchers, probably 80% of you don't have a sense of what two points means. But if I say to you that one in five refugees had no one who regularly showed them love, you kept what that means. 25% had no one with whom they would confide if they wanted to confide. So changing, I know social support measures are great and standardized measures are great because they give you lots of power. But we're so fortunate with the CLSA, the sample size is so big, that we can choose to use individual elements that are easy to understand within that social support measure. Similarly, some of these ones like income, even if you're using income continuously, don't make $1 increments because then the odds ratios, they're going to be statistically significant like income is associated with depression. But it's going to be really hard to interpret because it's going to be an infinitesimal odds ratio. It's going to be like $1.002 or something like that. So if you do $10,000 increments, people can get that or do categoricals. So under $20,000 a year, people get it. That's a really low income. People understand what that means. If also with respect to your outcomes, depression, PTSD, using dichotomized depression or PTSD scores, it makes it much easier for anyone to understand. If you go above the cut point in the CESD, for example, people get it depressed, not depressed, versus two points on the scale, again, doesn't mean much to people. Even when two points is a big thing, people aren't going to understand that. I've got this. I don't know how to get this out of the way. Okay. So you want to make sure that the journal does not publish the accepted pre-proof. So these are all the different steps. There's tons of detail I'm giving here. I have created a Word document that summarizes all of this that the CLSA team is going to make available. So you don't feel you have to take any notes about this. But Elsevier has gone to the point that the minute somebody accepts, that the journal editor accepts it, it goes up online in its accepted pre-proof form. It's really hard to get a media coverage if it's really rough and it's another month until you're actually setting up the press release, because they say, hey, it's been online for a month and you lose some of that coverage. So you want the final edited approved proof to be the first time it goes online. So I actually put in a sentence in the article, for Elsevier, I put it in when I put in the revise and resubmit. So if they give you a revise and resubmit, I put this in the statement and we'll be working with media services at the University of Toronto to create a Eureka alert and press release on this article. Please do not publish the paper online until we have finalized the corrected proofs. Media relations also request that they are informed about the embargo dates, at least three days in advance of publication in order to maximize media pickup. So I actually insert that in once the paper is accepted normally, but Elsevier, I put it in the revise and resubmit, because then the editor gets me in touch with the person who manages the production and they know to put a hold on it to save it, because otherwise it's really, you know, it's hard when it's been a month since it's been published. So the media relations officers are really happy to help, but they much prefer that you give them a drafted press release with all the pieces in it and that they can just work on. So again, all these press releases have a standard formula and usually it only takes me two or three hours to pull it together. So I'd love you to think about this as part of the whole publishing process. This is just the last stage in the publishing process. You've got it accepted now the press release. So Eureka Alert is amazing. I believe it's from the American Academy of Sciences and there are 12,000 science journalists who have access to Eureka Alert ahead of time for embargo data so they can see it before the actual embargo date. They're trusted to find, you know, to start the article, but then anybody can use it afterward. So this is my go-to where the press releases are gone, are posted. Now not every university in Canada has permission to post to Eureka Alert. Even at U of T, there's only one person in media relations who has the right to post to it. So I work with somebody who's in media relations in my department, which is social work. And then once she's happy with it, she sends it to Christian who's at the U of T Central and she posts it. So the idea is that you can't have garbage going up. There's a lot of trust in this site. So people assume that if it comes, if it comes, if it's posted up, it's legitimate and authorized by the university. So if your own university does not have permission to post to Eureka Alert, which some of the smaller schools do not, there's two ways around this. One, do any of your co-authors have it? And if they do, so you can send it through. So if your colleague at U of T or Miguel or UBC, they can post it for you. Secondly, journals themselves, some journals, the bigger journals, have permission to post. So you can talk to the editor about whether if you put a press release together, will they help post it for you? So this is a great quote from Oxford Journals about press releases. So the most important aspect is to remember that the research should contain a hook or main point of interest for the reader and the journalist. This hook should provide an identifiable audience, main point of focus for the release, and headline for the article. And I love how they finished it. If you cannot find, you, the author cannot find the hook. It's unlikely that we can. So you have to have the hook. So their press releases, you just kind of need to know the bigger picture of it. They're designed to be read by non-experts. So you got to keep it simple. It's designed to entice reporters to cover your research. So you have to be clear why your findings are important and who might be interested in them. And it's important that for you to know that it's unlikely that these are going to be front page articles on the global mail. These are typically fillers because they're not super time sensitive. So you write them as though they're going to be popped in where there's an extra space. So you might see that what you send out is ends up in times of India, verbatim. They don't contact you. So 99% of the coverage will come, will be just that. They pick it up as you've written it and send it out. You'll get a couple calls from people, if you're lucky, that want more in depth that are doing more in depth sort of coverage and want their own quotes. But because you give them quotes and stuff, it's a ready to go article. So I do it when I'm doing the proofs because while I'm doing the proofs, it's very fresh in my mind. So I can just write it up. I actually look for the quotes that I'm going to pull out of there and use or just slightly massage to make it work. It's way more time efficient. And then also sometimes the journal moves up the publication date. So you've got it all ready to go and you can send it off to your media relations officer in advance. Now, I know this sounds really specific, but media relations tell you that Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday at 5 a.m. Eastern time is when you want it because you want it to be near the front of the list that gets on to the reporter's desk. So just because of late postings or things like that over the year, sometimes things go out at 11 a.m. They don't get nearly as much pickup. Just two weeks ago, something went out on Friday. It was supposed to be, it was actually published on Thursday, but they didn't send us the DOI number. You actually need to have the DOI number before you post on your recolour. And so I didn't get the DOI number until like 8 a.m. in the morning. So it was going to be late. So I put it on Friday. It's still got some coverage, but I would say less than it would normally. So if you can do it on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday at 5 a.m., that's great. Low news times, you also get more pickup. So summer, you can sometimes get a lot of pickup because there's no news out there. Once I had an embargo date between Christmas and New Year's, it got tons of coverage, but usually I try to avoid that just because I don't want to take any calls between Christmas and New Year's. But low, low season's good. You don't want to compete with an election or other things that are really big. So you may want to avoid holidays like the day before Easter holiday, for example. You might want to miss not do it that week. Oops, going the wrong direction. So the other idea is to generate media attention if the publication coincides or is close to dates of interest. So grandparents' day is September 13th. If you're doing grandparent caregiving, doing dementia issues, you might think of September 21st. February is American Heart Health. In my area, social work. Social work week is March 6th. So we'll send a press release even though the article came out in January. It wasn't particularly time-sensitive, and it's about social workers and resilience. So we'll send the press release out that week. This little link tells you everything that's coming up and how you might be able to plan it. Alternatively, or just to mention, usually journals are really happy that you're getting media coverage. So if you ask them to delay the publication date until one of these dates. So if you had something accepted in August, but you said, can we just hold on on this dementia paper until September 21st? They're usually happy to help you with that. Okay. So when you're writing, you actually have the time date and the embargo time on the article itself. Then the headline is 90 characters, including spaces. So you do see some fails when you go to look at Eureka, or you realize some people didn't check it up and they're like cut off halfway through a word. You should be in the active voice, 25-point font, bold. As again, these are super detailed, but that's exactly how they format them for you. Then there's a sub headline. You have, oops, you have a lot longer with that, 255 characters, including spaces, 14-point italicized. But it should touch on some of the findings and try and engaging sort of thing. So in mine, I write you have a byline app. So you've got the embargo date, you've got the title, you've got the sub headline, then you have your university's name and you have your location. So I have like Toronto, Canada. And then we go to the text. My experience is that positive news gets much less attention than negative news and null findings are completely ignored. And when we're working with the CLSA, if you have null findings, you know they really are in all likelihood null because your power is really high. But it's hard to get that out. But again, if you say 66% are not depressed, you'll not get picked up. 33% that are depressed, you will get picked up. But just unfortunately, we're, negative news is stickier. So I'm just going to give you some examples of titles, of headlines and subtitles. So here's one model, you can, and I've tried all these different things and I'm not sure which is more effective or not, but these are all different approaches. So you can summarize all the key findings. So this one is older adults with asthma are at high risk for depression during COVID-19 pandemic that came out a couple weeks ago. And the two main take-homes were that half of individuals with asthma who had a pre-pandemic history of depression experienced depression during COVID-19. But even perhaps even more shockingly, one in seven older adults who had never been depressed prior to the pandemic developed depression during the pandemic. So we got lots of other details down there, 500 words more, but that was just you have to catch their interest. That's kind of the hook. This one was a few years ago again with CLSA data about refugees that we found that one in four older refugees are in psychological distress even decades after resettlement. On average, they've been in Canada for 40 years, but we still found that one in four were in distress. And we didn't have much of a subtitle on that one, but we hope that would catch it and then they would read the details. So another alternative is you do the catch your headlines but with less information. So my original research with the CLSA, I had been saying for 20 years or thinking, hypothesizing that the reason for the healthy immigrant effect was that immigrants had much healthier diets. So I worked with a wonderful nutritional epidemiologist, Karen Davison, and we found out that I was incorrect. Certainly immigrants have healthier diets and immigrants are healthier, but taking into account their diet did not attenuate that association. So I guess that goes back to the not non-significant findings are not never considered prime. But there were other really interesting things in our studies. So here's some of the catch your titles. Some surprisingly good news about anxiety. So this was using a different data set like CCHS. So we found that 7 in 10 people with a history of generalized anxiety no longer had anxiety in the year preceding the survey. And 40% were in excellent mental health, which was no mental illness at all, no suicidal thoughts, no anxiety, but also happy and satisfied with their life. But we hope that that title, that actually did pretty well. That one's some surprisingly good news about anxiety. This one's the one I was talking about. So nutrition is a key ingredient for cognitive health of midlife and older Canadians. So we talked about fruit and vegetable intake. So immigrant status that also was associated with greater verbal fluency, my main question was did nutrition mitigate the association? It didn't. But nutrition itself came through and it turned out that this got, I think it was this one, maybe got several hundred pickups in sports magazines and things like that too. So the other issue is how do you make your findings more tangible? So this again was a prospective data, but you can think about this. CCHS has got amazing prospective data. So if you're doing a survival analysis, just providing just a number that's a risk score is not really very helpful. But what we did is this was, we were using prospective data called the National Population Health Survey. And we followed people for 18 years or the data set followed people for 18 years. And we looked at people who had excellent mental health at the baseline and controlled for their pain and chronic illness. And we tried to make them that they were relatively, we were comparing healthy to healthy. And we found that when we calculated it, it worked out to be five months. They lived longer. People understand five months. People don't understand an actual score on a test, right? So this one, this is this paper, I've done a series of papers using American data on how fast the decline, how much improvement we're seeing in the health of older adults. It is coming down very quickly. But if I say something like serious cognitive impairment declines 23% among older Americans, and I had 5.4 million people in the sample, about half a million a year using the ACS. So really strong data. But 23% doesn't really mean much. It's huge, right? But doesn't mean anything. But I changed it to numbers. So I said, if the prevalence of cognitive impairment had remained at the 2008 level, rather than declining, by 2017, there would be another 1.13 million older Americans with serious cognitive problems. Well, that's an easier thing to understand and tended to create some interest. So again, focusing on novel findings. So in this one, what we're, we were looking at the association again, it was my major focus was immigrants, but the actual paper found about low fruit and vegetable intake was a so and higher body fat was a link to anxiety disorders. Now we'd also found chronic pain and serious physical health was also associated with anxiety. But those are kind of given well established in the literature are not surprising findings, not surprising headloins. So I provided that data, but it was lowered down. So I did a lot of research earlier on early adversities and later life health outcomes mental and physical health. So we were looking at a whole bunch of adversities childhood sexual abuse childhood physical abuse, but also witnessing domestic violence. So the child as a child, the person had witnessed their parents domestic violence and now their adults and had they attempted suicide. And so we found that link and that became the title link found between witnessing parental domestic violence during childhood and attempted suicide. And we found that one in six adults who were exposed to chronic parental domestic violence during the childhood had attempted suicide. So again, we change it to numbers, but we also emphasize the novel finding. So we had found that childhood sexual abuse and physical abuse were also risk factors for attempted suicide. In fact, even stronger risk factors. But these have been so well documented. You know, what are the people make fun of you? What is the the something like the Journal of obvious results. So I had that information in there, but I tried to emphasize the parental domestic violence, which had not been as well studied. So now if you have hypothesis papers, the best way to go with that are questions. So I'm trying to figure out is this big improvement between dementia that we're seeing across the Western world that it started basically in the 1980s and come down very dramatically that the prevalence of dementia is it due to lead exposure? So I actually just have a hypothesis paper in the Journal of Alzheimer's disease saying, well, could it be that leads making the fact we phased out leaded gasoline starting in 1973, could it make a difference? So to put it in perspective, many of you remember the Michigan water crisis about five, 10 years ago, five years ago, and it was a big national crisis. Well, during the Flint, Michigan's worst days, 5% of the kids had blood lead levels above five micrograms per deciliter. The mean in North America now is about 0.8. So it was an order of magnitude higher for 5% of the kids. And that's why it was a news. But when I was a child in 1976, 99.2% of us had blood lead levels above five. 88% of us had above 10. And 25% of us had above 20. Now at 40 micrograms per deciliter, they take all your blood out and give you new blood, even if you're asymptomatic. We had a quarter of white of the general population, and we had more than 50% of black kids in the US. So their mean was 22 because of the inner city context where the pollution was terrible. So the level of pollution of lead poisoning was really high. So anyway, this started with is there a link? And then we just talked about the logic behind it, but that got people interested. This is another paper we're doing again. It's a hypothesis paper about trying to figure out some unusual things about schizophrenia and poorer nations. So in developing countries, people with schizophrenia have a better chance of a full recovery. And this is done in a big WHO study. And they followed them up five years, 10 years, 15 years after it really is a solid finding. And there's a variety of other sort of unusual findings. Abram Hoffer found a connection with niacin historically, but not recently. We know that if people were exposed in the Dutch famine winter and the 1958 to 61 Great Leap Forward famine, if the if the mother was in her first trimester, the risk of schizophrenia doubles. So it turned out that a paper came out showing that in South India, people with schizophrenia were much more likely to have one particular genetic allele. And normally in schizophrenia, the maximum allele contribution is like maybe 5% higher risk. This was like 29% higher risk. And what is it? It's a niacin metabolizer. So there was an a former disease that I haven't even heard about until recently called palagra, which is as resulted from niacin deficiency. And about 3 to 9% of people who had it developed. It's the four D's Dermatitis. And one of the D's was dementia, dementia and psychosis, and then death if they weren't treated. It turned out they provide niacin supplements. So it's not really an issue in the Western world anymore. But potentially in the developing country and places like India, where they did not provide niacin in flower until 2018, that in fact, people may have palagra, which is easily treatable if you catch it early enough with high dose niacin. So that was those questions. But though the overall the whole text should be about a second, should be about 500 to 700 words, fewer spine, order information so that the most important is first, be accurate, don't have too much hyperbole and don't overstate it and avoid jargon such as SES, which I use all the time and my kids laugh at. So I always try it out with my children. And avoid too many technical details. They're not going to be that interested. So I guess I said I tried this out on my kids when they were younger. They were they were always telling me boring. This doesn't make sense. So I think about it the whole the whole document like a three minute cocktail party overview of the paper. And what are the two to three most important or most interesting or most novel points you want to cover? The first paragraph kind of needs to be the one minute elevator speech that's kind of engaging and catches people's interest. You use many short paragraphs with spaces between the paragraphs. If it isn't self evident why the findings are important, unexpected or exciting, you really need to make that evident within the first few paragraphs. And then quotes. This is a great chance for students to get coverage. So I actually put lots of people's quotes in the media. The media relations will tell you that they prefer only to have like two people's quotes in it. But you know, that's not neither here nor there. I would like to make sure that my students get quotes in it. So I put everybody's quotes in. So never more than one quote per paragraph or per idea kind of thing. I draft all the I draft all the quotes. I put words in their mouth literally, which is really just pulling the key points from the paper itself when I go through the proofs. And then I just make it sound like a sentence. And then I send the whole drafted release to the whole team and they send me their thumbs up. They're fine with their quotes and they're how and usually you put the quote first. And then you say the co author name and then their title and position at the end. So here's an example of Mabel's paper Mabel's my doctoral student who's who's this is what's her first paper dissertation and just came out in December. Well actually came this is the one that was two months later. We posted the press release in December came out in October. So we were surprised and delighted. They like things that sound like opinions to learn that more than 70% of our sample maintained their excellent state of health across the study period. Then you got the details about who she is. Our findings underline the importance of a strength based rather than a deficit based focus on aging and older adults. The median research tend to ignore the positive and just focus on the problems. So and then somewhere in the middle in the press release middle or later you provide details on when and where you published this was published online this week in this journal at try to send it out ideally the day of certainly at least the same month of or say week of when it's published. Okay around the second last paragraph you put any information about the methodology because they're not that interested in it but some people might read that far down. And then the last paragraph the last paragraph is a quote to sum up. So this is my master student Andy McNeill. So as life gradually returns to normal following the pandemic it's still important to consider the potential long standing mental health effects. This was about the asthma and depression during COVID paper. We hope those finding these findings can help inform targeted screening and referral to efficacious treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy to support older adults with asthma who are experiencing depression. And then you have this you put a blank line you have to put in the DOI number and the publication source then you put in your information about the media contact. I encourage my students to do them sometimes they're nervous about doing it. And then if there's a paywall for the article you add this a full copy of the papers available to credentialed journalists upon request and please contact you. And then on the day of the press release you try to have some free time that you can ideally in the morning a lot of the calls come in if you're going to get calls to answer any media calls or emails and most reporters appreciate a call back within an hour if that's possible or certainly within two. And at a minimum even if you can't answer email that I've received your email I'm teaching for another two hours I we could talk at this time just so that they know you actually got it before they go on to another article. And I typically have a one page point form list of the key points that I want to emphasize and maybe even some succinct quotes that I would love to add so quotes that I didn't put in the original press release but people want unique quotes. You can track your media pick up so altmetrics some of the journals tell you what an altmetrics look like you can do Google searches to see where it gets picked up and your media relations office will also track it for you if you ask them usually. So this is what an altmetrics page was this is this is the one Andy McNeil was the first author on which I worked with people Paul Villeneuve and his group and some public health agency of Canada colleagues Union Margaret. So this tells you that the papers in the top 5% of all research and then it gives you a list of all the places that picked it up and it goes on so you can see that and then as I mentioned I've got a list of all these oops sorry I've got a list of all of these information about how long of all this is and just some points that's available so you don't have to if you're looking up one thing you wanted to look up like how many how many words is the title allowed to be it's all in here all right so thanks so much let me take some questions all right on time good so hopefully there's some oh 16 things in the chat my goodness okay Jennifer what do I need to answer so again thank you very much for that excellent presentation there's definitely some questions that have come in just a reminder if you can if the participants can add your question to the q&a box it's just easier to keep track there so I know I answered one question about a recording yes this will be recorded and it will be made available after so that one's great the first question which was posted earlier was do you send out the press release as soon as the paper is published online versus with the volume or issue number online I mean I just because it's really old news by the time it gets a volume an issue number and the media doesn't care so I send I try to get what you call an embargo date I guess I didn't explain explain what that is so an embargo date means the actual date and time that'll be posted online so not every journal will give you the time some of them will give you the date and time so they give you the date and time they promise me it's going to be up at 5 a.m. on you know Thursday August April 22nd I post I get the Eureka alert posted in advance and with the idea that the embargo is there but if they won't if they don't tell me the they won't insist that they could give it to me the exact day the exact time but they will always give you the exact day then I post it the day after so because I have to have I have to make sure it's up there because you you need that you need to be able to have it online for most of those places so so it's definitely online okay the next question is and this may be a more CLSA related question if I'm interpreting it but it's what process do we follow if we post a translation to another language of a study from the CLSA or Eureka oh but that sounds like that's a CLSA question yeah I think so too so Maryam maybe we can follow up with you after the webinar Laura Lawson our communications manager can get back to you about that so but but let me talk about other languages in general Eureka alerts only in English but the like I really wanted that coverage about the Palagra and the schizophrenia I really wanted it to go to the developing world because that's where the problem is so I worked closely with Dale Duncan who's our media relations officer she's fantastic because it was really a complicated story to try and tell and I she did a fabulous job so we got a lot of pickup and starting with a question helped probably but I could see just by searching for my name that week and the name of the journal I could see that it got picked up in and translated into Thai in some of the Indian languages and into Chinese and Vietnamese which is what my purpose was so the science reporters from around the world are using that Eureka site so you will get it into other languages assuming it's potentially of interest so I mean there's a few just nice comments that are posted that I won't read verbatim but thank you Sharon and Sharon and Sharon posted two of them so so I'll consider those answers for Shannon she also has nice words about a fabulous presentation she says I completely agree that this is a presentation I too wished I would have had early in my academic career the question is when sending out a press release are there any strategies you specifically used to get picked up by international news so for me that's the Eureka alert piece because everybody reads it so you'll get it you potentially can get it in times of India times of London Australia China etc so Eureka alert is really a fantastic open door now so this is a low ask of your media relations office right I'm not asking them to pitch so sometimes they see an article or you give them enough advance notice that they really like the article and they'll go to somebody at CTV or at CBC news and say you know I had one that was on binge drinking in middle middle school obviously not a CLSA data but anyway that one they knew that they thought there'd be a lot of pickup on it so they actually went out and contacted their contacts and got it in more the media piece but out of all of my publications I can only think of two that generated media coverage without me sending a press release and one of those was in oh maybe three one was in New England Journal of Medicine one was in Lancet and one was in one of the JAMA groups but all my other publications the only interest I've gotten is because I sent out a media release for it so those big ones you'll get international I mean if you can publish regularly and those locations go for it that's fantastic I have not published a ton in there but those ones actually people read they don't just wait for press releases they read them and they come online in these places but international I mean I don't have any international contacts per se but if people start picking up your articles and you think that they like this type of article and particularly the ones who phone you and ask you for direct quotes so I asked them if they'd like to they'd like an early advanced copy of my press releases so I have a sort of a list of people I sent to so that may work but typically the bigger places like Forbes and stuff they just saw the press release or they may have saw a media article like picked up the press release and then they reach out similarly like New York Times they they just saw the press release it wasn't as though I had any personal contacts at either location. Great okay so a question from Kevin now searching for social media what are your thoughts on social media posts like on LinkedIn and should they be unique or should they simply link to the press release? Yeah I think you're going to need to have somebody younger and more hip than me doing the social media piece so I have run an institute and I hire a work study student to manage my not my personal but the institute one so if I if I have a eureka alert I send it over to them and they send it out I and I know that there's some people who do amazing stuff with social media and have you know 10,000 or more followers I don't know how to do that so maybe did you say Kevin maybe you're the one who now needs to do the next presentation and show us how to do it. Okay yeah I would imagine that social media and sort of specific social media out if there's going to be a nuanced approach to sort of framing the issue and getting post seen and heard and whether or not you link to the full article or not or include it for different things like that. But I you know LinkedIn I actually don't use my LinkedIn account but I think you know any way you can send information out more the better it's just this is this is for me this is low hanging fruit because it's really easy to do it now you know how to do it and you get a lot of hit for two hours of work so this is where I invest my time but I can see I was just talking with someone who does fantastic work in at U of T and they have 10,000 followers and they they use social media all the time to get messages out so I'd love to sign me up if somebody's willing to do the next presentation on this I'm in. So the next question is actually from Laura Lawson here at the CLSA as a researcher do you use altmetrics to track media outputs only or do you find there are other uses such as the altmetrics score? Oh well you know what I'm not really again love to do a media I just happens that some of the open access places those those last two ones that were delayed they actually give me an altmetrics score I don't even know how to get my own altmetrics score but I just say like the journal itself pops it up I'm like okay great it's in the top 5% but I don't know how to how to do it myself so love to see another workshop on that. Okay and we have another question from Stacy and again just a reminder we'll have a few more minutes and if not this will probably be the last one what do you think is the longest amount of time we could alert the media to a publication for example I published a paper last August. Okay so normally when you post your Eureka alert they ask when it was published so I would not put that on your Eureka alert and you'll get some picking pick up because as I said a huge portion of people they just think this is kind of interesting and they just post it and it's still new enough try it send it out if it doesn't work it doesn't work you have only lost three hours of your time right. Yeah it's a good good investment of time versus the Eureka right I found that very yeah it's quite interesting. It's super good and you you know it's not over these days you're as nerdy as I am I I'm a research nerd so I just sit down and talk to my students about this I'm like oh I did this there's such an interesting paper and this and this and you know at parties I've been known to talk about research too so these are ideas that I'm excited about you already have those it's probably not that hard to write it up so definitely try as I said the one that was two months late I think I think I got a call from US News and World Report and then when they found it was two months late they are like they said no but the other ones that we got what is it 40 50 pickups so it worked. Well great I know there's been lots of positive feedback so I hope you've been you're able to look at that so I guess we'll wrap up I don't see any more questions if anyone does have any more questions you're welcome to I'm sure email Dr. Fuller Thompson or you can also contact us in CLSA. Just a reminder anyway so thank you I'm gonna I gotta stick with my notes or else we'll get confused so again thank you to our presenters we we appreciate you presenting this I think it was a very useful practical webinar for our CLSA researchers. I'd like to remind everyone that the next deadline for data access applications is coming up which is April 12th of 2023 you can visit the CLSA website under data access to review available data as well as additional details about the application process. I'd also like to remind everyone about the anonymous survey that you will get upon exiting your session today again that'll be helpful for to come up with ideas for for sessions like we did today. The next webinar is actually focused more on research again understanding experiences of stress during the COVID-19 pandemic among adults from the Canadian longitudinal study on aging and it will be presented by Dr. Vanessa Derubis on March 7th so I hope to the alert for the details about. Can I just add one point I forgot to mention which is the funders are really excited when you mentioned that it was funded by the CHR or it was funded by SHERC and they especially if you say that they are also really happy to send it out through their network so it's worth reaching out to your funding officer and tell them you've got the press release coming out and they're happy to amplify it and the CLSA has also been really great about amplifying media that goes forward too.