 It says this hangout on air is live, so that's a good sign. I'm about to close the door to do this, so I'm going to get still over from the hallway. And since we are live, let's go ahead and do it. My name is Jeff South. I teach here, and specifically I teach this course with a faculty colleague. Am I in the picture even? I think we have a lot. Alright, here I am. Hi Virginia. Hi. I'm a librarian in the class. Nice to meet you. But we have an abnormal class here. Yeah, I think we're both kind of abnormal. And then, of course, the students are here. Against the far wall is the associate director of the Robertson School, Tim Baikovic, who also has expertise in science journalism. So this is the first YouTube live event for Google Hangout on Air that we're doing for our class. And we are honored to have the, well, a person who has lots of experience in this area, currently the science editor for BuzzFeed, but why have you talked a little bit about other things that you've done that have led to this point in your career? So we don't have a rigid format for this. I thought what we just do is let Virginia Hughes tell us a little bit about her career, how she got to be doing what she's doing, and then maybe transition from that, maybe after 15 minutes, into a Q&A from you guys. Okay. So that sounds good with you, Virginia. Sure. Sure. So can I ask, this is a very simple question. Are you guys all undergrads or is this a class of like mixed graduate students undergrads? Undergrads. Okay. And is it some, like, are most of you journalism majors or science majors or neither? Half and half. Half and half. An interdisciplinary class. Tara and I got a grant from the university to pull together both journalists and nonjournalists and let them sort of cross pollinate. Cool. That's the origin for this class. Okay. Well, I'm happy to talk a little bit about how I got into science journalism. First, I have a little, by now it's sort of, you know, when you, these origin stories tend to get more specific and shaped over time. So I, you know, it's all truthful, but I think I should say from the outset that like most career paths, this one was not as simple or clear as it probably will sound in the narrative. So basically I was a science major in college. I studied neuroscience. And I worked in a fantastic lab. It was a cognitive science lab actually that did, it was at the time it was the largest virtual reality lab in the world. So we ran, we'd have people come in and put on the virtual reality headsets and then depending on what the, what the research study was, they would do, they had this huge like 40 foot room that they could run around in and do all kinds of things in virtual reality. And the cognitive science part was the professor was interested in how we, how our brains learn to navigate throughout the world and do we use landmarks or do we use, do we do these complicated mental calculations. And I remember one experiment we brought varsity baseball players into the lab. And then we changed, we put virtual reality on them and had a catcher's mitt and we had them catch fly balls and virtual reality. But sometimes, but we changed the, the like gravity constants and stuff so that the balls were coming at them at totally unreal, you know, speeds and directions and watched how they, how they learned to catch them and stuff like that. It was a, it was a very cool lab and I really liked science. I've always really liked science. But my junior year, I went to, I studied abroad in Paris for a semester. And just because of the way the credits worked out, I wasn't, if I had taken science classes in Paris, they wouldn't have counted. So I basically meant that I took a semester off of science. I did visual art and history and anthropology and, you know, I did a lot of traveling and eating and drinking and it was a wonderful semester as most study abroad is. But when I came back to campus for my senior year, I, you know, sat down with my advisor, this really great scientist, and he was like, so what do you want your senior thesis project to be? Because, you know, most majors who are working in labs had to have a thesis project. And I said, actually, I just have no interest in doing that anymore. Like I just didn't, I didn't want to do science anymore. So he was very understanding and he actually let me stay in the lab and he started paying me as a, this time as like a research assistant instead of a student. And I then just started thinking about, well, geez, if I don't stay in science, what could I do? And I really had no idea. I thought, I thought, I don't know, maybe I'll be a science education person, a teacher or work for a science museum, maybe, or maybe I could be a writer. I had done a little bit of travel writing while I was abroad and I had really, it didn't, it only, it got published in like a tiny university, you know, student publication, but it was fun. It was fun to do it. So I enrolled in a couple of journalism 101 classes in college and really took to it. I mean, then my college was in Rhode Island, so one of, I remember one of the assignments for the journalism class was we had, we were each assigned a different mobster, because the mob is like really big in Rhode Island. And we had to go down to the courthouse and learn whatever we could using public records about each mobster, like what kind of cars did they have registered, what deeds, you know, what, what was their property value, how many divorces have they had and, you know, stuff like that. It was a really like, it was taught by a reporter about the Providence Journal, so it was a very like cool newspaper journalism 101 class. I really liked it. And then I was just kind of like googling around for science. I don't even know how I first discovered that there was a thing called science journalism. I think it was through Google, or maybe it was in that class, maybe the professor told me I'm not sure. But I realized at some point in my senior year that there were these graduate programs at a bunch of schools that that gave masters in science journalism. So I applied to a bunch and ended up going to the program at Johns Hopkins, which doesn't exist anymore sadly. It just got closed down a couple of years ago, but it was a very small program that was housed within their, it was called the writing seminars department. So I was, I was there with like a bunch of poets and fiction writers, and then science writing was this like tiny little offshoot of that. So that was where I first really learned what it means to be a science journalist. I had my teachers who were, one was a journalist at Nature, one was a journalist at US News and Well Report. And one, the leader of the program was this longtime science writer who's written many books and so that's when I really started. And because it was only a year and a master's program was really focused on getting students networked in the world of science writing and meeting all the right editors meeting. It was in Baltimore, Johns Hopkins. So we were pretty close to DC and I had internships in DC and so during that year I did a few internships. One of them was at NPR in DC and one of them was at the alumni magazine at Johns Hopkins, which was actually one of the best internships I ever had, because alumni magazines are so small. And they really encourage you to do like long narrative features, which for most people just starting out is a pretty rare opportunity, like most internships you're stuck doing the super short, newsy one study type papers or stories. So, so let's see. After that program ended, I moved to New York. I had got an internship at Discover Magazine. This was in 2006. And I was, believe it or not, the very first web intern at Discover Magazine. So they, they were kind of like getting to the internet a little bit late. This was great at the time when, when print magazines were having their like, oh shit moment, like we need to figure out this, this digital thing we need to get on the internet. And, but what that meant at the time was just having an intern literally just convert stories that were written for the magazine and paste them into the website. Like my, what I was doing was not real. It was more of like a producer, a web producer than a web writer. So after that internship, I did another internship at Seed Magazine, which no longer exists. And all this time, by the way, people always ask me like, how do you manage internships financially? They don't pay or they pay very little. The nice thing about being in New York City is there's a, there's a huge tutoring market. And there's a lot of people willing to pay a lot of money per hour to help, you know, I helped kids with their SATs. I helped them write their college essays. And that's kind of how I made it financially work the first, the first year or so. Let's see, after Seed, oh, Seed weirdly, this is like probably ancient history, you guys, and, and, and like obscure history, but Seed Magazine owned this website called ScienceBlogs.com, which was this huge network of 70 or 80 different blogs. And they were looking for at the rate when my internship ended. They were hiring a community manager for the blogging network, which was basically just like a, I called myself a cat herder. I was just in charge of like, making the, keeping the bloggers happy, getting them paid on time, doing events with them. It was more of an administrative managerial position than it was a writing position. But the nice thing about it is it gave me health insurance and it gave me like a steady salary for the first time. But the bloggers in that network are all today like well-known, like Carl Zimmer was in the network, Ed Young was in the network, David Dobbs, Rebecca Sklu, I don't know, like who's who of science writing was all blogging on this network at the time. So it was like a very good way for me to meet all these important, I mean, quote unquote important people in the field. And by the way, from starting in grad school, I was, I said yes to every single freelance assignment that came my way, pretty much. So I was trying to steadily kind of accumulate freelance clients over the years. And after about a year at the job with the blogging network, I had enough, I had enough clients that I felt like I could, I could do freelancing full time and pay my rent. So that's what I did. I started freelancing full time. That was in 2008. And then I did that for until last year, early last year, I took this job at BuzzFeed. I changed to the dark side and became an editor, which, which is actually really great. And, and I think has has been fulfilling to me in ways that I never expected it to be. So that is the abridged version of my career history so far. Is there anything in that I could expand on or any other? I don't know, any, any, any other questions you guys have about that? You mentioned that you start off as a science person and kind of straight away. Do you feel like there's any kind of finding moment where you mentioned your study abroad or anything else kind of led you away from a science track, whether it was a lifestyle kind of choice or just the topic itself? Yeah, I think I mean, because I had worked in this lab, I realized, I realized, like, first of all, this was a great lab. My advisor was really supportive. He was really nice to me. There was no, you know, you hear horror stories about scientists sometimes and how they lack managerial skills and how women are treated and on and on. It wasn't anything like that. It was more just I realized that all of the graduate students I was working with in the lab, I was, you know, under them. I was there sort of like, lacky to do whatever they needed. Their projects didn't, didn't, like, I loved going to the seminars. I'd love going to the lab seminars and talking about the papers and the field and talking about the big questions. But the projects, when they got into the nitty-gritty of, like, how to design, you know, how to refine their project methodology or statistics or, like, working with the data sets, making sense of the data sets, this, like, nitty-gritty, very, very, you know, it can be very incremental. A graduate student's work for six or seven years, even if it leads to a paper, even if it leads to a big paper in nature or something. Like, it ends up being a lot of time into answering a very small and usually pretty inconsequential question. And I just wasn't patient enough or interested enough to do that. I wanted to, like, talk about the meaning of it all and the, yeah. So I think I just realized that my temperament wasn't cut out for. I think that was the primary. And then, like, also I realized, like, you're not going to make a lot of money being a scientist and your hours are going to be really crappy. And if you ever want to have a family, that's going to be really hard. It's going to be hard to get tenure. Like, all this stuff that people talk about. I think primarily I just realized it wasn't something I wanted that I loved doing day-to-day. I have a question about you, really two questions that draw on your experience as a science reporting editor. And so I'm wondering if the writers that report to you tend to be people who started out as science people and became writers, or did they start out as writers who then became involved in the science world in some way? And then since some of the people in this room may be reporting to science editors one day, is there a pattern to the kinds of things that you have to address or correct or coach in new science reporters anyways that we can make it easier on our future editors? Hmm. So one of the reasons I took this job is because they gave me, like, I was starting a new desk. There hadn't been a science news desk here before. And they told me I could hire whoever I wanted. So that was something that was very appealing, obviously, like build your own team and only hire people you really like. So I can say what I looked for when I was hiring is I wanted, it wasn't so much people with like X number of years of experience, because I think it worked really well on our team. We have a really broad level of experience. We have a couple of reporters who have been doing it for like two or three or four years. And then we have a couple of reporters who have been doing it for 20 years and have a lot more experience than I do, actually. So it was more like I was looking first and foremost for people who approached science reporting with well-earned skepticism. One of the things that I wanted to do to make our team, to set our team apart, was not cover single study, like not cover the latest nature papers or science papers every week. I didn't want to take a GWIS explanatory approach to science writing. I wanted to try to do more critical things and try to do stories that looked at how science intersects with broader society, whether that's the business world or academia, gender issues, politics, sex, health, things that how people would care about science affecting their real lives as opposed to being curious about a scientific finding. So I wanted people who had shown an interest in those kinds of stories as opposed to, not that there really isn't, I don't have any kind of disdain or, you know, a lot of the stories I did for most of my career were of the sort of, here's a new study, I'm going to explain it to you in a broader context type genre. And there's a lot of that out there and it's getting better and better. I think more and more places are doing that well. It's just not what I was looking for at the time. And then I was also looking for, for me, I think reporting instincts are more important than any given like writing skill, because I can, you know, you can teach people how to be a better writer. Writing, I think writing, especially for journalistic writing that isn't like, you know, most of the writing my team does is, is not a 6000 word feature, although we do those occasionally. But I think it's just, I wanted people who loved reporting, who like wanted to like jump on the phone and talk to talk to five people about what this means and, and would be like reporters first and, and then writers second. That makes sense. So, I think those are the main things I was, and then I just wanted to be around people who were reasonable and pleasant personalities. You know, nobody wants to work with a jerk. I'd like to throw in a question and sort of place off the last one. I'm asking you this as someone who's had a foot in both worlds, the science world, and of course now the journalistic world. And just wondering whether scientists and journalists approach truth somewhat differently in that most of my journalistic experience has been covering politics or as the editor of a team that covers politics. And, and, you know, I'd always push reporters and as a recorder, I would be pushed by my editors, you know, to try to be definitive to get away from wishy-washy. This might happen. You know, the governor might propose something and to try to really lock it down to be as well just to be as definitive as possible. But in science, you know, the, at least from what I've read, you know, of course the pursuit of truth is incremental. And one study builds on the next one, but no one's, you know, of course, you're moving toward truth, but you're not ready to be definitive, necessarily, you know, when you do a study. I'm just wondering, do you sense attention in the way those two disciplines approach truth? Or am I just kind of overthinking this? No, I think that comes up a lot. I mean, certainly when scientists get mad about science reporting, it's usually about how that it was framed as, you know, too definitive or as, you know, a gene causing X as opposed to being one of many genes that contributes to the vulnerability of X. And I think this is part of the reason why my team tries not to cover single studies because you come with this awareness that no single study, it's pretty rare for a single study to be definitive. I mean, like the single studies that we did cover last year were, I don't know if you guys remember when they found a new hominid, the sort of new Lucy. I mean, they found it. That was news. It was, it was pretty straightforward news to a bunch of archaeologists found this thing. What wasn't straightforward was, you know, all the questions behind what it meant and the speculation. I think it's interesting covering, so being part of Buzzfeed, we're now very connected to the election. And my bosses and everyone in this newsroom is focused on, no matter what desk you're on, like connecting to this huge conversation that's happening right now about, you know, terrorism and immigration and jobs. And so this election, you mentioned politics, like what, what truth is, is actually a very relevant and interesting question, I think. For instance, we're going to be on the debate on Monday night, me and a couple other people on my team are going to be part of our, we have a fact checking desk at Buzzfeed and we're going to try to fact check in real time the things that are said at the debate. Because we feel like in this election, that's necessary sometimes. So I think, I think scientists and reporters believe in a fun in truth, like believe that there are that there is a fundamental truth they wouldn't, I think they're aligned in that. I think the way they're most where they diverge the most is reporters instinct is to tell the story, you know, in a headline, get get to the point. Say what you mean, and scientists go out of their way sometimes to caveat and, and hedge and make sure they're not saying or claiming something that they don't have the evidence to claim. So, so I think you're right that there is a difference, but I think I also see like a lot of similarities in the in the sense that like both scientists and journalists ultimately just want to find out the truth. And, and so, so it's an interesting, I guess, maybe contradiction in that way or sort of. I find scientists often sometimes really respect journalism and especially investigative journalism because actually one of the one of the people on my team Peter Aldhaus was a scientist was a PhD animal research scientist. Before he got into science journalism and he approaches his journalism a lot like he approached science like data sets data based reporting and he does he's amazing like data driven visualizations and he just did a story we're going to put up tomorrow about polling methods and we know why why presidential polls are becoming slightly less reliable than they used to be and blah blah blah. So, so I think the best journalists try to take a really scientific and rigorous approach to their reporting. And I think the most annoying scientists caveat everything so much that they never say anything interesting. Just as journalism develops into this new age with the internet and everything you become a very large part of that obviously being editor for a very popular website. One thing I think I've noticed a lot of science based articles from probably less reputable parts of the internet is that they often draw full truths and as headlines from things that are not definitive. People who do cover one study things and maybe go a little farther than what the study may have actually said like, you know, chocolate cheers cancer, even though that's not exactly what somebody may have said that's what gets the views out there. Do you think that that's a growing problem and how online a lot of other sources sort of discuss scientific topics. I think it's definitely a problem. I actually don't think it's a growing problem. I think if anything it's a shrinking problem. I think, especially with heart health stories, this has been something that people have. I wrote a blog post a few years ago that where I went to the New York Times dot com. So it's also in reputable places not just like crappy websites or whatever but I went to the New York Times dot com and I typed in their archives. I looked for Resveratrol, which is the compound in red wine that, you know, has gotten so much attention for its supposed life extension or health extension abilities. And it was I mean this was not the entirety of my blog post was that you could I just listed the headlines in the New York Times on Resveratrol for the last 10 years and it was, you know, extends life doesn't extend life. Here's cancer doesn't cure cancer it just was like a whiplash of back and forth back and forth back and forth, which is exactly because they were covering single studies and that's how science works right you like the studies. Find different things and over time, a picture emerges but when you only cover it incrementally like that it just it just it ultimately leads to readers. I mean, I give I tend to give readers more credit than scientists do like I hate the attitude of like the masses are stupid and they can't think for themselves and they think they can't think critically and whatever they read online they believe and I don't think that's true at all. I think people are, but but it is true that like headlines, you know, X cures why that does get a lot of eyeballs on it doesn't get a lot of views. And when it comes to health that could have potential consequences if it means people are actually acting on that advice, whereas in another field like some archaeology back and forth or is their life on Mars back and forth like who cares if there's whiplash a little bit. So, so, so I was gonna say I think the reason I don't think it's a growing problem is I think I've noticed more and more outlets trying to steer away from that. And I think the reason is a there's a there's some diminishing returns happening, like that stuff gets so saturated online that actually fewer people are clicking on it like readers are getting a little like jaded. I think like I don't want to read yet another article about chocolate or red wine or coffee when I know they kind of know by now that like, it's going to be the opposite of what they already heard and they're kind of just throw their hands up and like I don't want to read that so. And there's also been more discussion about it and science writing science journalism health journalism community about why this this might not be the best way to report on things. What's really interesting is part of the reason why it gets reported like this is because the journals created this embargo this elaborate embargo system, you guys have talked about that in class. Yes. Okay. So of course it was only in their best interest to create this system because it pretty much ensures that your, your journal studies are going to get covered in as many outlets as possible by giving the journalists a week to do the story. It's like nature and science has is kind of a genius move for them to get more coverage of their stuff. But I think with the Internet, like, at least for us we when we do those single study on the occasions that we do cover a single study, they don't do that well traffic wise and I think it's because readers are seeing the same story in 10 different outlets 10 different websites and so they're not necessarily going to click or share BuzzFeeds version if they already read it in the Wall Street Journal they already read it and Washington Post or whatever so I guess I don't get like, I don't get to like, Huffy or concerned about the crappy Internet journalism out there. It's out there it exists the Daily Mail is, you know, it exists interestingly I think some of the British publications are the worst but I guess I just have a little bit more faith in readers to not be moved by really crappy reporting. I will throw out a question. So you mentioned the election in that, you know, clearly. Now there is more of an anti intellectual, anti scientific attitude that has gotten, you know, we've regulated a lot of press and it's a bully pulpit. As a science journalist, what do you think about this. So I just wrote about this last week when when Trump went on the Dr. Oz show. Because I don't know if you guys are aware of it Dr. Oz has also been come under a lot of fire for his. This is this is on live the Internet now so I don't, you know, the way he has promoted certain supplements and vitamins and his I would say lack of evidence based claims and what he says. And I notice he's also given space to anti vaccine people to air their opinions and. Yeah, so, so I was thinking when I wrote this piece. The premise of the of the essay is like that Donald Trump going on Dr. Oz is sort of a genius move on his part because he's tapping into the audience which is like exactly who would be maybe sympathetic to Trump like this open minded skeptical. Maybe prone to alternative, sort of non mainstream tell it like it is I want to hear from Dr. Oz because he is more he feels more connected to me or more truthful to me than my doctor does. And I'm interested and by the way, like 40% of Americans take supplements and vitamins, and they don't bother talking about it with their doctor because they know their doctor is going to be very dismissive and not engage with them about this thing that they're trying. And so I think that that explains most of the Oz attraction but but what I was really surprised to find out when I was reporting this essay is that when surveys are done. These are huge national surveys that have been done for decades, asking people about their trust in various public institutions, whether the Supreme Court, Congress, scientists doctors, businesses, banks blah blah blah blah like science and medicine consistently rank the highest of all of our public institutions there was one exception that was higher. Oh the military, the military gets a higher rating than than scientists do but scientists and doctors are like if you ask people generally you trust science you trust medicine they say yes, and they say yes much more often than they do for other institutions so that was like very that made me feel much better I think this anti scientific thing is actually like I think I think people who are like pro science or whatever look at a phenomenon like Donald Trump, who is who thinks climate changes a hoax and who says vaccines cause autism and all kinds of things and they say oh the rise of it means that there's an anti scientific bent in our country, and are an anti intellectual bent and I. So I come from Michigan, a rural part of Michigan and a lot of my family is Trump supporters. I think it's just much more complicated than that I think, I think people are really looking for somebody who isn't corrupt, and I know, you know, there's plenty of evidence that there's some corruption around Trump's businesses, whatever but they're looking for an anti scientific, they don't want the mainstream politician they don't want the mainstream doctor. They want somebody who will tell them the truth, and not, you know, like, wiggle out of questions about your work emails, and what happened to those emails I think that I'm not ready to believe that the public doesn't trust in science or doesn't believe in science I think. I think that there, there is less evidence for that then, then sometimes gets said. But maybe I'm naive. I have something that might be sort of a follow up on this topic because I feel like I read a lot of science stories. In popular media that you know if the topic is climate change, then there's this sort of obligation to give a little bit of space to the people who say well it snowed a lot last year so there is no climate change or if it's not that seems to give a little space to the anti vaccine people. And so I guess I'm wondering, when you are building a story, how do you decide what because they can all I mean those factions, even though they're minorities usually can produce some study that confirms their point of view right and so I'm wondering what is your, how do you make that decision about whether to include the scientific minority opinion or not. So first I would say I think that's happening less and less in the mainstream media. I mean sure it happens on very partisan right barred and drudge and the right wing partisan sites but you know 10 years ago the conversation was. Remember, it was about climate denialists and denialism and whether climate change is real, and that doesn't get reported anymore I mean like the most reputable, most media full stop does not engage with the question of whether climate change is real, they just take it as a given. And I think if you look at the cover when I first started at Buzzfeed about a month later, the measles outbreak happened, and we like extensively covered that and I think the media was pretty good on that stuff too I mean it was very very rare that you'd find any any outlet that said vaccines cause autism or vaccines are dangerous now. In that situation we I mean the the the issue comes where the measles outbreak was happening because of a very small but concentrated group of people refusing to vaccinate right so you can't deny that that exists and you can't you can't say that though if you have to acknowledge their existence and their beliefs in order to even explain why this phenomenon is happening because in that case the news was the outbreak. And so we tried to focus our stories on like why people don't why people don't believe or how doctors were handling their patients who don't believe or but we never but that's different and giving equal time or or then or then just like throwing your hands up and saying like, well there's an open question I think I think all of our coverage and I think most coverage kind of took as a given that vaccines are safe. But, but but then also had to acknowledge that like there is a small group of people who are causing this thing to happen so it can be and like with climate stuff now. The conversation is really moving very quickly to adaptation, and how parts of the world I mean the, it's sort of hard to at this point it's pretty hard to deny that. I mean I guess the question of whether humans are causing it or not is is one that's live in certain political circles and if we were covering and sometimes we do cover like House. The House Science Committee is led by Lamar Smith, who is this ultra conservative, who is now going after the attorneys generals who are investigating Exxon for its for its covering up its climate research. So in that case we have to talk about how Lamar Smith is a climate denialist. But that's not the same thing as saying that that it's an open question. Sorry, I feel like I'm not being very articulate about this. Very hopeful. And what you said about acknowledging essentially but don't dwell there. And I think my sensor is, you know, I'm always looking for the kind of the false imperative toward balance. The imperative to balance in something that maybe doesn't deserve to be that I think I'm hypersensitive to it. So that was very helpful what you said that it's being acknowledged when you see those. Yeah, I mean I think it'd be hard to report. I mean we had to report on the measles epidemic right it was like this huge thing that was happening it was a national story. But this also came up with a Planned Parenthood. The sort of undercover videos that claimed that these Planned Parenthood doctors were selling baby parts for to fetal tissue researchers and we were actually the first national outlet that did a story about that fetal tissue research and saying like no it's actually not illegal and here's why fetal cells are here's how they're used and here's how they're important or whatever but you know it that was very difficult because Planned Parenthood the nature of those Planned Parenthood videos where that they were propaganda and they were edited they were it turned out later they were very selectively edited. But we had to play the video we had to show the video in order to in order to tell the story otherwise you'd just be ignoring you know news that was actually happening so yeah I think it can be hard. It's definitely like a difficult thing. And certain things are more difficult than others like I actually think vaccines issue is is very it's sort of easy to do because the evidence is so overwhelming the climate the evidence is so overwhelming. When you start reporting on nutrition and supplements and most of the time it's like there is no there's a lack of evidence which is not the same thing as something being disproven right so yeah. It's it's hard though and there are there certainly there's a lot of research now showing that once once people's minds are made up about something. It's not like presenting them with a rational weight of evidence is going to change their mind in fact they use whatever evidence that they take in to further reinforce the belief that they already had. So yeah I guess that's more of a it opens up questions about like the segregation of the media. In general you guys seen those things the Wall Street Journal of this amazing thing the other day that was like here's what a Facebook feed looks like for a typical Republican and here's what a Facebook feed looks like for a typical Democrat. And the sources of the information were just like night and day. They are not reading the same articles and discussing them they're getting curated and fed different sources of news. There was a New York Times story about a month ago that explained how to find how Facebook defines you politically in your profile. You really have to drill down really really deep to find it but it's there and it says Facebook has defined you as a liberal or as a conservative and that. And when you see that you have the ability to override it to say I want to see you know I don't want to be digital like that. But it's fascinating because I haven't seen Wall Street Journal story that you mentioned Virginia but that sounds so interesting just because in today's world you know living in sort of your own little Google bubble and just hearing the news from the echo chamber that confirms your viewpoint I think is a really dangerous thing. Yeah it's hard and I think we try hard here to not be partisan and to present especially our politics team we try to tell stories about both sides and delve into alliances or monied interests on both sides. But I mean I think our audience is more skewed forward than many given political affiliation. I was just wondering the things that in the articles that you guys write in the a lot of the times you have to deal with the just telling the truth on an issue when it's something kind of new when there's like a lot of studies on something and there's a scientific discovery and you're telling people the truth. But another responsibility from what you were just talking about with things like the whole nutrition thing and the vaccines thing is that one of your other responsibilities of science journalists is to be I guess guard dogs to false information. And I'm just wondering how often do you feel you need to maybe not present the truth as much as you need to tell people that something else is not the truth. Well this is something that we think about whenever we think whether we need to do a debunker of something. And our bar for that is usually that we would not debunk something unless it had reached a certain level of virality or you know everyone was talking about it and they were wrong. So I think the best debunkers actually stand on our own and are more interesting sometimes than the original the original story so we the my most my favorite debunker that we've ever done was on. I don't know if you guys read about the supposed head transplants the surgeon who had said he could do a head transplant. And it was ridiculous and it wasn't it wasn't a viral thing I think maybe five or six science magazines had reported on it. But we we felt the debunker would be fascinating and it was so our debunker was about all the ways in which you couldn't like it was about like the anatomy and physiology of the neck and and about surgery surgical techniques and about how this had been tried and monkeys So that was that was more of a special case where we did it because it was fun, but most of the time we wouldn't do it in less. Like the last debunker I did we did I think was that do cell phones cause cancer study where it was just like it was the you know these studies come out every couple of years and they get a lot of attention. And we felt like the focus of that attention was not accurate where the skew of it was to like giving the study too much credence and so we did a debunker. It was more of a historical look at like look here's what the study said and by the way here you know here's a very similar study that said the same thing about microwaves 15 years ago and here's another one that said the same thing about. It was kind of about looking at how we treat new technologies and how we always use a rat study to go straight to the like causes cancer thing and it never never really pans out. So to answer your question I think I think most of the time we don't see our job as as guard dogs to like debunk things. So we would much rather be it's just a matter of resources right and we'd much rather be spending our time going after original stories like revealing exposing things that people don't know about then cleaning up after other people. We've done a lot in a zine on my team for instance has done for really big stories about sexual harassment in academia. Really exposing professors at various schools who have who have treated their students horribly over many years and we feel like that those stories, you know, we broke those stories and those are just much more fun. They're much harder and much more fun to report fun in the sense that like I don't mean that sexual harassment is fun or that it's funny. But you know we want to be like moving a conversation forward not not doing fact checks of other people. And just a quick follow up. How do you guys measure virality that in media? Well BuzzFeed is very good at measuring virality. It's one of the things that made this company really famous from the beginning. So we have lots of metrics that we use. I guess the fundamental unit is like I mean it's hard because we're so distributed like one piece one story or one piece of content. I hate that word content but one story could be adapted in seven different ways and it often is by a very coordinated team here. So we could write a story, put it up on the web. That same story in bullet point form might appear on our news app on people's phone. That same story with a photo and a caption might appear on our Instagram feed. The same story might be in Snapchat Discover. It'll be and then shared on Twitter and Facebook Pinterest and God knows what else like YouTube. There's all kinds of things that I frankly like there are teams set up in place here who specialize in each of those different platforms. And what we do is we try to give them our content in a couple of different forms. Like we write the bullet points and we try to give them content in a bunch of formats so that they can adapt it in the best way possible. But fundamentally we measure virality through sharing and page views eyeballs like how many people are getting the story on all these various platforms. And how many people are not only reading it but choosing to share it with somebody else. Which we think is like a very I mean this is why I always say people joke with me a lot about clickbait and Buzzfeed being the place for clickbait. And actually Buzzfeed is one of the first places that got rid of clickbait like clickbait will get somebody to click on a headline. Right it'll be like you'll never guess the vegetable that blah blah blah right or whatever like the framing of those clickbait headlines are meant to get you to click to find out what it is. But most of the time after you do that you feel really duped by the answer you get to that article and you're like oh that really wasn't the greatest ever milkshake of all time. Or whatever it had promised in the headline turned out to be a lie. And so you don't put that article on your Facebook feed because you don't want to like expose all your friends and family to this really lame thing. So we feel like sharing is I mean of course we want a lot of people to look at our stuff but if a lot of people look and share then the exponential power of that sharing ultimately leads to like a much bigger impact. And the other thing we look at is like today we look at impact in broader society. So there was a lawmaker today who introduced a bill that would make it so that universities have to report their sexual harassment findings to the NIH and other granting agencies which they currently don't have to do. And this woman who introduced the bill has been following our sexual harassment reporting very closely. So we feel like that was a win for us in an indirect way. I mean obviously we didn't introduce the bill but we felt like it was an example of our journalism having an impact in the real world that can't be counted in pay twos or shares. How do science stories do compared with other kinds of stories on Buzzfeed? It doesn't matter. You obsess, you know, here's the pop culture story and it got so many likes or shares versus a more serious science oriented story. You know, are you constantly looking at those or do you realize that hey, we're talking about it? So I am constantly looking at them because I feel like I want to maximize whatever the potential audience is for a story. So we have a lot of built-in tools here, our CMS, so the software that we use to publish, for instance, we can give it four or five different headlines and four or five different thumbnails and it'll make all the various combinations and test them at the same time and whichever combination that is the best, it'll just switch over to that. So like little things like that, the technology can just help us boost. But I think, I mean we're certainly not, like at my mid-year review or my annual performance review, it's not about how much traffic we got and we're not, we don't have quotas, we're not like ranking our stories based on traffic. But it's very important because I think it's a metric of how many people are reading us. And I think more important than the raw number is I try to like get a sense for my team of like what our baseline number is for an average science story. And then if something falls short of that or far exceeds that, we can say like, oh, what was it about that story that really captivated that audience? And we can, the way our metrics work, we can really zoom in sometimes on like which communities of people shared that. Sometimes we have stories that don't get like, maybe they get kind of an average number of views, but when you look closely, you see that like everyone in a certain community was talking about that story on Twitter. Say we're on Facebook or whatever, like that we count as a win. I mean, we basically just want people to be engaged, some segment of our audience to be engaged with our, with what we put out. I don't think any journalist, you know, every journalist wants the maximum number of people to read their story. And I think it does, it's not like traffic doesn't influence what we, I think there are a lot of, you know, if you open the New York Times and my boss says this a lot and I kind of agree with him. There's all those stories in kind of the middle of the paper that nobody reads. They're like about new legislation being passed or about some like really inconsequential fight on the hill or something that they're just like boring policy stories. And I think we avoid you try to avoid those because no one reads them. And it's not because they're not important. It's because they're not urgent. And I think we try to find stories that are important and urgent. Like if it's something is just important, that doesn't make it news that doesn't make it like our job to report on it. It's kind of a subtle distinction but, you know, it's also just a matter of limited resources like reporters can only do so many stories a week and do I want them doing stuff that's going to like engage and excite a lot of people, or stuff that's important that nobody reads. So I guess the choice here is traffic doesn't matter, but it's not our only metric of success. I have a question. Virginia, I want to bring it back to your, your earliest part of the conversation about your career. You have a background in neurology and neuroscience. And I'm wondering how this affected particularly your early career and your credibility and trust issues with the scientists that you were interviewing. It's clear from looking at your right that you still write a lot in the areas of brain and behavior and neuroscience. And I think that would be interesting to our students who have all kinds of backgrounds and probably are wondering the same kind of thing right now. Yeah, so I think it's really important to, well, so some people are, they call themselves generalists, science journalism generalists and they can write about anything in science and they love it and, and they're great. When I started, I knew that I had a slight advantage, maybe over other freelance writers in that I knew the neuroscience and sort of behavioral neuroscience field, maybe a little bit better than other freelance writers. I certainly didn't, by the way, like having an undergraduate degree in neuroscience. I mean, I learned more about neuroscience in my first year of recording than I did in the four years of being an author, you know, like, as far as the actual themes, the actual issues of the actual, the people you've heard about and people were talking about at conferences are not able to text books. But so I, but like, on the other hand, it was pretty easy for me to read a study of molecular, you know, synapses or neurons or whatever. I wasn't intimidated by that at all. So, so it does help, I think, from like a purely mercenary business point of view, like how do I make at the beginning, like how do I make a name for myself or whatever it's certainly. And then the other thing is I just, for the same reason that I gravitated toward neuroscience and college, I gravitate toward those stories. Now, I just find them fascinating. I think humans are fascinating. And so I don't think in terms of my like credibility with sources, I don't think it matters at all. I can count on my hand like the number of times that a scientist has said no to an interview request. And that was the case when I was first starting as it is now like scientists. It's way easier to report with scientists than it is with any other type of person. They're always willing to talk, unless they're like the super elite like Nobel Prize winners, you can always get them on the phone, you can always get them to talk about their work. So the only thing about credibility is just like, I guess I knew, I knew what conferences to go to, and I knew how to sort of like navigate a scientific conference to find new stories that maybe other people wouldn't have found. But I don't think, I don't think students should worry about credibility with scientists because they really are like so easy to talk to. I try to try to get a senator to talk to you on the phone at a moment's notice. It doesn't happen. I think we've got time for one last question. So Jessica or anybody else, Ryan, Joe, we need to come up with the last question. Well, the thing about this one, so you mentioned Envardo, so everyone kind of waits to hear about one story. How do you separate between what is a really true breakthrough in science, like how those really big significant studies and those that are made to be significant. Can you kind of discern between the two, you know, created versus internal kind of significance in science as well as journalism? Well, the best way is to pick up the phone and call four or five scientists and I see all the nasty ones. But the other thing that happens is over time, if you have a beat, you, like Dan Vergano on my team who was at USA Today for 15 years and then at GEO and now with BuzzFeed. He's seen it all before, you know, when something gets touted is like the latest big thing. He's like, oh yeah, I remember this from 12 years ago. It's actually like, you know, so I think you either have to have the experience yourself of knowing what's actually big. And if you're too young, you don't have that, then you just call people who do have that and could say, it's always good to, by the way, to ask a scientist when you're interviewing them, who's your biggest competitor? They'll usually tell you that because they're usually friends and they'll say, oh, it's, you know, so and so, they can be, or you don't have to say competitor, but you could say, like, who, you know, who else does this? And you can also, if they don't tell you whatever, you just look at their references and look at the people they cite in their paper, other than themselves, because probably half the references are self citations, but the other half you can. It's usually pretty easy to find, you know, people in the field who study the same thing, who are probably their competitors. And when they tell you, yeah, this is a big deal, I wish I would have had that, or he scooped me, or she scooped me, or whatever, like then you know. It takes a little bit of work though, you can't, you certainly can't rely on the press releases that come from nature and science, because again, it's in their interest to get as much coverage as possible. So those press releases really, even from nature and science, even the ones from the journal, a lot of times they're not inaccurate. It's just that they make it seem like a much bigger development than it actually is. They're focusing on what's new about it, when what's new about it might not be much to write home about. Interesting. So really having that hype detector, that BS detector, but at the same time not being dismissive that this might be a breakthrough. And again, as you said, if you don't have the experience to size that by your own networking, you know, calling other scientists in that field to get their take on how significant something is. Yeah. And by the way, also it goes the other way too, when somebody really lays into a paper and really criticizes it of like, this is crappy. Let me tell you what I really think. And you have to be skeptical of that too. There's a lot of, you know, science is politics. They're political, they're fighting for money, they're fighting for grant money, they're fighting for media, they're fighting for prestige. And so, you know, it's always good when you get a criticism, you got to go back to the original guy and say, well, what do you say to this? And, you know, over hopefully you talk to, that's why, you know, talk to three or four people hopefully are five or depending on what it is. And you can, you can generally get a sense of scientists in general are not liars. You go back to the original guy and say like, hey, so what do you say to the criticism that X will usually say like, yeah, that makes sense. But it's not that big of a deal because why? Or, you know, like they, it's really nice reporting on scientists because they're very rational, reasonable people for the most part, with a few exceptions. That does separate from covering politics. Yeah. But he helps. Okay. All right, go for it. Somebody else have one? Okay, not everyone. Yes, the very last question. Just wondering how over the years, do you really build your, your role the next people, you know, to call on certain issues. I'm sure you have a guy for, or multiple people for different subjects, you know, so and so who's an expert on this that you can just call up at any time. How do you build those lasting informational relationships that you can lie on later? Yeah, so a couple of things. Different journalists do different things. I have a friend of mine who has this like really elaborate spreadsheet that she keeps updated. And I don't do that so much. One thing I do, I try to build in some, some processes. So like, first thing I do is, no matter what, whether I quoted them or not, whether I was critical of them or not, when the article comes out and they talk to me for the article, they get a link to it immediately when it's published. And, you know, if they have problems with it, I want to hear about those immediately. I don't want to hide from it or hope they never see it or. And ideally, any criticisms that they see, you will have asked them about before you publish. And we, we have a philosophy here at BuzzFeed called No Surprises, which doesn't mean that you give your article in advance to your source, but you don't, you don't want to be a source to be surprised by something you report after the fact. And oftentimes, bringing an allegation or a criticism to a source ahead of time leads to more reporting that makes your story better. So I always send them a link, which is like another way to get my name in there in box and remind them, we talked, here's what, here's what that led to. And it also, like, they might not remember exactly who I am or whatever, but they, the next time I ask them, I'll say at the beginning of that email, not sure if you remember me, but I talk to you for this story link again, so that they can be reminded of like, oh, her work is, you know, solid, like she, you know, she's an actual, you just give them a little reminder. They, they get a lot of emails and they probably don't remember who you are. But so then it's just, and also going to conferences helps a lot. Like once you meet somebody in person for the first time, and you could say like, I'm the one who called you for those two stories last year. Here's my card. But, but mostly it's just about like, I mean, Gmail is great because you can search. So when you, when you cover something as a beat, like I did, I did neuroscience, basically molecular autism stories for like three or four years. And that small of a field, I knew everybody backwards and forwards, I knew exactly who to go to for every. And over time they, they knew me, but they don't really need to know you, like, because like I said, they all say yes to interviews anyway. But I think they do, especially once you get into like covering more controversial areas, they just want to know that they're being fairly treated. And I think if you could just remind them with links of like, here's my work then. And then they come to you with stuff too. That's the other thing about continuing to email them and, and giving them a link to your story, like when they have something that they want to get pressed for. They might not remember you, but they might type in their email like, you know, journalist request, and then your, your name pops up and then they'll remember. So it's a two way street, like you hear things from scientists tips sometimes. And you want that communication to be there. I also, whenever a scientist writes me, which is thankfully not been very frequently, but, you know, with like, Oh, they think I got something wrong, or they're upset about the headline and they're upset about the framing. My first response to them is, I'd love to jump on the phone with you right now and like talk you through that like let's talk. Even if you think they're 100% wrong, totally off base. Most of the time or like half the time, they'll say never mind, or they won't respond. They just needed to get that like that. And then the other half the time they'll call you and you'll have a chat and you'll either you want that you really messed up, or they'll realize that they had an emotional response. They're taking it too seriously. And, and then meanwhile you've had another conversation with them. They remember you a little bit more. They think of you as a reasonable person, like, so I think it's like any other relationship, you know, you just have to be a little bit persistent. Well, thank you so much for your time. So I can't think of a better way to kick off our YouTube live. Thanks for having me guys. It was fun. It's a lot of me talking. So I think you've laid out some really great ideas that will work really the rest of the semester for us. So thanks again. And I'll personally be in touch with you after. Okay, great. Thanks guys. Bye.