 So, this is our second Google Hangout of the Science Journalism class here at VCU, and is she speaking to Google? Yes. And they were, we are honored to have Michelle Nighouse. You got it. First try. Thanks. Someone who has written for lots of publications in your time, Smithsonian National Geographic, long list of forums where she has talked or rather written about science journalism. Also an expert in how to teach science journalism and her advice. I mean, written one book, I think it edited another book. Yeah, exactly. There are a lot of articles in which you talk about that too. Your advice for legislating science writers. So, without further ado, we'll turn it over to Michelle for 15 or 20 minutes, and then we'll ask her out for questions. For anybody who happens to be watching this on the web, I will be looking at the comments on the YouTube page and also on our class website so that if you have questions that pose to Michelle, just type them in there. Okay. Great. So, take it away. Hi, everyone. Thanks, Jeff. Can you hear me okay? Yes. Yes. Okay. Great. Oh, good. I can hear you now too. Wonderful. So I'm talking to you from White Salmon, Washington, which is about an hour outside of Portland, Oregon, and the Columbia River Gorge. But I spent a lot of time in Virginia growing up in Farmville, Virginia, where my mom's family is from, and I understand the world is going to visit tonight for the vice presidential debate. So I've spent a lot of time in Richmond as well. So, just to start things off with a few minutes of how I got into science writing. Like some of you I expect I loved writing as a young person and a high school student. And I was especially drawn to journalism. I was really involved with my high school newspaper. And that seemed to imply that I should study English literature in college. But when I went to college, I went to a liberal arts school called Reed College in Portland, Oregon. I took a English Lit class and I thought, oh, no, this isn't about how to write. This is about how to think and talk about literature. And I just want to read literature. I just want to think and talk about it. And I don't want to write about it. That's not what I want to write about. So I also happened to, because of very strict and I think well-intentioned or effective distributional requirements, I had to take a science class my first year in college. And I took a really good introductory biology class that I think woke me up to the reality that science is a process. So that I had never, even though I had taken a lot of science in high school, I had never realized that. And I was intrigued. And it was also a bit of a personal challenge. I had been a bit science-phobic in high school. So I thought, well, you know, I'll just, let me try this biology thing for a while. And I think I also had a big idea of, well, I'll learn something that is interesting to me. And perhaps I can write about it someday, which makes my life plan sound a lot more planned out than it actually was. But I did have that idea in the back of my mind. So after I graduated, I supported myself with itinerant jobs as a wildlife field technician. I helped out on projects in the Southwest, on research projects on desert tortoises, on endangered frogs in the Sierra Nevada, on post-fire recovery in the Sonoran Desert. And that was all a great deal of fun. And I really enjoyed knocking around in the desert with my friends and my boots. But it also gave me a close-up look at the reality of a research career. And that reassured me or convinced me that a research career was not for me. I was really interested in the process of science. I was interested in how science was incorporated, used and incorporated into our society. I was also really interested in scientists personally, like what motivated them, what led them into their careers and led them to pursue these questions for years on end without any typical kind of societal reward. So I liked all that, but I just felt I didn't have the intensity of focus to be a researcher myself. I didn't have the passion for a single set of questions that it seemed like a career in research required. I was the person who wanted to come in at the end and be like, well, gosh, what have you spent the last 20 years finding out? And how can I knit that together into a larger picture that ordinary people might understand? I was really intrigued by that process of translation. And that was a big aha moment for me. And I've written about the specific aha moment, which was watching my scientist friends chase this rattlesnake around in the middle of the night on an asphalt highway in the middle of Arizona. And they were so fascinated by the snake. And the snake was beautiful, but I was watching them and thinking, what the hell are they doing? And why are they doing? I was really interested in them. And that was sort of the first time I discovered that my position in the scene, the right position for me in the scene was as the reporter, as the observer, as the person who watched and tried to make sense of it for people who hadn't been there. So I got an internship at High Country News, which I read a couple of High Country News stories if you hadn't run into High Country News before. So, you know, maybe you've seen the magazine. We cover environmental issues around the West, the American West, with an emphasis on the rural West and public lands, since that's what really makes the West, the American West distinctive, is the huge fraction of the American West that is owned and managed by the public. And I, so in 1998, just to give you a cultural marker, I guess, we had one networked computer in the office. It had dial-up with the New York Times in paper version three days after it was published. And we were a news organization. I mean, we came out every two weeks, but this was like, this was okay for a news organization. We were really up to date with that New York Times, getting the New York Times three days later. So we spent a lot of time on the phone. We spent a lot of time in the field in weird places in the rural West. And of course, you know, technology changed. In the four years I was there on staff. And by the time we left, I left, we all had network computers. They all had broadband, I think. But it was a very transitional time in journalism and in the industry. It was really the last gasp of print. And for me, as a person who was very early in her career, it was an interesting time because it was the last time. And I was, I think, the first generation of journalists who didn't have the idea that we could get a job at a newspaper and stay there for the rest of our careers. You know, we were seeing our mentors, people who are older than us, much less experienced. We were seeing them lose their jobs, you know, abruptly. And especially in the newspaper business and to some extent in the magazine business. And again, High Country News is kind of a hybrid between the two. So it was pretty clear that I, you know, as I thought about my career beyond High Country News, I wanted something that had a little more flexibility where I could be, you know, I could, in a sense, hedge my bets. You know, I could kind of see where the industry was going and follow it. And my answer to that, and for personal reasons, I met the guy who had become my husband and I owned some land in the plate in Peonia where the newspaper was based. I wanted to stay in Peonia if I could. So my answer to Life Post High Country News and in the new journalism environment was to become a freelancer. Everyone thought this was absolutely insane to quit my very, you know, reliable job after four years on staff and become a full-time freelancer. But I thought, and especially to do that from a very small town, I was based in rural Colorado. It was five hours from Denver, six hours from Salt Lake City. So I was certainly not in the media hub of the United States or anywhere or the state even. So it was a bit of a leap into the dark, but I decided I'd try it for a year and see how it went. And that was in 2002. And I've been a full-time freelance writer ever since. And what that means is that I work on contract with lots of different publications. So occasionally I will contract with them for several stories in a row, but I am always working. I'm always doing, in a sense, piecework for people. That said, I have longstanding relationships with editors and publications that I've written for for many years. But there's never a commitment on either side that I'm going to do another story for them or that I'm going to do another year's worth of stories for them. It's always on a piecemeal basis. So that said, I want to say on behalf of all freelancers that I have made a good living ever since I started freelancing. I have, for most of the 14 years, I've been a freelancer. I've been the sole or nearly sole breadwinner in my household. I'm also a parent. I had my daughter in 2008. She just had her eighth birthday. So it's been rewarding for me. Freelancing is not easy. There's a lot of uncertainty, especially the way I was trying to do it from a small town. It required a lot of, especially at first, a fair amount of travel to network and that sort of thing. That has gotten easier just as networking has gone more online in recent years. I've had to show my face less, which has been convenient for me and my family. And as I've gotten more established, I've also had to schmooze less, so to speak. Starting out, I wrote a lot for High Country News, my old employer. I did a series about climate change that really was a turning point for me. It was a series of six long stories that was back in 2004, 2005. And that got me interested in climate change, which is a theme I've continued to follow in the decade since. It also gave me an entree into national publications. I won some awards for that series. And it was also just a clip. As we call it, it was something I could add to my portfolio and say to national editors, hey, I can do a long story. I can do the fieldwork, I can do the field recording, and I can put together a long narrative that people are going to be interested in and people are going to read. And just as a piece of journalism, it was rewarding because it was about the visual impacts of climate change in the West, a lot of which had not been previously acknowledged to general readers. It wasn't always brand new research, but it was something that had not been put in context for readers before. It was a fact that we were seeing either the effects of climate change in the West, not just in faraway places like Antarctica and the Arctic, or if we weren't seeing the direct effects of climate change, we were seeing patterns that were very much like the predicted effects of climate change. And at the time, again, this was a decade ago, that was a wake up call for a lot of people. So that was a really satisfying project. And as a freelancer, I started out at some other environments. I started out freelancing for other environmental magazines like Grist, which many of you have probably run into. It's still around Audubon Magazine, other magazines published by environmental organizations. And then slowly I got into writing for more general audiences, which was my intent all along. I really liked the challenge of trying to make these issues interesting for people outside the choir, but I certainly believe that preaching to the choir is also an important thing to be doing. The choir needs to be informed. So I wrote for, again, I wrote for Smithsonian, wrote for online-only publications like Slate and Salon and so forth. And then the last few years I've been writing quite a bit for National Geographic, and I've done several features for the magazine, which has taken me all over the place and has been really satisfying to write for that large of a general audience and to also have the resources of National Geographic, which would give you the time and the space to do a big story justice. And then in recent years I've also been blogging a lot for The New Yorker, which is I find a very satisfying change of pace. I've always really loved doing long stories, and I've always kind of idealized them as many journalists do. But given our media environment, getting to say a lot in a small space is sometimes, I think it's sometimes almost as worthwhile as writing a giant 5,000 word piece that people are going to promise to read for months on end and never actually read. Giving them 800 carefully crafted words that say what you really think is important for people to know about a current piece of news is, you know, in terms of like a service, if journalism is a public service, and I do think it is in terms of public service, that is, you know, it rivals the public service that's done by a really deeply reported long piece. So I like that, even though I always thought I would be a long form, exclusively a long form writer, I more and more like that mix of long and short pieces. So I usually have something going for Netgeo and perhaps, you know, another longer feature. And then I have blog posts which are, you know, short stories. Basically those are 800,000 word stories for The New Yorker or for my own blog, which is called The Last Word of Nothing, which is a group blog that I do with a bunch of other science writers. So that takes you up to the present of my story. I guess the things that are the common threads for me in the last almost 20 years of being a science writer and being a journalist are that I do love field reporting. I love talking to people. I love understanding new places by going there and having an excuse to talk to people who are, you know, off the tourist trail, not people that I would normally run into as just a visitor. I love that it's not easy for me. It's not, I'm not a naturally Greek areas person. So I find it challenging, but I also find it one of the most satisfying parts of my work. I, you know, continue to be really interested in science and conservation and really dedicated to making sense of that for general audiences. I think a lot about my readers and who they are. And I, you know, I am also a curious, but very busy and destructive person. And my readers are the same way. So I feel a lot of, you know, I feel like I have a lot in common with them. You know, I'm just a person who has a little bit of background in science and has, because of, you know, thanks to my job, I have had the time to look into this particular thing and I can help to make sense of it for them. So it feels, in some sense, it's a collaborative effort. You know, we're all trying to make a sense of the world for each other. And then the other common thread in my career is that I have been willing to give up, you know, a lot of sort of standard conveniences for creative freedom. You know, I've lived in a small town. I now live in another small town. I love small towns, but one of the reasons I live in them is that they're inexpensive and I have a low overhead. So I don't have to take on work that I don't want. And I've remained a freelancer, you know, despite opportunities to take on staff jobs because I just have become a little bit addicted to that flexibility, the flexibility of schedule and also the flexibility of subject matter inform. So that's the rundown on me and I'm happy to answer any questions you might have. Well, I have a question that goes to the point about freedom of subject matter and the life of a freelancer. And I'm just wondering how often when you're an active freelancer, as you are, does the idea for the story come from an assignment from an editor or how often are you going to be editor and saying, hey, there's this great breast pump hackathon. I love that breast pump hackathon. It goes both ways. Excuse me. When I was starting out, again, I had the advantage of having a working relationship with High Country News so I could just go to those guys because we knew each other and we could discuss story ideas, you know, their ideas and my ideas. But when I was pitching things as a freelancer early on, it was always me pitching a story and because, you know, people had no idea who I was. And so I'd write and introduce myself and say, here's an idea. Here's a couple ideas I have for stories and they would say, you know, yes, go ahead or no, we did that last week. Why didn't you check? And or, you know, no, that's not for us. Like it was, it's a process of getting, you know, I'm sorry, a little backstrange background noise, getting to know the publication, each publication and what they're looking for and how they see themselves. Now, you know, now that I've been doing it a while and I know it, you know, science journalism is not an enormous world. Like I tend to know the person I'm pitching or else, you know, know some, we know someone in common. So it's a much more informal kind of communication and editors I've worked with for a long time, like my editor at Nat Geo I've worked with on and off for almost 10 years now. And so we have an ongoing, you know, conversation where he'll be talking about things that are being discussed in the office and I'll have ideas from, you know, just my sort of general pipeline of ideas. So it goes both ways. But it's not unusual for someone who has experience for a magazine to contact them and say, you know, we're looking for a story on, you know, I did a story on the California drought for Buzzfeed last year. And that was a case where they were like, we need, we want to, we want to long form story on drought because it's something that's in the news and people want to know about what are your ideas. And so then it's a process of, you know, I know they're interested in a certain subject and I helped develop the story. We developed the story together. I was just wondering if there were any issues that you found that were specific to freelancing for science journalism. Just specific to that. Let me think. I mean, it's hard to say because I haven't freelanced for in another beat, but I think, I mean, the disadvantage of freelancing is great flexibility and the disadvantage is lack of collaborators, lack of resources and lack of credibility, especially at first. You know, when you call up a, when you call up an organization, you know, a university or a researcher, whoever it might be and say, you know, I'm a freelance writer, they are like, I'm busy. I have to go to the bathroom, you know. But they, so I think this is perhaps similar to other beats, but you know, it takes longer to develop sources because you just don't have that immediate credibility of being able to say, hey, you know, this is Michelle from the New York Times. You know, I say, this is Michelle. I'm a science journalist. I sometimes write for blah, blah, blah. And I just don't have quite the, you know, I don't get to wear the magic hat like a staff writer does. So that's a big difference, but it's again with experience that difference narrows quite a bit. I spoke about journalism as a public service and science is increasing, becoming, you know, more siloed and more focused. How do you feel is your role as a journalist in the scientific community being able to pull out and make connections? Let's hope you can dig into that a bit more. My, sorry, you broke up a little bit. My role in making connections among, within the scientific community or making connections among fields for other scientists or for the public at large. So for drawing out kind of the significance of the work for those who might be not well-informed and also just kind of your role reporting on science in this larger area of science research, does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. I, yeah, definitely, I mean, I see my role as a science journalist as someone who can understand something about all those increasingly specialized fields and draw them, put them in context for, not only for the general reader, but actually for scientists themselves. I mean, I don't do much of this myself. I've done some of it, but I, you know, some friends of mine make their living almost exclusively writing for the new sections of science and nature. So they're writing for an audience of scientists about things that are going on in science because, you know, the scientific community is huge and diverse and they don't understand each other sometimes. You know, they need to be, the ecologists need to understand what's going on in, you know, in genetics and vice versa. So it's, I think that is also a public service. It's just a different kind of public. And then, you know, I do think there's a real need for even though journalism itself, the economic model of journalism is challenged as we can talk about, but I think there's a real societal need for more science writers because, as you say, the field is, the scientific fields are becoming more siloed, more splintered, more specialized, and we need more and more people who can move between, move among those silos and, you know, as the phrase goes, connect the dots for people because science, and not only is science becoming more specialized, but it's becoming more immediately relevant to our lives. And it's involving more and more larger and more complicated ethical decisions. And those are not decisions that get made within the scientific community. Those are decisions that we as a society make. So there's a real need to understand those things. Thank you. Yeah, one more thing about that. I mean, I think that scientists and to some extent science journalists have for a long time thought, well, if we just open the heads of the public and pour in a bunch of accurate facts, then things will change for the better, you know, and that's sometimes called the information deficit model. And I think that we have learned through painful experiences, especially with reporting on climate change, that reporting the facts, reporting what we see as reality does not always change the public's view of reality. And I think as science journalists, we have gotten better. We still have a long way to go, but gotten better at not assuming that the accurate facts are going to solve everything. We've gotten better at understanding our audiences, understanding where they're coming from and how we might speak, not in any way abandon the facts. I mean, that's like the fundamental thing. But in addition to sharing the facts, understanding where our audiences are coming from and understanding how we can deliver those facts in a way that's going to be heard. Excellent. Thank you. Yeah. I wanted to follow up and go just a little deeper into this idea of context. And by the way, I'm the librarian in the class. Oh, wonderful. I love librarians. Thank you. Everyone knows. I know. Really? Yeah. I've been in this career about 35 years, and I say about 90% of the questions that I receive are from people who want to know what we know. And about 10% lead us to telling the student or the researcher what we don't know. I have to say the best I've read today was yours that said, coral sex is poorly understood. And I thought, wow, that must have been fun that you write that with a straight face. But it really made me think about this passion of mine for unearthing what we don't know. And I wonder if you would talk about that a little bit as part of the science journal's role to report on that part of the context. What is it that we do not know? Yeah. I love that question. And that's so interesting that 90% of the questions you get are about what we already know. I think we should already know and are disappointed when they find out that we don't know. Oh, OK. And then 10% of the questions are, what are the unknowns in such and such a field? It's usually my telling the student, we don't know about that and having to prove it to them, usually through a review. Another kind of an article often doesn't give that much context or that kind of context in background. Your article will convince them because it says we don't know much about. For example, I was surprised to learn a few years ago, and I shouldn't have been, but we can't make dirt. Topsoil is this. Here's this simple substance that's everywhere and we don't have enough of it or won't have enough of it. Yeah. But what a concept. We don't know how to do it. It seems pretty essential that there is. That's great. I've never thought about it in quite those terms before. That's so interesting. Yeah. Let me think of how I've several different thoughts about that where to start. I think, I mean, again, going back to the end of my last answer, I think as science journalists, we have struggled mightily, especially in covering climate change, to establish what scientists do know with a reasonable amount of certainty because the way scientists talk about uncertainty and the way the public understands uncertainty are very different. The scientists, as many of you know, scientists routinely measure their uncertainty because they know that everything is uncertain, so they will point out, you know, this is an uncertain, here's the extent to which this result is uncertain and the public hears that as like, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about when someone says they're uncertain. So there's a big disconnect there that has been exploited as has been well documented, has been exploited by all kinds of people with a vested interest in climate change not being accepted by society as reality. That gap in understanding has been exploited so that the public for a long time thought that climate change was much less certain that the reality of human class climate change was much less certain than it actually was. So I think as science journalists, we have been occupied for a long time trying to establish the 90%, you know, the question that we have been trying to answer the kinds of questions that you get 90% of the time. You know, what do we know about this? What do we know about climate change? And I think it is exciting and really fun to write about things that we don't yet know and especially for climate journalists, it's kind of a luxury because we are, we have worked because just because of this dynamic that I just talked about, we have worked very hard to talk about what's already known and to make that clear to general readers. So yeah, when I get to say here, look, I'm reporting on something that, I'm reporting on coral sex that we really, despite trying to find out for many years, we don't know quite how coral reproduces or there's a lot of things that remain unknown about this. I think that those are exciting stories and they can really emphasize to people what I was talking about that I took a long time to understand as a student of science, the science is a process and it's an ongoing process and that there will always be things that we don't know, fortunately. Does that answer your question? It does. I have more thoughts on it, but there are a lot of students in the room at night. Yeah. Let's see. We can get back to it if there's time. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, okay, the joke. So coming from a scientific background, you know, having a degree in biology or that background, do you ever get like cynical or frustrated that you may have to write about something or sort of explain something that you've, you know, like climate change for a minute, where you've known it as truth and fact for so long and there's still people out there who may be like, nah, that's a bunch of funk, you know. Do you ever get frustrated or cynical with having to explain things that you've taken as truth for a long time? Yeah, sure. I mean, yeah, especially, I mean, especially in the case of climate change because I do, you know, every, it seems like every year we understand with more and more certainty that there was an, and perhaps still is a deliberate campaign of misinformation, that it's not just people, I have every sympathy in the world for people not getting stuff because God knows I have to look up things all the time, you know. I have journalist amnesia, so I understand everything about one thing for a short period of time and then I forget it. So I don't get annoyed with having to explain basic information to people. That to me is part of the job and I actually enjoy it. It's like, okay, it's like teaching, you know. Okay, let's try this again. Let me use a different metaphor or maybe you'll read this different story about it. Maybe you'll get it. You know, there's that kind of like iteration of where you're trying to build a connection between two minds and it's kind of exciting because, you know, eventually it's going to work out. That said, the climate change thing where I know people have been manipulated by misinformation, it does get frustrating for sure, you know, because you know what you're up against and I know that my personal worth is far less than Exxon's. Exxon has a lot more power than I do to win hearts and minds, but I think it's changing. I mean, people, unfortunately we have journalism and science have been aided by reality and a lot more people are realizing that climate change, they're either, as I was talking about in the American West, they're either experiencing climate change themselves or they are experiencing something that's very much like the predicted effects of climate change. So we no longer have to work so hard to prove our case. You know, tragically, no longer have to work so hard to prove our case. Thanks. I was wondering how you kind of approach writing articles differently when you, like based on the publication, so like, you know, if you're writing for the New York Times rather than High Country, do you feel a little more comfortable, like, I guess, aiming to be clear rather than being creative? What's the kind of difference there? Yeah, I mean every magazine has, every magazine and newspaper is, and magazine is more so than newspapers, but I think every publication is this way where every writer has an individual voice and the job of the publication is to bring those voices together in a, you know, every month or every week or every couple of weeks, bring those voices together in a conversation that, a coherent conversation so that there's, you know, you recognize these stories as both, you know, say both a story that I wrote and a story that belongs to Smithsonian Magazine, you know, so there's a dual, the job of an editor for magazine is to make that happen, to make sure that there's a balance of what I might call the institutional voice and the personal voice because it's nice when stories are distinctive and you can be like, oh, that seems like something that Malcolm Gladwell wrote or that's a story that, you know, any number of wonderful science writers from the New York Times wrote because they have their distinctive voices, even though in newspapers those distinctions are a little more subtle. So, yeah, I think I do certainly, you know, when I'm writing for a magazine, a new magazine or a new publication, I will read, I will read the publication pretty closely and try and understand their DNA, you know, where are they coming from, who is their audience. I tip I heard a long time ago and still uses, still works online is to look at the ads that the publication has and that tells you a lot about their readership because the marketing department studies the readership a lot more closely than the editorial department does. They know who they're, and they, you know, because they're promising people that they're buying, that they're selling ads to who those ads are going to reach so you can tell a lot about who you're talking to through the ads. And so I do tweak my style. That said, over time you do kind of, I think more and more as time goes by in a writing career you develop a distinctive voice of your own. You kind of, you know, for better or worse, you get more confident so you can express more of yourself but you also get stuck in your ways. So, you know, Michelle and I have a story tends to be the same or to have some similar characteristics. So, you know, hopefully there's something in common between the stories that I write for High Country News and that I might write for the New Yorker but just that there's an awareness that those are different audiences. Explain things about public lands in the west to a New Yorker audience that I wouldn't have to explain to a High Country News audience. There are going to be different things that are going to be interesting. High Country News readers really want to get down in the nitty-gritty and, you know, know about what happened at the public meeting while New Yorker readers are going to be like, now just tell me the upshot, okay, tell me how that makes sense in my world and, you know, where I'm living in the urban east coast. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I think so. Have you ever felt an obligation to kind of pick and choose facts from a scientific article to protect the public's perception of what you're writing about? Oh, like to say to say, to portray something as more certain than it actually is because I want them to believe in climate change, for instance. No, more like just maybe not inciting panic or... Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm fine with people maybe. No, I mean, I see what you're saying and I think you know, yeah, it is something to consider because you don't, you know, joking aside, you don't want to incite meaningless panic, right? You want people to to you want to get their attention and then you want them to do useful things. That's not a journalistic bias. That's just as a citizen in society, you hope that people are going to take the information you put out there and do something useful. I mean, maybe a good example of that is the earthquake story that was in The New Yorker a couple of years ago that some of you might have seen about the Cascadia earthquake when the story won the Pulitzer Prize this year. And that story, because of the masterful way it was written, it scared a lot of people and I interviewed the writer a couple of months after it came out and she said, you know, I was really worried I was really worried in the week after it came out I was, you know, sort of pleasantly surprised by all this attention it was getting but I thought I just don't, I didn't want to write a disaster porn story. Like, I hope this isn't just going to be a story where people are scared and then they move on to the next thing to be scared about. She said that I was very encouraged, you know, after it came out. And I think it's a very natural kind of panic that people in the north, and this was, I'm sorry I should back up and explain this is about an earthquake that has long in the Pacific Northwest it's long been known that this earthquake is there's a chance of it happening at some point in the next 50 years. There's a one out of three chance that this catastrophic earthquake is going to hit the Pacific Northwest and that's been known in the region for a long time but it really brought it home to people in the Northwest because it's instead of saying this could happen it said this will happen and it forecast what it was going to look like when this big one did happen because and I think that was warranted because the earthquake may or may not happen in the next 50 years but it is going to happen at some point just because of the way the tectonic plates are set up. And so in the week so there was a great deal of sort of freaking out on the internet about the story and then after that initial hubbub a lot of changes started to happen a lot of things that, you know, a lot of kind of boring things that people have thought for a long time in the Pacific Northwest we need to do this, we need to get our earthquake codes in order, we need to pass regulations requiring escape routes and so forth people need to get their houses reinforced and retrofitted for earthquake protection a lot of those things have happened and I think that that was an example of a useful scaring of people so I have something sort of pertinent to that because I have a family that lives on Lopez Island in the Bay Area so it's just funny because I got to see exactly that article and exactly in those ways happened on a real person scale because that came out both my aunt, my grandma who live out on that island now have earthquake emergency like a whole kit set up in their car at all times in case it happens and like whole family meetings about like, you know where to go when this happens and if they get separated so it's just interesting to see that on a very close personal scale that was interesting Yeah, oh I've been to Lopez Island is where they don't have it's very service only, right? Yeah, you've got to see Mary for Manicortis Yeah, it's out there they really do need to be prepared that's great I'm glad to hear that because I think that's my impression too from living in the Northwest new about it but it's made it much more a part of the people now talk about it and they don't just sort of refer to it and say, oh god big ones coming at some point, they have taken much more concrete steps to be prepared for it Sure Have you ever written a story that you kind of pointed towards not just the mass public but maybe towards people in the government to change legislation like it wasn't specifically meant for just a mass audience but to maybe push them to do something about crime change Yeah, for sure I don't know if I've done that intentionally I mean there's a joke and I continue that we have most of our subscribers are in the West except for this one in Washington DC and we feel like good at least people on the Hill are reading our reading high continues as background to perhaps policy proposals and new legislation but certainly in any story I'm always happy to inform the general public because I do think it's good to be generally a good thing to be informed about the world but the levers of change are different for every story in some stories you do want to convince as broad you do want to make like the earthquake story that's the case where the levers of change are both in the local and state government and their individuals so you want lots of individuals to know about it because as a citizen of the society again it would be a good idea for them to retrofit their houses and make them earthquake proof but there's other cases where like I wrote a story about the Mekong dams the Mekong hydropower a couple of years ago for National Geographic and this is ongoing this is a series of 11 hydropower dams that are going in on the lower Mekong river and primarily for power production some of it domestic but most of it to be shipped outside the region for economic gain and it's a real threat to to the region's food supply I mean it's a food story because it's the largest, the Mekong is the world's largest freshwater fishery and people, rural people and urban people in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam and Thailand to some extent still depend on fish from that river and these dams could severe, especially there's a couple of them that could severely disrupt fish migration and basically take away that that free source of protein for millions of people so the individual person in the US it's so far away you know hopefully people in Southeast Asia are reading editions of National Geographic but it's a US based publication I was glad for people to know about it I was glad for them to be introduced to the value of the Mekong if they didn't already know about it but the people in the US who can help change that situation work for the State Department so I told the photographer that I worked with after the story came out we have a local monastery here in White Salmon and the monks come by for alms every Sunday and one of them said hey I heard you wrote a story about the Mekong and I said oh do you want a copy along with what we gave them for food I put the copy of the magazine in their bowl and then I got an email from someone in the State Department who said thanks for writing that story I'm passing it around the office and I wrote to the photographer and I said I think we've got it covered the monks know about it and the State Department knows about it so that's a job well done I've got a question about the experience that you and your family did develop this throw chapter of your life did that inform your science writing did that help did that have any impact on the way you frame questions or you think about what is the story or just the way you approach it yeah I mean in a million ways I'm probably not aware of I think living in a small town and in particular a town where that's near the headwaters of a river that's near a lot of coal mines that's an agricultural town I think that in for my science writing and my environmental conservation writing because I was living in a place where things come from and I was very aware of the process of producing the resources that we use every day and the costs and benefits that we know people who were killed in the coal mines you know there's very that was very real to me it wasn't just something that happened for a way and then I think living off the grid was a benefit in the same way because you know living off the grid I feel like I'm always at pains to tell people it was really comfortable it wasn't like we were suffering we lived for about 15 years in the strawberry house that my husband built that was completely off the grid and there were certain things we couldn't have like a toaster and a dryer we couldn't have anything with a heating element that we used for long periods of time just because of the power that consumed but it was a very comfortable existence but it does make you aware of the amount of power you're using because you can see it in the meter you know you can see okay the sun is shining and it's you know the batteries are getting recharged and uh oh it's been really cloudy for a few days we better be a little more careful about what we're using so I think just in terms of you know inputs and outputs it was useful that way it's always reminding me one thing that I noticed and really loved in the pieces across different publications that you've written is that there is a quality that I would describe as literary you know there's a narrative of beautiful descriptions I was thinking about the choral sex piece and there's a moment where you say the water bubbles up like boiling oatmeal I just think it's beautiful turns of phrase and I'm wondering quality is something that you feel has developed in your writing over time or is that has that been a home I guess I'm wondering did you go from sort of hard news style of reportage to that more literary voice or has that been a signature all the way through well thanks first of all that's really nice to hear and I daily news writers think of writers like me in an affectionate way but in a hopefully affectionate way they are like these like slackers who are sitting around thinking of the exact and while we are out telling every day telling news and you will read a story in the newspaper and it's full of really important information but also full of what we call journalese which are these stock phrases that journalists will default to because they are trying to do something so quickly and I have especially during the selection year I have every sense of gratitude in the world for those writers because I don't care how much journalese they are writing I'm just glad the facts but my niche niche in the business has been to take a little more time with how I'm telling the story with the hopes of you know just it's just another tool to catch people's attention in this very busy world where there perhaps they are not caught by the by the urgency of the story you know who like no one starts their morning thinking well gosh what I really need to know about this morning is cruel sex they are like what's the latest with the Trump campaign they are looking at the Washington Post to find out what the latest is but because my stories don't have that urgency I hope that by pooling around with words and telling things in a surprising way that I can penetrate the noise that surrounds all of us I started out a high continuous which again is like a magazine newspaper hybrid and though we did have a sense of urgency and duty to report what was going on we always had a little more time than a reporter at the times where the Washington Post might have you know I wasn't expected to do three stories a day I was expected to do a story every three days so I always had a little bit of time to at least think about how I was saying stuff Michelle in terms of advice for writers extending just kind of building on what you just said besides setting aside adequate time are there other specific tips that you might offer this group and I realize that there's no formula to writing a great story and that there are lots of different kinds of stories from long form to you know kind of a brief but are there any sort of three or four things to keep in mind I guess that young writers should pay attention to as they try to practice the craft or the craft well one very practical tip I have is to find a way to block off the internet when you're writing I use an app called freedom and I don't plug products great often but I will plug freedom which is I just think it's a great it's worth every penny I've spent on it and so I have you know recurring blocks that will that I don't you know I don't have to press the button myself I have a schedule of recurring blocks where I can block off certain sites or I can block off the entire internet you know in my case when I'm writing I still do need certain and you need to access to some parts of the web I just need to block myself Facebook or what you know I need to like block out certain distractions so I do that and that you know I think just no matter how disciplined you are if you have if you're writing tool is attached to like this perpetual fun machine there's just no way to get writing done and so you know even if you're really disciplined your brain is going to get tired resisting the perpetual fun machine so that there's some method like that I mean I know writers who use who use a computer with no connectivity whatsoever like especially fiction writers will you know basically get a turn there turn their laptop into what is basically a type writer in my case I do need a little bit of access to the web because I need to look things up as I go along usually so that's extremely useful for the for any modern writer I think and then I think just I have benefited from growing up in my career thinking of what I do as a craft rather than an art and I even though I you know as I was just saying I really enjoy the art of it and they love that my my part of the business allows me to explore that art I do think of it as a craft mostly as a craft and I think that helps me get through the kind of typical writer's drama where you're like oh god I have writer's block I need to go drink my mint on the daybed and recline you know it's like it's just more like I'm a nurse or I'm a carpenter or you know I have a deadline and I have to do this and it just I think thinking of it as a craft and thinking of it as a series of steps that are not always predictable but they are there and that you can always put your fingers to the keyboard even if what you're writing is not very good you can put your fingers to the keyboard and go back and make it better later when you are in you know a better mental space so to speak so those are two things can I think of a third thing I don't know it's you know so much of so much of what I've learned about how I do and why I do it has to do with the kind of story I'm writing but as a freelancer you know self those are those two things I think speak to self-discipline and as a freelancer that's something I have to think about all the time because no one's watching me you know I could be here just surfing you know just shopping all day and no one would care so I've had to learn to discipline myself or find tools or tricks of mine that help me do that because and I would say that for any writer I mean writing should maybe this is my third tip that writing should be something you enjoy I really don't understand people who say they hate writing or writers I'm like why do it but I think it's hard even no matter how experienced you are it's really hard to get started writing you know to start a writing project because we are constantly distracted by more finite things you know writing any project is this sort of task you don't know how long it's going to take you don't know if you're moving forward or if you're going to have to you know backtrack it's not a linear process like it's much easier to go do the dishes because you know how long that's going to take and you know you know you're going to just work your way through it and get done writing is hard to get started but once you start it like I think my disciplinary tactics are just ways to convince myself to get started because once I get started I really really like it and I love the process of translation and I love the process of playing with words and trying to find the right word Sarah? Well I have a question that I think is going to come up in our class very soon and probably has already come up for some of our students that's the idea of accuracy can't predict how it's writing I think maybe this goes back to Kirby's earlier question what's different I think it is complex and it's more complex than entertainment or politics even so when accuracy is an issue how do you address it do you let your sources review when do you how does that work for you? Yeah thanks for asking those questions because those are really those are big issues in what we do and you're right that is different from entertainment or politics so the issue of accuracy I fairly often talk to groups of scientists about media and I work with an organization called Compass whose job is to act as an interface between science and the media and they will often bring in journalists to their training not to so much train the scientists directly but to say here's how my world works here's what I want or need from scientists when I'm telling a story about science and here's how you can present your information in a way that's going to make my job easier and that's going to further our aim of you know making sense of this for the public so through that I have I often try and stress the difference between precision and accuracy and that scientists want us often want often confused in my mind at least I think they're confused but they think I'm confused I'm sure but they often will think that precision and accuracy are the same thing that if you don't include things to the maximum with the maximum precision known if you don't include all the caveats with all the details that it's somehow inaccurate and I think it's my job to say look a story can still be accurate even if I in the interest of having my busy readers read the thing all the way through if I have left out some of that precision and that's of course a judgment call and I've certainly battled with scientists who have thought that I took out too much precision that's something that's really in the eye of the beholder but I do think that that is a big part of my process of translation actually is figuring out what kinds of precision are crucial to the accuracy of the story and which kinds can be left out in the interest of finding a larger audience and then what was the second part of your question it was really important oh seeing drafts yeah biggest view so for those of you who aren't in science there is this tradition of peer review where scientists routinely send around drafts of their of their public their articles either for anonymous peer review or for peer review by their friends and colleagues for feedback and as journal and so they understandably expect the same from journalists when their work is being written about they're like well so when can I see a draft of this so that I can correct any errors and this leads to a lot of awkward conversations between journalists and scientists because there's this cultural divide because as journalists we are coming from a tradition where we may not be reporting on politics but our colleagues are and you know I always say well imagine if Woodward and Bernstein had shown Richard Nixon drafts of their stories for Washington Post about Watergate you know like that you just don't do that because your sources have a vested interest and you're not exposing the information that you're about to expose so our situation is different but we come from that tradition and you know there's politics in science and there's money in science and you know we there are things that you know sometimes that we write about that scientists may not want us to be writing about so we do have to maintain that level of distance between sources our sources as we call them and our own work you know we can't give them editing power over our own work that said I think that we do have more we share more goals with our sources than straight out political reporters do we're not always working we're not always in an adversarial position and sometimes our interest overlap especially in accuracy so I will I will not check quotes with sources I just don't I just make you know I either record or I take very good notes and I make sure my quotes are accurate because if you run a quote by a source they will change it they'll change it and make it sound like nothing no normal human would ever say or they'll make it really boring and like the reason you're quoting them is that they put it in an interesting way so I just don't because it's not good for the story but I will fairly often you know run a paragraph by a source if you know I don't I don't check things about other people's work with them but you know if there's like a three sentences where I'm analyzing the results of a study I sometimes will either call them and walk through it with them or say you know is this an accurate way of representing your work and then and I'll say please let me know if there are any factual errors and sometimes they'll write back and say no that's great or sometimes they'll write me back with like a page of explanation that I'm like no that's all this that I took out but it gives and they you know they know that I can't always you know I can't just take their corrections and incorporate them you know I have to do my I have to you know my first priority is with my audience but it does give me a chance to say okay here's their here's their version of the here's you know the most accurate version in their in their mind of the story and is there anything that's left out of my version that that really you know that I really need to add back in or you know or is there just a simple misunderstanding that I need to correct and I can do that before a publication does that help that helps tremendously for some conversations I've been having in the last week or so oh good okay yes it's such a tricky issue in this class and also in a panel event that we're having so yes it's tremendously helpful thank you good yeah I think that the key is that we need to we need to maintain that separation between our between ourselves and our sources but but there are times when we can work together as science journalists it doesn't have to be and shouldn't you know for the most part shouldn't be adversarial but we need to have we need to maintain that freedom to do investigatory work when we need to there's tremendous interest in this class particularly that we're seeing from our medical campus and they're asking these kinds of questions and they want a forum in which they can discuss it but I'd say overwhelmingly they want to be partners in this process they recognize that science communication is not where it should be and they're telling me they take the blame for some of that yeah all the solutions that you suggested but I do think that they understand that they have a role in this and that some compromise in working together is inevitable and necessary yeah there's a good book the organization I work work for occasionally compass that does this work with scientists and media training the director of it has written a book called escape from the ivory tower oh are you okay so that's my friend Nancy Barron's book and that's I think really helpful it speaks to a lot of these issues that come up for you know academics especially but I imagine also medical professionals and I'm you know I'm always careful when I do those kinds of talks and trainings I don't think researchers need to become media professionals you know that is a that's our job you know we don't need them to be doing their our job for us and I've worked for a long time to do this job and I know it's really time consuming so I don't want them to think that they have to take on a second career they need they you know want to be focused on the research and they should be but I do think that there are things that they can do that are not very that are actually fun and and helpful to them in their own work as they're talking to people in other specialties and so forth where they can learn to talk about their work you know they can learn to tell a story about their work rather than getting buried in the details that sort of thing that they can just practice almost for you know almost for fun and it can take them a long way so one more question that's okay I was just going to ask kind of following up on what you said about working with scientists and your sources have you ever felt like when you're kind of not battling it out with them but if they come to you with something they think should sort of be correct they're clear in a way and you can stand your ground and you're like no I think I need to keep it this way have you ever felt like you were going to earn and you originally used to speak or were you not as concerned about that or maybe as a freelancer were you more concerned as opposed to if you work for a sitting paper or something you know I think I've been lucky and I can't think of any case where it was really like a core issue that they were upset about it was always details gotcha so maybe not a huge concern yeah it was always a case where we were able to I was able to just say you know sorry like I see where you're coming from but I have to think about my audience and here's you know here's what I decided or here's what my editor and I decided sometimes it's not up to me sometimes I'm in a situation where I'm kind of battling for more specificity and my editor is like oh please you know like no because writers after spending a lot of time on a story writers do get too deep into it and kind of we lose track of what's interesting and what our audience needs to know so there's a backstop to be like no no no you don't need that extra paragraph about whatever and so I can sometimes say look at you know was my decision or I just had to make this decision and they might be irritated with me but they're not you know it's not like their relationships over actually the most amount of flak I've gotten from scientists is when I portray them telling jokes they hate that um they don't always hate it but sometimes I'm always like surprised at like their consternation when I report them telling a joke and I'm like that makes you sound like an interesting person you know and I mean I do use I try to use humor a lot in my stories when I can because my readers are science-phobic to some extent like I have been at certain points in my life and I think portraying scientists as human is really important and I will tell I have told this to scientists who have been like oh god I can't believe you told you know reported me telling that off-color joke and I'm like look that like really like take one for the team because that is just humanized you for 4 million readers in National Geographic and I think the problem is that they you know if our if we as journalists are conscious of our editors sitting on our shoulder or our peers sitting on our shoulder and you know assessing what we write scientists are very conscious of their own peers assess they're not thinking of the general reader they're thinking of the reaction of their peers and their peers are going to be like oh that's you really didn't look very serious in that story you know you look like kind of a joker and they're embarrassed about that they're embarrassed about what their peers are going to say but I've managed to bring a couple people around to the idea that it's okay to be funny in public so I agree well I think that's going to be a wrap so thank you so much well yeah thanks for spending more than an hour with us sharing tips on writing and your career and it was wonderful so thanks again Michelle Professor and our broadcast so okay good luck to all of you thank you alright okay so just hang up here thanks Jeff