Industry, Research and the Media

1997 Sigma Xi Forum Informal Panel Discussion
November 20, 1997

Sponsored by:

The Media Resource Service—Linking Journalists and Scientists
800-223-1730 or mediaresource@sigmaxi.org

Sigma Xi and the Media Resource Service have a long-standing interest in promoting the public understanding of science through the media by helping journalists locate reputable sources and by bringing scientists and reporters together from time to time to discuss their interests and concerns. This panel discussion was part of an ongoing series that focuses on media coverage of science and technology.

Moderator:

Paul Raeburn, senior science and technology editor of BusinessWeek and an honorary member of Sigma Xi

Panelists:

Selby Wellman, senior vice president of Cisco Systems Inc.

Robert Frosch, former General Motors research director, former NASA administrator and current president of Sigma Xi

Paul Raeburn

… BusinessWeek is a news magazine, and we try to cover stories in the same way a newspaper or the Associated Press does. We draw conclusions in stories based on the reporting, but we try to lay out the reporting for you, so you can see what we learned, and how we got to that conclusion…I'm fortunate enough to have access to a lot of people, many famous scientists. I sit down in their offices and talk with people who over the years have been incredibly generous with their time, and get private tutoring, in a sense, from some of the greatest minds of our day. That's my rare privilege as a reporter, and I think the obligation that comes with it is simple—to tell people what I found out. Everybody else can't do that. I like to feel that I'm a fly on the wall and tell people what they would have seen if they had been there, and I try to filter it through my experience of science, such as it is, as an outsider, and what I've learned over the years hanging around scientists…

Selby Wellman

… My experiences in dealing with the media have been quite varied, all the way from the business side, the Fortune magazine and Wall Street Journal articles, to the technical side of our industry, which is Computer World, PC Week, Network World et cetera. Ninety-eight percent of my experiences have been extremely positive. Of the 2 percent that have presented some challenges, something that has helped me has been the understanding that any form of communication is two-way.…I don't do any interviews today without first starting off with a few questions of my own. I want to know what the point of the story is. Do they have a mission? Is this just general information? Do they want our opinion? Or do they have some article that they're trying to prove a point with? …I've had some negative experiences, usually when a reporter was trying to prove something without knowing what the answer was. That's one area. And the second area has been in terms of just pure understanding of the technology. In our world, we have reams of acronyms. If you were to sit in on a Cisco product planning session, you wouldn't recognize what was being said as the English language sometimes. So I try not to use too many acronyms without explanation, and I try to fill in any gap the reporter may have in his or her understanding of the technology, by drawing diagrams of a network or filling in other aspects of it. And I find that reporters greatly appreciate that.

Participant

…How do reporters separate good science from bad? How do you judge the merits of a study?

Paul Raeburn

…What we try to do is a sort of instant peer review. There are areas that I've written a lot about. …Then there are other fields that I haven't covered extensively. So I find knowledgeable people and I ask them about the study, and it usually becomes pretty clear after a few phone calls whether you're on to something or not…

Barbara Culliton, former editor of Nature Medicine and an honorary member of Sigma Xi

One of the things I used to do regularly is ask: Will you tell me the name of a colleague of yours, whom you respect, who does not completely agree with your findings? And will you tell me why they take issue with your work? If you volunteer the information that you do have an intelligent colleague who has a different view of it, you'll not only get a better story, but your credibility with that writer will go way up very fast.

Participant

…Could you distinguish between reporting on science and industrial technology, and, secondly, how has the Internet affected your profession?

Paul Raeburn

…Technology is a little different, and I am learning a lot at BusinessWeek about how to cover that, because it's inescapable that you have to look at companies and business issues and financing. One of the key questions in technology is not only where is it going to go and when will it get here, but what it will cost. If the technology is wonderful and is priced out of range, it doesn't matter how wonderful it is. If a piece of science is wonderful and interesting, that's all you think about. You don't think right away about what it's going to cost to make that drug or something that's not going to happen for 10 years. Technology stories become more hybrid things that require different kinds of reporting, and I think they're harder to do, because you've not only got to understand the technology, you've got to understand the industry and the company and the personalities involved and so forth….Over the last year or so, the amount of information, good information, increased enormously on the Internet. There's a huge amount of government information on the Net, and it has now become an absolutely essential research tool for reporters. I use it every day and can't imagine how I got by without it.

Alan McGowan, a founder of the Media Resource Service

…Has BusinessWeek thought about how the Web is going to change the magazine five years from now and in what way?

Paul Raeburn

…We put the entire magazine out on the Web on Thursday night, all for free. The archives is searchable and there's a fee for that, which is one model many publications are using. Just a couple of years ago the idea of giving away your entire magazine for nothing would have sounded crazy, and now nearly every magazine is doing it, and it doesn't seem to have done too much yet to subscriptions. I guess people still like to get magazines on paper. Will that change? Sure, it will change, but how is impossible to predict. However it happens, it will change overnight. There will be some point, some six month period maybe in the future, in the next few years, where 15 or 20 percent of the country's magazines fold because they're entirely on the Web. Maybe. Or who knows what. We also have a daily news service at BusinessWeek and put out a number of items every day on the Web. This has given us an immediacy we didn't have before.

Arthur Mihram, Library High Tech News

…In the age of telecommunications, everything seems much less reflective than it once was. The emphasis seems to be on getting information out quickly. There is so much information pouring forth, I'm concerned about the effect this could have on journalism.

Paul Raeburn

…It seems to me the need for editors will be greater than ever, people who sift through information and separate the good from the bad. Inevitably, the growth of the Internet means that people will have to become more adept at doing this themselves.

Selby Wellman

…I believe that as the Internet gets more and more use, it will start to become like any other medium. Today we tend to be selective about what we view on television. When TVs first came out, we watched everything that came on, and I think the Internet will be a lot like that. I don't think people will spend three or four hours in the evening looking at things they don't really want to look at. There's a lot of surfing going on now, because it's still a novelty, and I think that will diminish over time.

Robert Frosch

…I've had a lot of good experiences with the media. My worst case was with 60 Minutes, which involved a particular torpedo program that was having some problems at the time, but ended up being the torpedo of choice and is still in the inventory in its fifth incarnation. Mike Wallace wanted a story out of this, and we marched up to New York, because it had to be done in their studios. I was assistant secretary of the Nary for Research and Development at the time. And he taped questions and answers for four hours, of which he used about three minutes. Fortunately, one of my staff members who came along audio taped the proceedings. When it aired, it turned out that CBS used my complete answers, but substituted different questions in the editing room, which changed the meaning of the answers. We yelled about this, and they said, "Oh, we don't usually do that." A year later, they asked if they could do a follow-up, and I said, "Sure. I'll be happy to do a follow-up…live." And they said, "Well, that's not technically feasible." And I said, "I guess it's not technically feasible to do it dead." So that I think was the worst. It was defended as straight journalism because "We didn't change what you said."

Participant

…The recent interest in cloning seemed overly sensational. Does this tend to drive out good reporting?

Paul Raeburn

…I'm lucky to work at a place that covers all kinds of things. We have a series in BusinessWeeknow under the science and technology banner that is called "Ideas." Recently, we did a profile of the physicist Freeman Dyson, who as far as I could tell had almost nothing to say about anything related to anybody's business of any sort. The aim is to provide stimulating ideas, thought provoking ideas, to a group of readers, many of whom may be in business and who are inquisitive people who might find this kind of reading interesting. So we try to do those kinds of things, but we had a great time with Dolly, which I thought sensational, but also a terrific story.