Tips for interviewing people with disabilities: Covering medical studies often means interviewing people who live with conditions discussed in a study. If you’ll be meeting in person with someone who has a disability, the interview will go more smoothly and productively if you both feel comfortable. This tip sheet from the National Center on Disability and Journalism offers tips on what reporters should do or consider before and during the interview. Although the tips focus on in-person interviews, many of the suggestions could apply to phone interviews as well.
General Google searches are not the best way to find good research. One of many useful reminders from Denise-Marie Ordway’s tip sheet, 10 things we wish we’d known earlier about research, on the Journalist’s Resources blog at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Ordway, a research reporter/editor at the site (and a former Pulitzer finalist), provides a mix of tried-and-true tenets of medical research reporting, plus some important caveats that rookies and veterans alike may on occasion overlook or forget. This tip sheet can be an excellent refresher review before embarking on a study that relies heavily on medical research.
The difference between science journalism and science communication may seem so subtle as not to be important at first blush, at least to a layperson reader. The difference between the two is crucial, however: one requires a journalist to reports all facts and relevant perspectives on an issue without bias toward the actors involved. The other — science communication — is aimed at communicating science and possibly even science advocacy, often without concern about the people behind the science. In an excellent essay at the Guardian, science journalist Brooke Borel explains the difference using a recent example of conflicts of interest in GMO research. A similar essay by Bianca Nogrady explores the same issue.
“False balance” when covering controversial medical studies: This Columbia Journalism Review article, Sticking with the truth: How ‘balanced’ coverage helped sustain the bogus claim that childhood vaccines can cause autism, is a case study about how misunderstanding what “objective” coverage really entails, It can contribute to public misinformation and misconceptions when the reality is that the evidence for one side of an issue is overwhelmingly greater than contradictory evidence. By always seeking “both sides,” and giving them equivalent weight, article can result in a misleading “false balance.”
Uncertainty is a way of life for scientists, but readers and even journalists are usually less comfortable with it. Sense about Science provides a guide on Making Sense of Uncertainty, which covers how scientists express their degree of confidence about results, how uncertainty can undermine valid evidence and how policymakers and stakeholders make decisions in spite of uncertainty.
NIH Clinical Research Trials and You: Glossary of Common Terms
This guide is not specific to news coverage, but it serves as a handy reference for reporters who might need a refresher in clinical research jargon – or those who are learning for the first time.
“Covering Medical Research: A Guide for Reporting on Studies,” by Gary Schwitzer. Available online as a slim guide from AHCJ.
Questions to Guide Reporting from the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice