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Interview with Alok Jha

Science Correspondent for The Guardian (full biog)






Do you think it is ok for non-scientists to write science stories?

AJ: Yes, I think it is really important for non-scientists to get involved. Science is a community of people that includes scientists and communicators and so on. You’ve got to have people who haven’t got any background involved otherwise how do you spread the message? You’ll just be talking to people who know what you’re talking about all the time, and no one else will be listening. That’s the philosophical answer. The practical answer is if it is just people that do science asking the questions then they won’t always ask the right questions that non-scientists want asked.

Do you feel comfortable writing stories that are outside of your subject area?

AJ: Absolutely, I try and write biology stories more than physics stories. I love physics, it’s great, but it’s hard to get physics into a newspaper. I think it is easier for me to ask simple questions in biology because I really don’t know what the subject matter is at all. And, if you think about it, in general, biologists don’t know anything about physics and vice versa, so we are all outside of our fields in some respects. Even scientists are non-scientists when they are out of their fields.



Is it different interviewing for feature articles than it is interviewing for news pieces?

AJ: I would say there is no direct difference; there is a continuum I suppose. If you are doing a news piece you know it is because a paper has come out or something has happened, the story kind of writes itself. You say this has happened one, two, three, four. You get some quotes to show that you haven’t made it up and usually quotes can be quite colourful, so you can use that as part of a really strong opening, saying scientists are angry or happy, to get some emotion in there.

But this all has to be done really quickly, in about four hours, so you try and keep the interviews as short as possible, and pretty much in news stories you know what you want people to say. You know that you’re going to phone up someone and get a quote that is going to be a little bit inflammatory or angry. I’m not saying that because we construct the story, but because we kind of know what the story is already and how people are going to react to it. If it is just a paper that has come out in a journal, you just want them to explain what it is they have done with soundbites and then it’s done.

For a feature it’s a different type of thing, because you don’t know the story before you start usually. You’ve got an idea that this is an interesting area to research, an interesting area to write about, it’s been in the news maybe.

So you ring up lots of people, and sometimes you won’t even use the quotes that you get. You just want them to give you an idea, “am I right about this?” or sound people off. You could speak to them for half an hour and only then will they start to give you good quotes; when they are warmed up and a bit calm, and they are giving you open-ended answers.

In news articles you want open-ended answers that are two or three sentences, for features you want them to talk for as long as they can. And everything they say informs something else. They might tell you to read this paper or talk to this person, so you amass a lot of information and find a narrative.

But then there are a whole range of intermediate levels. You might be writing a news story which is quite confusing, so you might end up talking to someone for 10 minutes, from which you might only use two minutes. The general difference is for news stories you keep it short and for features you just let them talk because no one person is going to give you all of the answers.

Do you get time to check your stories properly?

AJ: As far as checking facts is concerned, you’re hoping that you check your facts as you go along and that your sources are accurate and valid. If I am interviewing a Professor of Physics at Cambridge University and he tells me something, I probably won’t check that because I trust that he knows what he is talking about. Unless it is a controversial issue, in which case what I will probably do is check with a few other people and get some kind of consensus view. What I never do is check things in encyclopaedias to check they are right, because that is their job. If I think something is wrong or if I think I have misheard something then of course I will check it but as a matter of course no.

If it is someone who is controversial, someone who says they have found a way of making free unlimited energy, something that clearly goes against the rules of physics, which happens quite alot, there is no way I can prove this is right or wrong. But, what I can do is put the quotes to a much more established figure and say, ‘can you tell me what the science establishment thinks and can you tell me your own personal opinions on this piece of research?’

There is an argument to say that is misrepresentative of what is happening, because you are only quoting one person from each side. But, I think people who read articles like this understand that, as long as you make it clear that this is not what scientists think. What they don’t want is a 200 word section of scientists demolishing what you have just told them. What you have to remember is that any scientific article is not outlining scientist arguments; it’s giving them a story to read.

I do not check quotes unless someone is really uncomfortable speaking to me and they ask to. But as a rule no, because scientists never come back on time and even if you say to them “I want you to check this for factual errors, I’m happy to change factual errors” they’ll always come back with stylistic points. It is quite nice to get people to say things off the cuff, because it sounds more natural and if they have time to edit it, it makes it sound really stilted, and it sounds really odd in the context of an article where everyone is talking in normal speech.

Plus also, sometimes people come back to you and say “Well actually what I said doesn’t make sense or I’m not happy with it”. That’s a bit more difficult because you don’t want to make people say things they don’t want to say, but you have to remember that when you speak to a journalist it is on the record. If you don’t want it on the record, you have to say at the beginning, “I’ll tell you this but I’m not comfortable with this being on the record”. If it is someone you trust, and you are telling them that information then they will honour that, because they want to keep their reputation and you are doing them a favour by talking to them. But you never ask unless you really need it for some reason.



Can you take us through a normal day at The Guardian

AJ: Normally, you would know what your diary stories are, anything in the journals, any press conferences, events, lectures, press releases that kind of thing. Say for today, last night at about 5 o’clock we will have sent the news desk today’s diary. This is what is happening in the world of science today. Sometimes there is loads and sometimes there is absolutely nothing. This morning we will have a meeting with them where they will go through all of the days news stories, and we will pick the stories we want to do.

Some stories are obvious, we’ll know days in advance we are going to do a major Nature paper or something, and may have prepared some stuff in advance. Others we’re not sure of, so we will discuss them and by about 10 o’clock we will start working on a certain number of stories.

Then about 12 o’clock they have another meeting to decide what goes where, how things are looking and what space everything is going to get. And at that stage you know you’re definitely doing these two stories and they are going to have this much space and you’re in the home straight. So for most of the day we really don’t know how long our stories are going to be, how much space they are going to get, if there is going to be a picture with them, so we are really shooting in the dark.

So what we are doing in the morning is interviewing and just working on the assumption that it is going to be about 500 words long, so therefore you can cut it down easily or add another 300 words to it easily. About 3 o’clock we know what we are doing, we can file about 4 or 5, so we need to speak to people by about 2 or 3. Sometimes we can’t speak to people until 4; that’s ok, we’ll have the story written, but then we will speak to you at 4 and quickly file extra stuff. Then it gets edited and subbed, goes through the system, which takes about 3 or 4 hours, and gets printed at about 7 or 8 in the evening.

Sometimes at 2 or 3 something major will happen and everything gets shoved back, and so when you have spoken to a scientist all morning and taken up half an hour of their time, they’ll see their story doesn’t appear or they are not quoted. This is usually because something else has happened which has shoved everything else, because it is a dynamic newspaper and things get changed all night.

What we tee up often is interviews, so we ring up in the morning and say can we talk to you now or can we talk to you at 2 when you are back from lunch. If we know it is a big paper we try to get interviews a few days before, but it is really hard to do that as you will be working on the stories for that day. That means you can get stories filed early so you can get extra stuff as well. Things like the news wires also really help as well; the copy wires will write stories based on all of the diary stuff, so it helps to get quotes from there.

If something major breaks for us, like Hwang resigning at three o’clock in the afternoon, then the foreign desk will come over and say we need this on the front page. So you have to either dump all the stuff you are doing and start again, or you have to finish all that stuff by 2 and then do other stuff for the new story. Because if it is news you can’t not cover it, even if you are stretched and you have to prioritise a little.

While all that Hwang stuff was happening, I remember we had been working all day and the news came over the wire, he’s resigned, he’s retracted the paper, and it’s a fantastic story, you have to cover that. But we were all doing stories for the next day’s paper, so you have to file stuff really quickly, almost in half an hour, and it really gets pressured like that.

Then you have to find loads of new people, who don’t know what the story is, and say “Right, Hwang has just resigned, tell me what you think about this? What’s happened?” And scientists will always say to you, if something has happened really suddenly, I need a few hours to digest this. So you just say I know you do, but, you know kind of what has happened, here’s what happened, and some scientists are brilliant at that. You can take them through it in 5 minutes and they say “If that is true then I think this…”, and that’s fine to say that, because it is a news story and things change; “if really all these things are lies then I think this…”.

This is where a good scientist will speculate for you really quickly. You want their immediate reaction, you don’t want their considered reaction, you want their immediate “oh dear god this is terrible”. Some people are confident in doing that and it is priceless. It’s alright for us to say this is going to be awful for scientists, but it is even better if a scientist says it. These stories will run and run, so then the next day you will have had some time to consider it and we will talk to you again, so you can have a running commentary over the next few days.

The problem is that only a few scientists are good at this at the moment, so you end up having the same scientists quoted again and again. Then you get scientists coming back to you asking why do you quote the same people again and again, and it is because they work within our schedule. It really isn’t because we think you have to work within our schedule, because this is what we do, literally we have to publish newspapers at 7pm and that’s just how it is.



How do you respond to claims that journalists ‘sex up’ stories?

AJ: Tim Radford used to tell us that any newspaper will only run stories that are interesting to its readers, whatever that story is; politics, fashion or science. Just because a story is important in the world of science, doesn’t mean it is going to get reported. What you have to do if a story is important, if it’s worthy and a bit dull, you still feel you have to report it but you have to make it relevant. Sometimes making something relevant to some people is ‘sexing’ it up.

I think that scientists are a bit hypocritical about this, because scientists are constantly sexing up their own research in their grant proposals, telling you that this is going to be a cure for something. When you are trying to make something relevant to the public, for example if someone has done some stem research which you know is important, there’s no point just telling someone the method, results and conclusions like you can in a journal, that then fits into a larger body of work.

For a reader of a newspaper this article is self-contained. They might know a little bit about stem cell research but that doesn’t matter; you have to assume they know very little about it. But they are intelligent and you can take them through the arguments, and an argument for them is this is what they have done, this is why they have done it, and the why they have done it is to help you get better cures in 20 years. Ok that’s a little speculative, but it’s not wrong and it’s not sexing it up to say in 20 years you’re going to have x and y because of what scientists have done this week. It’s making something relevant to somebody.

Scientists are constantly saying that articles in newspapers and magazines are facile and very simplistic, and glib and shallow and sensationalised. But I would argue that scientists who are good at whatever they do, only got into doing what they do because they found it a bit sexy, interesting and sensational and wonderful and found the wonder of what they do. They have to understand that we are not reporting science for science journals that go on about the next steps in science, we are reporting it to an audience that needs to have a bit more context and a bit more relevance to them.

Do you think it is important for young scientists to talk to the media?

AJ: I don’t think it is important if they don’t want to do it. It is important for us to get more people to talk to. To get more voices and to get different voices, because science is all about debate and the public do not see that at all, for them it is all about facts. So if you have different people saying slightly different things, it would help.

The more people you have talking about science, the more realistic picture you get of science. So you don’t just get Robert Winston saying the same thing about fertility again and again. You get lots of different views; there is a huge swath of different views on stem cells and fertility and you need to reflect that. And it’s not our job, it’s the job of scientists to come forward and say these things, sometimes controversial things.

I think young scientists are quite good at this because they realise how we work and how important it is to communicate. Also if your research is constantly being talked about you’re more likely to get money to do it. I know it’s a bit mercenary, but this is why Stephen Hawking gets millions of pounds for computers even when really what he is doing isn’t relevant to any of us, other than it being fascinating and him being a massive brain. He does a lot of communication stuff, even though he is a top scientist. So I don’t see any reason why someone who is a post-doc somewhere, who probably is much more in tune with what people are thinking these days and how people talk, why they can’t just come out and talk about their research.



How do you respond to young scientists who think they are not ‘expert’ enough for you?

AJ: I’m not an expert either, but you are more expert than me. The most stimulating talks about bits of research I’ve had are with people who think they are not an expert in something and will tell you very clearly what they have done. You don’t want everyone commenting on stem cells and ethics. If someone has done that bit of research they are the expert, and if they can take you through what they have done that is worth millions.

What about more general debates, like GM for example?

AJ: Well if they have something to say then they should say it. Even if that is to just say “I don’t think you should have reported that” or “I think that people are too worried about it.” Because I think it is not only useful for us and the public to hear them, but it is useful for them to understand that just because they sit and think something, it doesn’t mean that everyone else thinks the same as they do.

Lots of scientists might think that there is nothing wrong with GM crops and that actually they’ve been proven safe in a lot of trials, but most members of the public don’t believe that. I’m not saying that scientists are wrong. But it would be good for them to realise that most members of the public don’t believe that and not assume that just because the science has proved something, everyone else believes it as well.

Science is a wonderful thing that has given me confidence in a lot of things in life, but just because something is published in a paper does not mean everyone knows about it. So it is useful if you can articulate why you think, as a human being and a scientist, that GM crops aren’t all that bad for you and you do it in a non patronising way.

What makes a good interviewee?

AJ: Number one, someone who comes back to you on time, that is most important. Someone who actually phones you when they say they are going to phone you or gives you their phone number, or a phone number to ring them on, and doesn’t say I’ll phone you in a few hours and then refuse to give you a number. Basically, somebody who is accessible.

Someone who is ready to explain very simple things, because I will ask really dumb questions, but who is patient enough to say well ok this is what it means. Someone who puts things into context, so they will explain what they’ve done, what their paper is about, but also how it fits into the bigger field of research; why they are doing what they are doing basically.

Someone who gives decent soundbites maybe but that’s not so important. Someone who will speculate a little bit, I don’t mean give you quotes on the biggest science issues of the day, but who will respond to questions along the lines of “You’ve done this research. This has widened this research. Do you think that your new method could widen in the next 20 years?” Even if your answer is “I don’t know, that’s a bit of a leap”, that’s a good answer, that is fine. But not to get angry about it; “You journalists, you’re always going off on tangents.” Frankly, whatever research you do, you’re always going to have some kind of goal, you don’t just work in a vacuum.

Someone who is willing to be good humoured about something, so if someone asks you a silly question you can take it on the chin. If it’s a really technical bit of research that even you can see from the outside seems a little bit nerdy, then if someone asks you “Well, what’s the point in that?”, if you can say “I know it looks a bit nerdy but actually…”.

All of those things really!



What practical advice would you give to a young scientist being interviewed by a journalist?

AJ: For the most part, if you are being interviewed by a journalist for a science story, they are not trying to trip you up, you’ve got to realise that. If it’s not one of these big issues stories, all they want, 99% of the time, is an explanation of either what you have done, or they want your opinion on something that is in your field. They might not be able to contact the scientist who published the paper and they just want your help to explain what on earth it means, so you’re actually doing them a favour by speaking to them.

If you don’t feel comfortable answering a question, then don’t answer it. Just say “I’m sorry I don’t know the answer to that question” or “I’m not in that field”. If you have an idea of who can answer it, tell them. Be honest with them.

Also, if you don’t want them to quote you on something, tell them they shouldn’t quote you beforehand. Frankly, if you say this and then they go ahead and use it anyway, you just don’t have to speak to them again. They know they are going to burn their bridges if they do that. It’s a trust thing.

Be very clear what your expertise is. If, say, you’ve been involved in a bit of research and you’re one of three authors. If you are the only one they can get through to, but you can only comment on one bit of the research, your particular project, just say that.

Try and help them out, it will make them much nicer to you and it will make them treat you much nicer in print. If you like someone as an interviewee, you will never make them come off badly in print. If you are charming as an interviewee, and you give them everything and you’ve been really nice and you’ve phoned back, they will never treat you badly.

In the 1% of the time that you have done something terrible, or someone in your field has done something terrible, and they’re asking for comments on that, you don’t have to talk to anyone. But they will run the story anyway. So I would say it is always better to have your comment, to try and steer the story in a certain way, than to be silent about something. Being silent about something speaks louder volumes, and it allows the journalist to say “We asked this person to speak to us but they wouldn’t.” That sounds terrible.



Would your news editor be happy for you to use young scientists?

AJ: They wouldn’t care. What does it matter? All sorts of scientists through the ages have had their best ideas at 26 and 27. I’m 29, I would much rather speak to a 29 year old than a 50 year old. I know that there is this feeling that if you talk to older scientists they have more knowledge, and of course they do, but also you don’t put people’s ages in copy so it doesn’t matter. It’s about your level of expertise in a certain area.

Older scientists will tend to be more confident, and able to speak to you about all sorts of things. You’re probably more likely to go to Robert Winston if you want a general quote about the state of fertility research, because he has probably seen it all and he’s done enquiries for the House of Lords and spoken in parliament so you want that sort of gravitas. But for the most part what matters is what is said.

Some stories are based on what people say. If, say, Lord Winston says no one should ever have IVF that is brilliant, but it’s not such a great story coming from a young researcher. But, if I want to know if IVF works, it doesn’t matter who tells me.

Or a young fertility researcher saying Robert Winston is really wrong because every woman that I come across says this?

AJ: Well exactly, if you’ve got a bit of human experience that is valuable. Everyone has had different experiences and a range of experiences is important because so far the public see science as right or wrong. If you are going to challenge that view, and it’s more of a debate, you need people to say slightly different things all the time, and come out with these different things.

Don’t get angry when a journalist presents one view because that’s all they could get at that time - we have four hours to come up with something. Remember that the anti-science lobbies are very powerful; they will constantly bombard you with press releases, and particular views on how things are very non-scientific, that IVF and animal research are terrible. If you are silent as scientists then all that you are going to hear from the mainstream press, and I’m not talking about tabloids, is that all animal research is bad or all IVF is evil. You’ve got to speak out. You need to be as loud as the others, and unfortunately the others are very loud.

It’s not good enough for scientists to sit back and say, ‘We are not going to say anything because that’s the way science operates’. That means that all you will hear is the anti-science arguments. We are at a massive war with anti-science movements who are constantly decrying how bad scientists are and how they want to take over the world, and scientists unfortunately clam up and say ‘Oh no, we don’t want to speak. We don’t want to get into this debate.’ But this debate is going on and if you are not going to say anything then you can’t complain that newspapers and members of the public think you are evil. It’s a little bit extreme but you know what I mean.



What do you think about journalists claiming that their articles are balanced when they put all of their qualifying statements at the end and most readers will drop-off halfway through?

There’s the classic article about how black holes are all going to kill us and scientists have found out some mathematical equation that has said that we’re all going to die a horrible death. Then the last sentence is ‘but the chances of this happening are infinitesimally small’. You’ve now covered yourself with this statement at the end, and journalists hide behind it. I agree, it’s a really bad way of doing things.

But any responsible journalists will say that the reason you are writing about it is because it is a controversial view; it’s not a view that all scientists hold. Now there is no responsibility on journalists to get something that is fair and balanced but many journalists who want a good reputation will be as accurate as possible if you are searching for truth. Journalists are never objective. What they can be is as fair as possible to everybody. You are as fair as possible to whoever is making this weird claim and you are as fair as possible to actual claims of the scientific community as well, because who knows what the truth is.

The truth is probably as the scientific community think, but even they’re discovering they’re wrong in lots of cases. I’m not saying I’m arguing against the basic laws of physics or anything or this idea that science is a belief system as some people would say, which I don’t think is true. But there is nothing wrong with using controversial views to actually tell people about the scientific views on things.

So you start off with saying that a perpetual motion machine exists in his lab, but then say that a perpetual motion can’t exist because of these physical laws. What you’ve done is tell people about the laws of thermodynamics. I’m not saying thats what you go out to do, but it’s a useful way of doing it.

A journalist’s job is not to educate, that’s what schools do, but there is an important element of information out there. What we need is young scientists to come out with new ways of telling the same story again and again. If you just ask someone, ‘Do you know realise how important thermodynamics is?’ they won’t care. What you need to do is prove to them that actually if this stuff didn’t exist we wouldn’t know about x y and z and so on, and there are some fabulous people who could do that.

Younger people know more about what their peers think. They have just come into this knowledge, so they are much more able to say ‘This is what people understand and this is what they don’t understand. This is how I learnt this stuff and this how I came to understand what I understand.’


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    Last updated: October 05 2006
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