Interview with Emma King
In her final year of a cosmology PhD at the University of Nottingham (full biog)
Can you describe your first experiences with the media?
EK: I recall a journalist calling me. I’d never had any previous contact with journalists and, to start with, I just talked to them like they were a friend or an interested member of the public. It wasn’t until they started repeating things back to me in terms of what they wanted to print that I realised I should have started out on a different track!
I had attempted to explain my project in fairly vague and general terms and ended up with them saying things like “can we say you’ve discovered anti-gravity?”, at which I was fairly horrified! I then had to backtrack lots, to try and figure out better ways of putting things, but it seemed that by that point they’d already decided how to make an exciting story out of it and weren’t too pleased by me saying “please don’t print that, it’s not true”. It was rather scary to think that the things I’d been saying without giving too much thought to them could end up in print, and that, worse still, they might have been horribly mistranslated first.
They were obviously trying to get a nice exciting headline out of what I’d done, but the bit of the project that I won the prize for was just a reasonably clever bit of mathematics which was hard to explain, particularly in terms of catchy headlines. They were trying to take my explanation of the wider subject area and make it sound like it was my work.
These days I would probably ask if I could think about it and call them back 20 mins later when I had come up with some good stuff to say that was both accurate and (relatively) catchy, but at the time it really put me off speaking to journalists at all. And I never did see the final article - I’m not even sure if they ran the story in the end.
back to contributors page
Last updated: October 05 2006
