Topic: Science and/in the media. Guest presenter and resource: Beth Potier, UNH Communications and Public Affairs. (We’ll also discuss the homework from last week, so please make sure to do it before Thursday – see previous post.)
Beth’s recommendations:
How to pitch a reporter: http://www.scilogs.com/communication_breakdown/pio-how-to-pitch/
More pitching tips: http://www.scilogs.com/communication_breakdown/more-pitching-tips/
Bad science pitches: http://www.scilogs.com/communication_breakdown/bad-science-pitches/
Here is the homepage for UNH Communications and Public Affairs, and their collection of templates, photos, and other resources.
Some additional links you may find useful: National Association of Science Writers, AAAS “Communication 101”, Sense about Science, the Union of Concerned Scientists Science Network, “progressive media watchdog group” FAIR, American Society of Human Genetics (some of their links are broken), SciDevNet advice on working with journalists. Here is a long but super-useful blog post summarizing advice from a scicomm workshop for grad students at UWisc-Madison a few years ago. There’s a lot out there. Does your professional society address communication with the media? If there’s a meeting coming up, find out if they’re planning a workshop – or volunteer to help organize one.
scicomm 
The ‘Eek Squad’ blog by Rebecca Boyle from Popular Science has some really fun, nerdy stuff that’s not necessarily relevant to my work but helps remind me why I fell in love with science in the first place. She puts up sweet pictures of critters too, which is always a plus in my book.
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Curious how to balance social media with scientific publication? Here is a helpful tool:
“The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists”
https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-014-0424-0
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