{"id":1916,"date":"2012-01-04T16:52:12","date_gmt":"2012-01-04T16:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=1916"},"modified":"2013-01-05T08:39:13","modified_gmt":"2013-01-05T08:39:13","slug":"nerves-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2012\/01\/04\/nerves-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Nerves? You?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago I was asked by my University\u2019s press office to talk urgently to the Daily Mail, where a reporter was wanting some information comparing what life was like for women at Cambridge University in the past and now. As the University\u2019s Gender Equality Champion<\/a>, as well as having been a student back in the days when there were only 3 colleges who admitted women to the University, it seemed appropriate that I should respond. I assumed my university\u2019s press office would have vetted the background to the story for suitability before passing on the request so that there would be no obvious pitfalls. However, there appeared to be some urgency and so I had to conduct the phone interview in a somewhat public space at the Royal Society, where I happened to be that day. On the train home that evening I tweeted \u2018Being interviewed by the Mail always makes me nervous\u2019 to which I got the response from someone in Norwich, \u2018Nerves \u2013 you? Go for it!\u2019 which made me realise the nerves I was referring to weren\u2019t due to the fact that interactions with the media are always liable to be stressful, so much as \u00a0worry about newspaper interviews in particular, because one has so little control over them.<\/p>\n

My media training<\/a> has prepared me for some sorts of interviews; I\u2019d certainly recommend getting such training if you\u2019re ever offered it, regardless of at which level of the academic ladder you are currently. I know, at least in principle, how to dodge the bullets and lead the conversation back to safer ground. I know how to prepare, so that the facts you want to put across are at your finger tips. But those skills are most easily brought to bear when you have a specific story you are trying to put across and time to think about how best to deliver the message. If you are rung up at short notice on a topic of someone else\u2019s choosing, it\u2019s a lot harder to be prepared and it\u2019s a lot harder to be in control of the situation. I am rather unwilling to discuss the details of this particular interview with the Daily Mail journalist because the piece has still not been run (despite the apparent \u2018urgency\u2019 with which the interview was carried out), so I don\u2019t know how (or indeed if) it will pan out. Instead, I will illustrate why I am nervous about such interviews with regard to an earlier interview. Mind you, this one turned out so badly I\u2019m not going to give any details, dates or storyline, merely give some generic indicators.<\/p>\n

For this particular story I was rung up as one of several people being interviewed about what should have been an entirely innocuous and good news story. From my personal point of view, the reason it went wrong was entirely my own fault. Something, I forget what at this distance in time, had got under my skin in the day-job. I was feeling extremely cross when the journalist rang and consequently somewhat careless in the things I said. I was cross with the system, and some of that rage came out in the answers I gave to superficially easy enough questions. Consequently, what I was quoted as saying \u2013 which was very approximately what I had said, though not necessarily in the context apparently quoted \u2013 was inappropriate and ill-considered. I came across as a raging harpy who had my talons into the academic world in a big way \u2013 or at least, even when I had stopped being quite so angry and read what I had apparently said again, I felt it could have been interpreted in that way. It probably didn\u2019t actually come across like that to others, but I knew that I had let irritation over something else cloud my judgement in those few critical minutes on the phone. As it turned out, the rest of the article caused others so much rage that my own poor judgement faded into insignificance and rather quickly the story was pulled off the newspaper\u2019s website due to inaccuracies elsewhere in the piece (so there\u2019s no point any reader of this post trying to track it down!)<\/p>\n

That, to some extent, has taught me to be particularly vigilant. But it is difficult when journalists want a quote fast, and you are possibly not in ideal circumstances. A previous conversation with a Daily Mail journalist took place in the cycle park at Cambridge station, but the quote of mine they used was totally fine despite the less than optimum location (noisy, windy and cold). This most recent interview was overheard by a colleague who, when I apologised to her for talking in what should have been a quiet area, merely said I\u2019d sounded very patient. However, I will have to wait and see what (if the story ever appears) they pulled out from what I said.<\/p>\n

The trouble is that a perfectly reasonable sentence or two can be truncated in ways that make for more titillating reading than the original quote itself. You know how it is with the brief congratulatory phrases that find themselves on the back covers of books, or on billboards in front of theatres.<\/p>\n

\u2018An amazing performanc<\/em>e\u2019 might mean what it appears to say, or it might have been excised from the full sentence:<\/p>\n

\u2018An amazing performance of such ineptitude I didn\u2019t know whether to laugh or cry\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2018A book that had me gripped throughou<\/em>t\u2019 might be just part of the sentence<\/p>\n

\u2018A book that had me gripped throughout as I waited to see what clueless action the completely wet and boring heroine dreamed up next\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, if \u2013 in a piece about women at Cambridge then and now – I am quoted as saying \u2018girls at Girton had a hard time of it<\/em>\u2019 it might actually have been part of a longer sentence saying<\/p>\n

\u2018girls at Girton had a hard time of it on their bicycles, with the college being at the top of Cambridge\u2019s only significant hill, with a mile or two further to cycle even after the climb had been completed\u2019;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

or a phrase such as \u2018the boys used to stare<\/em>\u2019 may really have said something rather different such as<\/p>\n

\u2018it was hardly surprising if the boys used to stare at the lone girl in the practical class, but it seemed to be curiosity not hostility; they simply weren\u2019t necessarily used to girls.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So the nerves are not simply about being interviewed by the Daily Mail, or interacting more generally with the media, they are because it is all too easy for a quote not to come out quite as intended, whilst still being a legitimate, if incomplete, quote.\u00a0 In live interviews, for instance on the radio, one has more chance of controlling the context and making sure that what comes across is precisely what is intended. On the other hand, you also have a first rate opportunity for making a complete fool of oneself to an audience of millions if you\u2019re unlucky. This is on my mind having just taken part in Melvyn Bragg\u2019s In Our Time<\/a> on the subject of macromolecules. It is rare for this Radio 4 programme to stray into science of this sort, but I would hope that my fellow guests (Tony Ryan<\/a> from Sheffield and Charlotte Williams<\/a> from Imperial College, chemists both) and I acquitted ourselves reasonably and did indeed manage to say, and be heard to say, precisely what we wanted.<\/p>\n

So nerves? Yes, when talking to the print media indubitably. Not because I necessarily feel I don\u2019t know what to say or how to express it but because I worry I won\u2019t appear to have said what was intended. The radio seems to me to be easier in that sense, but still potentially very scary \u2013 particularly in advance. There\u2019s no time to be nervous at the time, you just get on with the task in front of you then sweat again later when replaying the dialogue in your head.<\/p>\n

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A few weeks ago I was asked by my University\u2019s press office to talk urgently to the Daily Mail, where a reporter was wanting some information comparing what life was like for women at Cambridge University in the past and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[420,421,107,422],"class_list":["post-1916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communicating-science","tag-journalists","tag-media","tag-media-training","tag-quote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}