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Finding the Real Media Stars: Analysis of Media
Coverage of the UK’s National Astronomy Meeting (page 5)
Anita Heward, Robert Massey
Summary
We present an analysis of the level of media coverage of the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) over the period 2005–08.
The study aims to provide quantitative information to assist press officers, both of future NAMs and of other astronomy meetings, in identifying talks that are most likely to achieve high media coverage and to look at whether the distribution of releases can be improved or changed to optimise media attention. We find that the increase in the total number of pieces of coverage exhibits a roughly exponential trend over the period 2005–2008, mainly due to a large increase in online general and specialist science news sites seen to be picking up NAM stories. Print and broadcast coverage have also increased over the period, but show a more complex dependence on the nature of the story and the interest of local media. For all four meetings, approximately 50% of the coverage is derived from the top three releases.
NAM runs over four or five days, from Monday or Tuesday to Friday. The peak of releases issued and the resulting coverage is on Tuesday and Wednesday. However, for this four-year sample, the ratio of pieces of coverage to the number of releases appears to be highest for Monday.
Comments about this article
Steve Miller
21 Oct 2008, 10:53
Heward and Massey raise the question as to whether or not they issue too
many press releases around the NAM. With limited resources available to
write and chase up releases, at first glance it might seem more reasonable
to concentrate on the two or three "big ones".
But this begs the question as to whether one can know in advance what the
"big stories" will be, particularly when it comes to Story Number 3 (or 4).
Scientific agendas and media agendas can often interact in ways that are
not immediately obvious or predictable.
For example, the UK coverage of the 1992 COBE "ripples from the early
universe" story was enormously enhanced because - simultaneously - the
media (parts of, anyway) were already sensitised to the religion-science
dichotomy, that was playing out in debates around biological evolution.
So when the American Physical Society press officers organised its press
conference in Washington, were they aware that Richard Dawkins and John
Hapgood were knocking chunks off each other on the other side of the pond,
and that this would make the COBE story run and run? Probably not.
That is not to say COBE was not a "big story", but to show how existing
media agendas can amplify stories. Press officers can thus never be quite
sure what is going to catch the media eye.
So my advice to Heward and Massey would be to keep "pumping out" the press
releases - at least as many as you can reasonably manage. You can never be
sure ...
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