The Power of Niche Publications for Science PR (w/ Matt Shipman)
Back in 2009, a researcher at North Carolina State University told press officer Matt Shipman that his team had figured out how to make antennas out of liquid metal.
“We wanted to raise the visibility of the work,” Shipman said. “So we came up with a few potential use cases and took a cool picture. WIRED ran a story on it, and within a year, something like a dozen companies had licensed it for different applications.”
For Shipman — now the university’s assistant director of research communications — the experience shows the power of getting research in front of the right audiences.
“None of those companies would’ve known the thing existed if they hadn’t seen the news story,” he said. “I think that one story probably brought more money into the University than it would cost to employ me for thirty years.”
Shipman started his career as a reporter and spent the last 15 years at NC State. He wrote The Handbook for Science Public Information Officers (2015, University of Chicago Press), contributed to Science Blogging: The Essential Guide (2016, Yale University Press), and serves on the board of directors for the National Association of Science Writers.
How is the media landscape today different from when you started in research communications in 2008?
Outside of major media outlets like the New York Times and Scientific American, there’s less coverage of science and health research than there used to be. When I started at NC State, the Raleigh News and Observer had a higher ed reporter, a tech reporter, a health reporter, and a life sciences reporter. We have one of the highest densities of research professionals in the country, so it made sense to cover a major economic driver of the region.
Today, almost all of those positions at the News and Observer are gone. While a reporter might cover any one of those areas at some point, there are now only one or two reporters dedicated to covering those things for the paper that people in Research Triangle and Research Triangle Park are reading.
With few daily papers and a small handful of science sections in the whole country, where are you pitching stories?
A big part of what I do is identifying and keeping track of news outlets that cater to very specific audiences rather than reach the largest possible audience. Identifying those sorts of audience-specific outlets is also critical because they’re more likely to cover the work and they tend to be more important to the research community.
These can be industry-specific outlets. In the materials research community, for example, there are multiple magazines and online publications that focus on semiconductor materials from an industry standpoint. Those publications are really important if you are doing research you’d like to see move from the bench into the real world.
These outlets can also be discipline-specific. If the research involves electrical engineering or computer engineering, then I'm probably going to reach out to somebody at a magazine called IEEE Spectrum. If you’re a computer engineer or an electrical engineer, it’s actually more valuable to get your story into IEEE Spectrum than it is to have your work featured in The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post. Fewer people will see it, but all of those people will matter because they’re the people who might cite your work, review your grant proposal, steer graduate students your way, or hire one of your graduate students for a postdoc.
What are some other benefits for researchers whose work gets attention in the media?
When I meet with new faculty, these are the selfish reasons I outline to explain why working with me is not a waste of their time:
One, it makes funding agencies happy if we take the time to write a news release and put it out. Even if no one on God's green Earth ever reads it, they will still get brownie points from their funders. We can help our researchers check the Broader Impacts box for NSF, we can help them curry favor with their grant administrator, and so on.
Two, it creates opportunities for you to work with other people in your field or — surprisingly often — it creates opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. Somebody who's working on a related topic in a different field will see the story about the work and follow up. This happens all the time, and it’s a big deal because it’s really hard to secure grant funding if you don’t have an interdisciplinary component to your work. If you're telling these stories, prospective interdisciplinary partners will often find you.
Three, it helps you recruit graduate students and postdocs. Many variables come into play when people are deciding where to go to grad school, like location, cost of living, the stipend, and opportunities for their significant other. Another important variable is when people see work and think that's what I want to do, that's the sort of project I want to be involved with. By raising the visibility of the work that's being done in a given lab, press coverage helps researchers recruit promising grad students and postdocs. This also happens pretty often.
Lastly, let's say that you develop something and you want somebody to license it. For example, a researcher has built a better mousetrap and wants to work with industry to get it into the homes of America that are plagued by mice. If I come across Mousetrap Magazine: The leading magazine for the mousetrap industry globally, I'll pitch them. If a researcher sees a 250-word blurb about their work, they’ll be ecstatic.
You’re a university-level employee. Do your bosses in senior administration think of you and your team as internal service providers? Or do you fit into their enterprise-level strategy?
The institution benefits when the research community in a given field thinks of your institution when they think of that field.
Administrators often have a keen eye on rankings. University rankings are based on arcane formulae, but the departmental and college rankings are just straight-up popularity contests. Deans, department heads, and maybe assistant deans get these surveys to rank their peer colleges or departments, and that’s where the departmental rankings come from.
If, for example, you're a material science department and you've had a whole bunch of stories in MRS Bulletin over the past year, then when Joe Blow at another university is doing their checklist, they're like, “Man, I saw a lot of University X in MRS Bulletin this year. They were a 3 last year, but I'm gonna say they’re a 4 now.”
Coverage also helps with recruitment, whether you're talking about grad students or postdocs or faculty. And it helps if your researchers’ citation rates are going up. That’s stuff people look at.
Once a researcher comes to you with a story, how do you reshape it for a non-specialist audience.
Part of the work is talking to the researcher so that I understand what they've done, why they did it, and what the broader context is. That allows me to write a news release that highlights what's interesting or important about the work in an accessible way. The researchers review it to make sure there are no inaccuracies, and it goes through an editing process where at least two other people in my unit will put eyes on it. That's partially a copy edit and partially to make sure we're communicating as clearly as we’re trying to.
There are times when a news release doesn't really fit for a variety of reasons. If that’s the case, we might do a blog post or just pitch the work to reporters or editors who we think would be interested in it.
The second half of the work really begins once we put the news release online. You can send it out to a mailing list, but most people don’t open that stuff because it isn’t personalized, so it won’t highlight the specific facet that’s interesting to them. It won't do you much good unless you are also able to pitch the story to news outlets that are likely to follow up on it.
How do you get reporters to care about the ideas you’re pitching?
A lot of what I do is cultivating and maintaining relationships with reporters so that I can reach out when we have a new release coming out. First of all, I know which reporters at most relevant media outlets would be interested in the subject matter. I can give them a heads up that this research is about to be published.
My job is not to convince them to write about the research — my job is simply to make sure they are aware the research exists. If I’m getting it in front of the right person, that will be enough. So, it's not a sales job, it's more of an awareness job. A big part of it is just getting them to open my email and see what I have to say.
It’s the result of years of work and of being ruthlessly honest with myself and in my writing about the research that I cover so I have a good reputation as being an honest arbiter of information. And that's incredibly valuable for what I do.
How do outlets that aggregate press releases — sites like phys.org and Science Daily — fit into the publication landscape?
Churnalism, as I understand it, refers to websites — ostensibly news sites — that simply republish material that was produced elsewhere rather than do any reporting. That can be news releases, feature stories, or blog posts that were published by research institutions or other organizations.
As someone who values journalism, I find the success of churnalism to be fairly disheartening. As a PIO, they’re a fairly useful tool that I make use of. Because I work for a large research institution that has a good reputation, some of what I publish is picked up by an RSS feed and is more-or-less automatically republished by many of these outlets. We are able to basically plug stories directly into Phys.org, and we have a similar but less formalized relationship with Science Daily.
These outlets have a broad readership. It’s very easy — particularly for people in the news business — to look down their nose at places like Science Daily and Phys.org, but they reach large audiences. For many in the research community itself, those outlets are where they go on a day-to-day basis to get their news about what's happening in their field. If your researcher is hoping to raise the visibility of their work with other researchers, then you absolutely cannot overlook those outlets. They’re really important websites for them.
Sometimes it seems to me that the science media world is overly focused on sharing extremely recent findings. The faculty at a large research institution like NC State don't just produce new findings — they're experts with world-class knowledge on all kinds of topics. How do you leverage their expertise to serve the public and advance your institutional interests?
At some point or another, most researchers hear or see a news story and think, “Man, I wish somebody had asked me about that, because there's an aspect of this that people are really missing.”
My job is to get researchers to let me know when those things happen for them. If it’s going to be an ongoing story, I can reach out to reporters who are covering it and say, “Hey, if this is something you're going to be following, you might want to talk to Jane Smith. This is something they know a lot about, and they can provide some context, analysis, and insight that you might otherwise not have access to.”
That's essentially pitching an expert to raise the visibility of your institution’s expertise in the context of something that’s happening in the world.
You’ve become an influential voice in institutional science communication. How did you develop the approach you’ve talked about today?
The moment the light bulb went on for me was years ago, right after I started at NC State. There's a professor here in the physics department who was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was one of a handful of NAS members we had at the time. When I met him, this guy looked like a mechanic. I'm a big guy, but he was much bigger than me. He was in work boots that were filthy, jeans, and a work shirt.
He could just not give a shit about press coverage — in a conventionally masculine, sort of Midwestern way — but he was perfectly nice and talked to me about the work. I wrote a press release about this paper he had coming out. I knew it wouldn’t be a super big deal, but I pitched it to a couple different publications that seemed like they might be interested. I was firing wildly. As far as I knew, it had bombed.
A few weeks later, I get this call from him and he’s as giddy as a child. He was elated because a story about his work was on the homepage of Photonics Online. For him, that was above the fold in the New York Times. If the story had appeared above the fold in the New York Times, he would not have given a shit.
“Photonics Online! Matt, you're amazing — how did you do this?”
I was like, what I've been thinking of as a win was all wrong. I needed to think about what the researchers think of as a win. A lot of times, it's that sort of stuff: the Photonics Onlines of the world.