There’s something very important you must always try to do when interviewed: Ask to review it before it prints! This may not be possible at all times. For example, it tends to be a lot easier to get a copy if the article is long and scheduled for publication with a few days notice. Nevertheless: ASK. It’s amazing how often quotes can get scrambled, your statements misinterpreted, ripped out of context, and so on and so forth. But it doesn’t always have to be bad to allow the reporter to have his way making the story sound more exciting on the expense of its accuracy.

This is, after all, the mainstream media and not a scientific journal. How much accuracy to sacrifice over sensationalism is something I evaluate for each article. Which brings us to our next section.

Remember Theatricality

At the start of your career it’s difficult to stand out. Opportunities aren’t always easy to come by. After all, you have others to compete with, and, even though your ideas may be great, it’s no guarantee that (a) your ideas interest them, (b) that they take you seriously.

Even people with great ideas and accomplishments sometimes go unnoticed indefinitely, and conversely, sometimes people with no ideas seem to be on everyone’s tongue. The difference often lies in communication and presentation: Communicate your ideas effectively, and you will gain attention.

Ironically, lack of details (which often plague general media coverage of science projects) can sometimes work to our advantage. The more left open to interpretation for the reader, the likelier it is he’ll fill in the blanks with what he considers exciting or interesting. Lack of details are a double-edged blade in this respect; while they might not convey your project properly, they can incite enthusiasm and ideas.

Often I find that I’d have to say a lot more than possible in an article/interview to explain the entirety of my project and its purpose. In that case, it’s often better to spend character spaces on pretty words, make it sound exciting, than to say almost enough to explain it “correctly”. Note that I’m not suggesting that you fabricate anything. If you have a project that you’re working on, there’s a reason for it. Making your project sound exciting can be as simple as explaining what it is that interest you, in a manner that everybody can relate to. If your project sounds exciting, it will urge people to find out more. Provided you have more details stored somewhere accessible to the public it should be fine (e.g. website).

Aesthetics Matter

The media, and people in general, love pictures. We all know that. So, combined with what we discussed on theatricality you want something that catches people’s eyes when they’re flipping through the paper over a warm cup of coffee. If you’re working on a robot, a picture of the robot itself is usually exciting enough. But, if you’re working on, for example, a system for analyzing speech intonation. Wooh, that poses a problem.

A potential solution would be finding nice looking pictures of people and draw some speech bubbles on it. Have one person telling the other a joke, for example. On the image footer, we’d put the intonation analysis graph, maybe even match words to the graph with lines. And there, we have a picture of a person telling a joke, visually explaining what speech intonation analysis is (up to a point).

Is it a bit superficial? Yes. But that’s the point. We can’t fit our entire projects into the articles, we can only hope they’ll spark enough interest so that people/investors/friends/young(er) scientists read the article and think “Wow, that’s cool, I better Google this”.