Story ideas come from reading newspapers, wire service stories, and journal articles, and sometimes they come from a source's phone call. About half the stories Joe ends up doing are assigned to him, and the other half are ideas he pitched to his editors.
In an ideal world, a reporter armed with background material would find and interview sources for a particular story, then put together that piece, and move on to the next. In the real live news business, reporters need to be flexible enough to work on multiple stories at once, splitting their attention between different sources and breaking news events, and still meeting assigned deadlines.
Believe it or not, skills learned in the lab do come into play as a science reporter. Most obvious of course, are the science training and research skills, which can be invaluable for a reporter trying to understand the science behind a particular story, or exactly what a piece of research entails. Being able to grasp ideas quickly and turn them into a story just as quickly helps when it comes to meeting the daily deadlines of the news business. Joe found that his experience teaching statistics to psychology majors was good training for telling his stories to the listeners. Teaching and radio reporting require the presenter to get the listener's attention by making the information interesting.
One place where science training may get in the way, however, is when a reporter must decide which information to present. Scientific audiences demand a high degree of precision and accuracy, but reporting science to a general audience often requires sacrificing some precision to get the basic message across. Keep in mind that in radio and TV, a listener can't back up and re-listen to something that didn't quite sink in the first time.
The rewards of working as a broadcast reporter, as you might imagine, are different from those of doing research. In journalism, they're more immediate, while anyone who's worked as a lab tech knows that the rewards in science can be a long time coming.
Joe Palca, now a science correspondent for National Public Radio, explains how he moved from science to broadcast journalism:
I was a grad student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, studying human sleep physiology. I wanted to do basic brain science, but there were no research jobs to be had, and money was scarce unless you were an M.D. I had completed all the requirements for my degree except for the dissertation when I saw an ad in a magazine for the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellows Program. I was accepted into the program and assigned to work with a science reporter at WDVM-TV, the CBSI affiliate in Washington. Because of union rules, I couldn't write the stories or appear on camera. I could, however, be an associate producer, which generally entailed doing research and tagging along on the stories, news-hounding, booking interviews, going out with a video crew, and shooting segments.
After my JO weeks as a producer were up, I finished my Ph.D. and applied for a science job, but he was facing a tough job market. I decided to try for a journalism job. I joined media organizations, and applied for entry-level jobs in TV and radio, landing gig writing and researching pieces for Health News on KQED in San Francisco. A fellow member of the Media Alliance Group was a producer for ABC. Using that contact, I took a writing test at ABC and got hired as a news writer, where I wrote for the evening news.
My next job was as a part-time desk assistant at the NBC station in Washington, where I did a lot of grunt work, but I also got a feel for the news business. Finally, I ended up back at WDVM-TV working as an assignment editor, sending reporters and their crews out to cover a story.
A year later I quit, moved to England, and worked with a friend writing copy for a PR firm. Six months later, I was back in Washington looking for a job. There were few entry-level jobs in science writing, so I did some freelance writing and producing.
While I was working as a science producer for a general assignment reporter at WDVM-TV, where I picked stories, set up interviews, and briefed I the reporter, an editor at Nature called and offered me a job as their Washington correspondent. I wrote news stories for Nature, and then I moved on to Science magazine, spending 3 years in each place. Then in 1992 my current boss, Anne Gudenkauf asked me to come to NPR, where I've been ever since. Currently, I am a science correspondent and a special correspondent for Sounds like Science on NPR.
