Ten easy steps to getting media coverage of your scientific conference

Toss Gascoigne, Executive Director of FASTS and Vice-president of Australian Science Communicators

So you want media coverage for your Conference? Funding a bit low? Public interest flagging? Student numbers in your discipline dropping off? Rumblings from funding sources about "relevance" and "technology transfer"?

There’s a growing realisation among scientists and technologists that a bit of well-timed publicity can be a good thing, for all sorts of reasons.

But conferences present a special challenge. For a start, they tend to be big and confusing events, with far too many people and far too much information. The challenge is compounded by the fact that the scientists giving papers are all away from their labs and their field sites and thus away from a myriad of exciting picture opportunities.

It can be done! All it takes is time, imagination, an understanding of what appeals to the media, and (unless the conference is in do-it-yourself mode) a judicious injection of funds.

So — ten easy, sure-fire ways to guaranteed media coverage for your conference!

Go through the program, pick out the most interesting and controversial speakers (about five?), and the most interesting and relevant papers. Then write a simple summary of their research and its effects. This should not be longer than half a dozen one or two sentence paragraphs, and should be written strictly in lay terms—no unexplained technicalities, no jargon.

Include contact points for your chosen speakers, and the times they will be available to speak to the media. Include the phone number of a person who can provide more detailed information. Put at an interesting headline at the top, have lots of white space on the page to make it easy to read, embargo the story so it can not be published before the nominated date.

You have now identified the "talent" for your conference (that’s a media term -- could be good talent, could be bad talent).
Fax the pages off to journalists who cover this sort of story, a couple of weeks in advance so they can include it in their timetables. You will need to follow the media to identify the appropriate journalists—they could be the science, technology, environment, medical, aviation or financial correspondents, depending on the subject of the conference.

CSIRO has a good list of science and technology journalists, which they will make available.
Follow up the fax with a phone call. Did the journalist receive the fax? Does the story interest them? Would they like more information? Offer to re-send the fax if the journalist did not see it—and keep it brief. Journalists are often frantically busy.

Trying to "bait the hook" by drawing a journalist’s attention to one among a blizzard of media releases is very effective and well repays the time taken in doing it. In the process the conference organisers gain an insight into what the media thinks are the best stories.
Make sure the "talent" is available! They need to be at the phone numbers you gave to the media, at the times you said they would be available. Think of equipping them with a pager or a mobile phone, so you can locate them easily during the conference.
Media needs pictures, but conferences are visully dull. See if you can organise interviews in an interesting location nearby, such as a laboratory or a research site. Or make available some typical and exciting equipment at the conference site. This will help TV cameramen and newspaper photographers make a better story.

Or you could provide TV stations with broadcast quality footage shot on Betacam tape: pictures typical and illustrative of the science under discussion. Five minutes is plenty. For television, if there are no pictures, there is no story.
Organise the conference timetable so that the "talent" gets to speak earlier in the day — 10 am to 1 pm is ideal, 4.30 pm is deadly. This gives the media enough time to cover the story, so it can appear in that night’s TV news or the next day’s papers.
Prepare a media room. It should be equipped with phones, phone sockets and power points for laptops and modems, free coffee, individual working spaces, and copies of abstracts and papers from the conference. Make it close to the main cConference room, and provide quiet spaces nearby for interviews.
Consider bringing the scientist to the journalist! Run media conferences each day, ideally at the same time, in the same place. Make available one or more scientists to speak to the media and answer questions. If they present two different sides of the same question, all the better. Media like controversy. Around lunchtime is ideal.
Consider giving the "talent" media training, to learn the ways of the journalist, sharpen up their interview technique, and find out what it is about their story that interests journalists. A month before the conference takes place is good.
These are the basic nine steps to media success. They can all be carried out by gifted amateurs with a feel for the media, but are best done by an experienced jouralist/communicator.

If the conference budget stretches to it, consider hiring in an expert to do all this for you. A good one will know the ropes, know the journalists, have the time to do all the legwork, and have the networks to ensure that your conference publicity is widely disseminated.

Media people can also spot the good stories in your conference program. That can be hard for scientists—what interests you as a professional will often fail to excite the media.

Don’t wait until the last minute—get your expert involved at least a month before the event so they can plan the coverage. Ideally you should involve a media person from the very first stages of planning —their ideas can help shape the conference.

Good communicators and journalists will charge about $600 per day for their help; others will charge less. Like all things in life, you get what you pay for.

Australian Science Communicators (ph/fax 02 6248 5846, ASC@asap.unimelb.edu.au) has a free booklet listing 50 communicators with skills in these areas.

And if all the above looks too hard, just remember that we live in the age of poll-driven governments. They interpret "leadership" as putting into effect what the community wants, and gather this information by extensive polling and listening to John Laws’ programme.

If S&T does not have public support, then in the long run it will not enjoy the financial backing of the Government.

This article is reprinted, with the author’s permission, from Campus Review, 14 October 1997.

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