The past few days for me have been consumed by a press release that UAF sent out describing our ice coring success. I had written a draft of the release several weeks earlier and sent it out to our UAF public information office on our arrival in Kaktovik, but it took some time to work through the system and go through a few iterations. Here is a link to the initial release.
Much of the time related to this got soaked up getting photos ready. I had prepared a bunch the week before, but then I was told we needed model release forms from everyone in the photos. Of course nearly all my photos have people in them, and most of these people are hard to get hold off in summer. So then I had to sort through to find photos that didn’t have people in them. I also wanted to stitch a few more panoramas that were related to the drilling, and this took more time. Then we had a teleconference with the press which lasted several hours, after which many of them called me back to talk one on one, including a radio interview.
The next day, this article appeared in the Anchorage paper. What I found most interesting about this article was actually the comments people left in the online version. Most of them were of the form “This is a waste of our tax money” and “This is just another attempt by evil scientists to convince of the hoax of climate change”. I was quite surprised.
The next day the local TV station joined us at the Ice Museum where the cores are being stored. We found the boxes sitting in the cold room where they give carving demonstrations. Everything looked like it was in good shape fortunately, and the tourists milling about were excited to see the cores. The interviews went reasonably well I think, and later that night the story appeared on TV.
The ice was fine in the cold room, but the camera operators were happy to get back outside where it was warmer.
This morning, the entire Nolan family made the front page of the Fairbanks paper, as well as the highlight story of the IPY site, thanks to Stefan. The day before our press people had given me a list of photos from my blog that they liked, and one of them was a pretty picture taken from the Hut with Kristin and Turner overlooking the glacier towards Bur Cirque. I never expected this picture to be used since it has nothing to do with the drilling, but it appeared smack in the middle of the front page, along with a smaller photo of me shpeeling while holding a core in my hands in the museum.
What I found most interesting about this article again were the comments. This time there were fewer irrational ones and more either funny ones or more comments beating up on the idiot comments. I guess that’s why I live in Fairbanks.
What I also found interesting is the differences and similarities between the two articles. Neither article overplayed the climate change angle or even mentioned the issue of whether the current changes were influenced by humans, despite the way many of the commenters read it, and neither took anything out of context or tried to steer the implications to suit their own agendas, which was nice. The big difference I found was that the Anchorage paper felt they needed a bigger hook than the real story itself – their lead was essentially ‘drilling has begun in ANWR’ – whereas the Fairbanks paper thought the cores were interesting on their own. After reading both stories and their comments, I was left wondering which came first – idiot readers or reporters that think their readers need shock-and-awe in every bit of news. Maybe it’s got something to do with the size difference between the cities, and their being more competition in a variety of ways in the larger and denser locations, and this process simply gets worse in real cities in the south. The Sitka newspaper, for example, just reprinted our press release verbatim. In any case, it seems to me that there is some relation between city size, what is considered news, and the type of people that read it, but I’m not exactly sure what that relationship is.
PS If anyone comes across links to this story in your local newspaper or radio, please share them in the comment section of this blog – thanks.
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Wednesday, 16 July 2008 22:06
Day 84-86: Press releases gives McCall Glacier another 15 minutes of fame
Written by Matt Nolan
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