Overheard in the Newsroom: A Reporter’s Plea for Patience

By Nick Seaver, January 18, 2011

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A colleague sent over this post from The New York Times‘ Dot Earth blog. As she pointed out, it echoes what we’ve heard from reporters who have been dismissed by impatient scientists for not being well-versed in a specific topic.

Here’s what must be the shortest post ever on Realclimate.org, filed under the heading reporting on climate:

Overheard in the newsroom: Reporter doing a phone interview: “Please slow down, professor. You’ve been researching this topic for a decade. I’ve been researching it since lunchtime.”

From here (h/t Josh).

I’m not quite sure whether this is aimed at eliciting a chuckle from scientists bemoaning the impossibility of communicating accurately with the outside world, or simply making a little fun out of the lack of reporters with a deep understanding of probability distribution functions or Bayesian analysis.

One way or the other, let’s continue the conversation a few beats to see how this might play out, for worse or better, after that initial line…

The original quotation comes from Overheard in the Newsroom. Definitely read the rest of Andrew Revkin’s post at Dot Earth to read what he imagines came next.