ABSTRACT - A sliver of scholarship reaches the public. When it does, mostly that’s thanks to journalists who craft news stories based on their understanding of scientific results. In this dissemination pathway, research passes from academia through media organizations to the public. But steps and decisions in this pathway are opaque to its actors — the scholars producing research, the journalists reporting it, and the people consuming it. This talk will shed light on black box processes that feed media coverage of scholarship, with an emphasis on the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. As a PhD and science writer, I’ll share insider and outsider perspectives on science journalism. I’ll attempt to answer questions pertinent to academics such as: Which research papers receive the most (or any) media attention, and why? What are best practices for interviews with journalists? What are the costs and benefits of public engagement via mass media? The talk will draw on my experiences reporting science news as well as preliminary results from a systematic study of U.S. media’s coverage of archaeology research. Examining metrics of media attention for publications in seven scientific journals, the study reveals regional and topical biases likely driven by editorial decisions at news outlets.

BIO - Dr. Bridget Alex is a paleoanthropologist, science writer, and educator. Currently, she is a Lecturer in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Over the years, she has taught courses in anthropology and science communication at diverse institutions including Caltech and Pasadena City College. She has published more than 140 scientific and popular science articles, which have appeared in outlets including Science, Discover, Atlas Obscura and Archaeology. She earned a PhD in 2016 from Harvard in Anthropological Archaeology & Human Evolutionary Biology. Her research focused on understanding the processes by which Homo sapiens spread globally as other human groups, like Neanderthals, went extinct over the past 200,000 years. With methodological expertise in radiocarbon dating and geochemical analyses, she conducted fieldwork in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and the Levant.

Location: Tozzer 203

45 minute talk

20 minute Q&A

Start: 3:00 p.m.

Please email amy_sylvester@fas.harvard.edu prior to September 8, 2022 to request the link to Zoom if you did not receive through mailing list. Click here to subscribe to Harvard Archaeology Seminar Series: