Transcript | Academia et al: S03E01

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Female voice 1 00:00:02 

You're listening to an IOE podcast powered by UCL Minds. This is Academia et al., the podcast for anyone and everyone figuring out life in academia. 

00:00:41 Alina Pelikh 

Hi, you're listening to Academia et al., the podcast for early career academics by early career academics. I'm Alina, a senior research fellow in demography at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. I'm a co-host for this podcast and like you I'm an early career academic just trying to figure it all out. 

In this episode we're going to discuss media engagement as one form of making an impact. We will answer some very practical questions: where do the media headlines about research come from? How do I write for the media and do I even want to know how do I make myself approachable to journalists? How do we track media impact and what it counts for? 

Joining me in today's conversation is the expert of media relations, Chris Lane. Chris is a deputy head of media relations at UCL working in the university's press office. His team sits within the external engagement office to promote UCL’s world-leading research and expert comment throughout the global media whilst also managing issues that may impact UCL’s reputation. 

00:01:42 Chris Lane 

Hi there, thanks very much for having me on. 

Alina 

Thank you Chris, so you've done a lot of important work around media engagement at UCL and as our podcast is by early career academics for early career academics we wanted to take this opportunity and introduce you to our community and to doctoral students who might be struggling to take the first step in engaging with the media. But to begin with can you please share a bit more about yourself and your career journey. 

00:02:07 Chris 

Sure, yeah, so I initially studied geography and psychology in Canada and then I developed an interest in journalism and so I studied a Master’s in journalism in Vancouver and while I was there I started working in a comms office on campus, so started working in communications and in media relations for a couple years there before moving to the UK and joining the UCL press office where I've been for nearly eight years working in media relations. 

And yeah my team at UCL, we have various backgrounds, some do comms more, have more scientific backgrounds, more academic backgrounds, whereas some come more from communications or from journalism. 

00:02:40 Alina 

Thank you, so do you think that your first degree helped you somehow in in the media work?  

00:02:47 Chris 

It does for some things in that it does help me with sort of understanding different types of academic papers. I would have come across you know similar sort of social sciences or particularly psychology, I do work a lot with actually Psychology and Neuroscience at UCL so that has helped some somewhat but and just to give me a broader base I guess of how academia works. 

00:03:05 Alina 

This is great so would you say it was hard to learn how to become a journalist after studying something else? 

00:03:11 Chris 

I would say that well most of the people that I studied with did have different backgrounds as well, which probably makes sense for journalists really in that the reason people become journalists is because they're sort of interested in in a broad spectrum of things, essentially always, like to you know, learn and then report about it so I think most of us did have different backgrounds and that can sort of help to have a bit of an expertise as a journalist or as a press officer in the end absolutely. 

00:03:36 Alina 

Thank you, so let's get to some practical tips. So if I'm an early career researcher and just got a paper published, so what would be my next steps, can you walk us through the process of who we should contact and where do we need to prepare for it. 

00:03:51Chris 

Sure yeah, so if you've published something that you think could be newsworthy, could be worth sharing more broadly with the general public you know, beyond just your peers in academia it's helpful if you please get in touch with someone like me in the press office at UCL. You could also get in touch with your faculty’s comms team or other communications professionals that you might have worked with UCL. We all work quite collaboratively so if you contact one of us then we can figure out you 

Know, who will actually sort of lead on it and take things forward. Yeah if you have a paper that's coming out say in an academic journal, it's helpful if you can tell us about it a couple weeks or more before it actually gets published. So often say when a paper is accepted into a journal that's usually a good time to tell us about it. 

00:04:37 

So that because it's… if we do want to do some press outreach around it, having advanced notice means we can tell journalists about it in advance as well and just gives us some time to prepare so please tell us in advance, that's really useful and also when you do get in touch, it's helpful if you can share not just the research with us but a few lines, a few sentences about you know, why you think it's important, why you think it's newsworthy, what's most exciting about it – just a couple lines of a quick lay summary to help us sort of understand why it's important and then so yeah, if you've contacted me I'll take a look at it and consider what I think might be the best communications or PR approach for it, channels it might be best suited for, that it might be best for. 

00:05:25 

So if it's a really exciting story then I might be doing a press release sending it out quite widely or it might be more suited to a more specialist audience, it might be suited for a news story in faculty channels within the IOE. For example they have a blog where academics can write about their research so maybe that might be the best place for it, so yeah we'll think about what strategy to take and then if I do decide to do a press release, I want to share with journalists and share it quite widely, so generally the process I would go about is I'd like to talk to the academic initially, hear their take on it, you know, they can answer whatever questions I might have and then once I've sort understood it, their take on it then I would draft the release myself. We don't expect academics to write their own press releases, we can do that for you, we can write up the press release. 

00:06:15 

I would always make sure to get my press release approved by the academics, make sure they're happy with how I've represented the findings and then yeah I would start to share it with journalists. If it's quite a big paper that we would like to share quite widely, what we often do is we'll send out a press release under embargo a couple days before the paper is published… so the way that works is say if the paper's coming out on a Thursday morning, we'll send out a press release on a Tuesday so that journalists have… but just to journalists so it's shared privately under embargo so they have a couple days to review the findings, maybe speak to the academic about it before they're allowed to actually publish anything, so all of this does take quite a bit of time. 

00:06:51 

So yeah please tell us well in advance is… this is probably the main point. 

00:06:57 Alina 

Thank you for sharing all that, so for someone who has never done that before can you talk a little bit about the difference between the press release or the paper. So it's generally in my understanding it's something short and it's something that a lay audience can understand, so usually all the complex stuff about coefficients and associations is being translated into what your gran would understand is that basically more or less it. 

00:07:18 Chris 

Yeah, yeah, that's pretty good yeah, so the way that we would write a press release is yes so it's going to be in in plain English so yeah, not using sort of academic language… sometimes you might need to use a bit of academic language but only if it's really clearly explained. Yeah, something your granny understands stands as a good way of thinking about it. We would say the way we write is we're, we're sort of assuming the reader doesn't really know anything about this particular topic but yeah that doesn't mean assuming they're stupid, you can think of them yeah like a, like a relative or a friend who they will be perfectly intelligent, they just don't know the first thing about this particular topic. 

00:07:54 

And the way that we would write the press release in terms of how we'd structure it we always have, we start with a headline a really short snappy headline that sort of tells really clearly what this is about, what the finding is, ideally in about seven or eight words so have to be really concise about it to get the point across, and we sort of, we start out the press release in terms of the first sentence with the main finding so it's quite different way of structuring a research paper. 

00:08:20 

You're not sort of starting out with a whole you know, literature review and all the methods and everything before you finally get to the conclusions on page 10; we have to start off with the main finding and really to draw people in. People don't need to read it so they're not interested and if they’re not drawn in by the first you know sentence then then they won't bother, they'll skip it over. So we sort of start out with what's most exciting and then go into the detail as we get further into it. 

00:08:46 

Alina 

That sounds really intuitive, one follow-up question on that. So you say that it takes a bit of time and understanding to produce this kind of research output and translate it into media and then around the embargo time and the article being actually published it seems to me that the universe speeds up and somehow the journalists pick it up so quickly and write their stories in  literally 24 hours to have it on the same day as the article is published. How do they do their job that quickly? Because there's millions of articles that get out every day with loads of press releases even just within the UK  

00:09:21 Chris 

Yeah, journalists do work really quickly, they do have to be working on multiple stories every day and churning out multiple stories every day so that's just how they work, what they've been trained to do. We try to make that really easy for them by providing them with a press release that already really clearly explains the findings. If I've written a press release really well then sometimes a good way to sort of see if I've done it well is actually if the resulting news articles are written really similarly to my press release so that they can really quickly turn out an article without… without having to completely write it from scratch because we provided them with a press release that already really clearly explains what the finding is. 

00:10:06 

The press releases we write are in a similar style, sort of newspapers and generally news outlets so we provided them with you know a full summary and you know brief explanation of the methods. We also like to provide them with a few quotes from the researchers which we sort of you know agreed on what the quotes are with the researchers so that the journalist could just copy and paste those quotes without even needing necessarily to speak directly to the academics. So yeah if we, if we don't make it easy for them then they're a lot less likely to publish something because then yeah it would take them a lot more time to have to sort of start from scratch and do all of that work themselves, whereas if we've done already a lot of the work ourselves to help them get there then yeah, that they're more able to sort of turn out a whole lot of articles each day. 

00:10:52 Alina 

Oh that's really interesting to be honest, I didn't know that they were allowed just to take your words and put it into their outlet because I've been comparing some of the press releases that were done for my papers and some of the bigger papers obviously change it entirely because I don't think that they're allowed to, so if you're doing something with the BBC they will write their own piece, they wouldn't just take the words that you've written, is my impression. 

00:11:12 Chris 

Well a press release is designed to be used yeah so it's not like not copyrighted in the way that a journal article is copyrighted, a press release is designed to be you know… we're, we're quite happy for people just to copy and paste the entire thing if they want, it's not as simple as that, obviously they're not, aren't going to copy and paste the entire thing, but if they do use some of the wording then we're really happy with that because that's you know that's the… that's the wording that the academics have agreed is you know a nice way of describing their work. Yeah that's why we spend a lot of time to really try to get the press release, get it right and get it as good as it can be so that it can really guide the messaging of the journalists. 

00:11:54 Alina 

Just for our users we're going to put in our show notes some examples of the press releases that have been issued within UCL and some of the examples, how it's been picked up with the media so that you can see the difference between the paper, the press release and the final media piece. 

So okay that's all clear now, so as we've discussed the office's job is to convince you that it matters so what is the first thing that you would look at, would it be something about how timely the research is, so say is it around the election date or how groundbreaking it is or how well written it is, so please share a little bit of what do you actually look for when you read the story. 

00:12:30 Chris 

Yes so there a few different things that we consider, what would make it most newsworthy and of interest to the general public, right that it does, it absolutely needs to be timely and and yeah certainly helps if it is groundbreaking research but what's the biggest most groundbreaking research from an academic’s point of view in terms of what makes the biggest splash within your field isn't always the same as what would make a biggest splash in the media… some correlation but certainly it's probably pretty limited correlation. 

Yeah to be of interest to the news, media the findings have to be really clearly relevant to things that the general public know a bit about and can understand which means that you know for example if the paper is more about research methods and you know honing research methods that's probably, that may be really important to fellow researchers but not so much of interest to the general public so we really need to consider the implications of the research findings – so will these findings directly affect people's lives or their behaviours or tell us something really interesting that we didn't know before about our lives and behaviours. We consider whether the results are surprising so if it was surprising to you as an academic then then please tell us, that's that's good to know but particularly newsworthy if it's you know surprising and unexpected to the general public. Sometimes also if it's just something a bit unusual or a bit quirky that can make it into the media 

00:13:48 

I've done press releases on studies at UCL on things like, there was one I did about courtship vocalisations in mice so essentially about mice singing love songs to one another, it tell us interesting things about you know about sort of speech and how that's developed but it's just the fact that it was essentially about mice singing love songs to one another made it more interesting and we happened to be promoting this in February so it was a nice little Valentine's Day story. 

If it's sort of a controversial or high-profile topic as well so if it's something that people are talking about a lot right now, if it's relevant to you know what's in the news right now that certainly makes it more interesting to make it really timely and you know why people want to hear about it right now. As you mentioned if you know an election's coming up and we have some insights new insights into something that is a key you know key point of debate in the election campaign then yeah that could make this particular paper more likely to get picked up now than if you'd published it six months ago when that topic wasn't in the news. It's not just about the findings themselves I guess, you know it really depends on the context and what else is going on that day that week so yeah the same findings might be more… more newsworthy one day than another day. 

00:15:09 Alina 

Absolutely context matters and it's all about luck because unfortunately as academics we can never predict when our papers are going to be published and sometimes when you write them you think that they're very timely and very need to go out today but it takes years to get it out… that's the story of our lives and just to say something around for our PhD students and early career academics, would you consider taking a paper that's just been published by PhD student or would you focus more on kind of someone with already an established academic track? 

00:15:33 Chris 

It doesn't matter to us really who's published it as long as the research is sound as long as it's… as long as it looks good so if it's been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal then that sounds good to us… if it is you know sort of one sole author as a PhD student in a smaller journal.. then you know we might want to check in with another more senior academic just to sort of, as a sense check for us to help us gauge how strong the findings are, how strong the research is but generally speaking it really doesn't need to be you know a leader in the field. If you're a PhD student, you've been researching this for you know months or years then you are already very much an expert, you know far more about it than almost everyone else does, so we're definitely just as much interested in hearing from PhD students to tenured professors. 

00:16:25 Alina 

Excellent! Early career researchers, you've heard it, you have a paper, get in touch with Chris and his team, so that was very straightforward. Okay we've published something, we've reached out to your team, now what actually happens if we get approached by the media, say radio for an interview or being asked to comment on something, what should early career researchers do apart from freaking out a little bit. 

00:16:45 Chris 

Well I would say start by, don't freak out a little bit, ideally key thing is just don't panic and yeah calm down and a good first step is to contact the media relations team as we can offer you some advice that would be specific to that, we can off plenty of general advice like we're doing here but if you contact us about a particular interview request that you've received then we can maybe offer some more specific advice about how to deal with that particular interview and it's also just helpful for us to know about. 

You don't need to contact us but we do sort of like to know what UCL academics are getting up to in the media and a big thing I would say is just to really trust your expertise. Yeah you are the expert even if you're a PhD student you have been researching this for years so yeah you know, you know a thousand times more about this than most people know about it, you know people who aren't in your field, a journalist has contacted you clearly because they think you have something interesting to say… they're interested. 

They think their listeners or their readers will be interested and so yeah trust yourself in your expertise and then certainly make sure to prepare for the interview in terms of writing down, you know making some notes about what it is you'd like to say, sort of get your thoughts on paper bits and consider what kind of questions you might be asked and in preparing for the interview it's helpful also to ask the journalist just a few questions about what to expect so you want to make sure to find out you know is this for broadcast so is it for radio, is it for TV, is it going to be pre-recorded, if it's pre-recorded that means if you make a mistake then go back out and edit it out but if it's going to be live or is it going to be for print article you know in a newspaper or written article online, those are a bit more common generally than you know the live TV interview is sort of, it isn't really as common so chances are it's going … just going to be sort of for print and they're going to be looking for a few sound bites and they can explain a bit of sort of what it, how that process will work. 

00:18:51 Alina 

That's really helpful thank you, so I think just to follow up and what you've just said one of the academic's greatest fear when interacting with media is that the main message gets lost or even worse, get misinterpreted or taken out of context and you already suggested that we need to try and find out what the purpose of this media piece but it's not really very straightforward and academics are usually afraid to make mistakes and to make an inference and to say that A leads to B unless they've proved it in the paper but what journalists always want is, so what does it mean for the bigger picture for the for the actual real world, these are the kind of questions that we fear because we are specifically told to only talk about in this sample we found out that A and B are related so do you have any tips on that. 

00:19:39 Chris 

Yes so we, I do hear from a lot of academics who are concerned about how their findings might be misrepresented.. One thing to consider is engaging with the media by you know speaking really openly with them, that helps journalists to get it right, that helps reduce the risk that they're going to misrepresent in the sense that they could still report on the story without talking to you directly and then they're more likely to get it wrong, so you can really help them to understand if you speak to them and engage with them really openly. 

00:20:13 

One thing to keep in mind about journalists is the way that they would be interviewing an academic isn't the same way they'd be interviewing say a politician, they're not going to be grilling you and trying to catch you out, they're essentially… they're on your side, they want to get the story right, they want to tell an interesting story about this amazing work that you're doing so they're working with you on that really. 

So just one thing to kind of yeah calm yourself down and then in terms of to 

prepare for the interview a few things tips I'd say for how to prepare is to consider, just really think about what the story is you're trying to tell, what agenda you might have in terms of what messaging you're trying to get across, what do you want people to take away from this story – it's helpful to think about having three key messages you know.. what’s three main points you want to get across as three really succinct bullet points so that you can kind of keep that top of mind. Regardless of what questions you get asked you can ask ahead of time what questions the journalist will be asking you. They might provide the questions although they might not provide the questions in advance or even if they do provide a couple of them they would want to be able to you know think on their feet and ask some follow-up questions that they've just thought of but even if you don't know what they're going to ask you, if you at least have your key messages top of mind, then you can more easily sort of integrate that into your answers regardless of what exactly the question was. 

00:21:36 

It's also helpful to think about any examples you might have that can sort of bring your story to life in terms of just key facts or observations or anecdotes or sort of statistics that are you know easy to understand that really illustrate the story and also think about just who is the audience that you're ultimately trying to connect with so that's not just the journalist but the people who are eventually going to be reading this or listening to this, what is it you especially would want them to know and to avoid the kind of things going wrong. It's helpful to essentially just think about that in advance so think about in advance what could be, what are the likely negatives that might come up you know, what's the sort of worst case scenario headline that you think is sort of a risk to the reporting on your own paper and then if you kind of think of what the worst case scenario is then you can sort of think about okay how do I tell it so that doesn't end up misinterpreted like that. 

00:22:36 

Because you might need to say that in your answer you know so we found this but what this doesn't mean is that you know it doesn't mean this you know we can't say this we can't confirm this just to be really clear on what the findings do and don't say. 

00:22:45 Alina 

That sounds really helpful and I just wanted to share some of my experience with our listeners. I've had my article being published as a press release with the help of a UCL press release office and it's been picked up by the BBC. They didn't give me questions in advance and I asked for them so that is a very common thing, you ask for them and you don't get them but then on the day it was a very very relaxing half an hour chat not only about the paper that I published which was on separation from a first partnership which is something that everyone can understand because if you've experienced the first partnership, what are the chances that you're going to stay with your first partner and how it has changed across generations so there was something about the fact that the partnerships are becoming like stable, well romantic partnerships that's what I mean and it was super relaxing and we've talked more about my whole PhD thesis about the transition to adulthood and the piece came out really really nicely. 

00:23:41 

It was merged with some other academic from the States and I really enjoyed it; on the contrary the same article was picked up by The Guardian and the person who was writing it asked for just a chat with me to talk about different aspects and that was way later than after the BBC one came out and we've had a 40 minute discussion which was again very friendly but the person who was writing the piece about how young couples marry those days really early so kind of something like David Beckham's son being getting married in his early 20s and something like oh this strength has been revived by the Gen Z, and my point was exactly educating the journalist that the fact that it happened to some celebrity kids including her own is not what the majority of the population is experiencing and the message was very clear that if you have to write the story about it of course but I can't say that that's the new trend and that's the new norm because the data shows that it's not and I actually was very impressed that I have advised the journalist to have a look at the statistics on the growing proportion of couples in cohabitation and the age of marriage and everything that shows kind of the opposite of what the story was about and after that I haven't heard for about a month and I thought like well surely like my 40 minutes were just wasted and nothing is going to come out of it. 

00:25:02 

But I felt like you know my scientific purpose, I educated the journalist and tried to make the story more plausible and I was very impressed that in the end the story did come out but they actually did look at all the stats that I recommended looking at oh, they did cited these kind of publications that I mentioned, they included my short commentary on some of the trends from my paper which did not back up the main story but I was very impressed that it was kind of the high level of journalism where they didn't get out of me what they really wanted to support their story but yet they made sense out of it despite it all so I don't know how often it happens and maybe our listeners also have some similar stories that happened to them but I just thought that it's worth sharing that sometimes you think that it doesn't go along and I try to make my point clear very many many times during the interview this is not what we observe in research so this is a very niche trend and yet it worked out well in the end. 

Chris 

Yeah that sounds really interesting and they've made some quite good points there about what to do I think in the sense that for one thing, I think the fact that it sounds like it was you really when you were having a conversation with the journalist you were really sort of listening to what they were saying and what kind of story they wanted to tell so you kind of picked out that they wanted to tell a certain story that wasn't quite accurate and then you responded to that by really helping them get it right and yeah providing them with additional materials that can be really helpful, point them to other data that wasn't necessarily your own work but just to really help them understand the story and make sure they get it right, and then you said that you were worried that you'd wasted your time if that article didn't come out but I would say that's not, you haven't necessarily wasted your time. If the article never did come out then it might not be a waste of time in that you would have at least avoided the you know an inaccurate article from coming out and so sometimes media engagement might not necessarily lead to something being published but that doesn't mean it's a waste of time because yeah it's still really useful in educating the journalists and you know making sure that the coverage that they end up doing is accurate or that yeah they don't tell a story that's completely inaccurate. 

00:27:14 Alina 

That's absolutely a great way of seeing that if you stop from incorrect message getting out to the public that's also a result much harder to quantify but nevertheless a very important result okay. So moving on to some other practical skills, so we talked a lot about giving interviews and if we come back to writing at the first place so would you have any tips for our listeners on getting their work out there and specifically what to focus on if they write a blog themselves and prove me wrong so blogs are usually written by the authors right, not by your team or can there be a collaboration on that as well? 

00:27:46 Chris 

Yeah, a blog would be written by academics themselves typically and then press release or a pitch to the media, we would write it ourselves and we also often support academics in getting articles into say The Conversation or other news outlets as well that publish articles, not just in you know UCL’s own channels but externally that are written by academics and we can certainly support you in you know in advising how to write that, so I guess generally if you're writing for a general audience, lay audience, it's important to consider what's most interesting about your findings that you know, what would really capture the attention of someone that isn't in your field. 

00:28:24 

I mean some ways you can sort of test this even just by talking to you know your friends or your family about your work and see what is it that they're most interested in a bit of a litmus test but also of course you know a comms professional like me, we can also help you with that but often the sort of headline of your story, the key finding might not actually be… the key finding of your research there might be something else that's you know a bit more interesting to a general audience. In writing a news article writing something for a general audience we always yeah we always have to start with a really short happy headline and then lead with sort of the key finding, you have to be able to really succinctly explain what the story is so for our press releases we always have a sort of one sentence lead sentence and that tells the whole story in one sentence, later in the piece we'll go into more detail but yeah you need to be able to find a way of sort of saying what the story is in just one sentence before then getting sort of getting into more detail and yeah just try to be really clear and write really in plain English, avoid technical terms, avoid academic terms that the general public might not understand. 

00:29:33 

You may have been using these terms for you know for a decade but just yeah need to keep in mind that it might not be as obvious to the general public and no one's going to complain because something is too easy to understand, whereas yeah if it's too hard to understand it might just go over their head and they won't keep reading it but yeah there's nothing wrong with just making something really simple and clear and if you do have a challenging concept that you want to introduce, make sure to just explain it and also try to really make every line count so particularly as someone is reading through the piece, each sentence has to sort of keep their interest in reading the next sentence which is why we tend to keep a lot of the detail, we might leave a bit more towards the end of the piece so we start out with you know what's the main finding, what's most important you know, what are the key implications and then we sort of go into the methods and you know maybe some kind of further questions you know, opportunities for further research and things towards the end just for the people that are really interested who have made it all the way to the bottom of the page. 

00:30:30 Alina 

Yeah that's really helpful, I think one thing I wanted to add is do you kind of stand your ground and especially I've heard a lot of stories when writing for The Conversation, The Conversation’s editorial team is huge and you never know what kind of expect, what you get and what are their views on specific topic and I've heard a lot from colleagues that they had to delete the messages that were added last minute because they do not support the findings of the researchers but the editor thought that that's a good kind of big headline phrase and I think that's usually hard to do especially in your early career to know how to say no to certain things that the editor might be trying to bring in. I think that's kind of one of the challenges I would say. 

00:31:14 Chris 

Yeah and just explain why it is that you feel that way, why it is that this really has to be in there, it's super important or why is it that this you know particular phrasing isn't correct and yeah just take the time to explain to an editor, a journalist who isn't an expert in your field and yeah it might seem like they're you know pushing back, they want to do things a certain way but once you've just explained why it is that you know this message has to has to get across in a certain way, once they understand they may well entirely agree with you. 

00:31:47 Alina 

Okay so we come in closer to the end of our conversation and I only have two questions left so one of them is about training so I know UCL offers a lot of media and engagement training, can you talk a little bit more about what to expect of this and how our listeners may engage with this? 

00:32:06 Chris 

Yes so UCL’s media relations team, we offer media relations training sessions both centrally through organisational development that are open to academics across UCL and that would be this open to sort of anyone from PhD students to senior research staff and we also offer training sessions that are specific to different faculties, we do offer those pretty regularly working with the faculty communications team though most of them are offered as webinars but we do sometimes also offer in-person ones… we cover a lot of what we talked about today essentially, we talk, we cover who the media relations team is, who we are, what we do, how we get UCL into the media we talk about the benefits of doing media engagement, how it can benefit you and how it can benefit the general public. Essentially we talk about how we go about promoting research and expertise, we talk about what stories hit the news in terms of which kind kind of you know, research stories are more likely to get covered and the different news and media channels that might cover your stories and we also do go through some examples in depth to explain you know exactly how we got the results that we did and also exactly you know why these particular examples were, why these were strong stories and why we covered those and why journalists were particularly interested in them. 

00:33:21 Alina 

That sounds really good, so everyone who's listening sign up to those courses if you want to learn more and if you want to have your hands on some practical examples which are impossible in a podcast format. We've learned a lot today thank you Chris. 

00:33:35  

To finish on a philosophical note, one last question – we've learned that there are many ways to engage with media and how to disseminate our work, can you share some of your final thoughts on the benefits of engaging with media. 

00:33:47 Chris 

Yeah so I mean one key obvious benefit is that of course it sort of raises your profile and that in doing that it raises UCL’s profile, that's why a whole team of people are here to help you out with it. It also raises your department's profile so you know say, if you're in the IOE, it helps share that UCL is really a place for expertise in education research specifically or whatever exactly it is that you're researching. 

00:34:11 

And yeah, you can raise your own personal profile, seems that that's sort of increasingly important these days in terms of from employer’s perspectives or funder’s perspectives that you're making an impact with your research beyond just the research community, so it is good for relationships with funders and with other partners and collaborators if they see that you're you know, promoting this collaborative relationship and the results of the work that you're doing. 

00:34:36  

I think another argument is that a lot of.. most of the work done at UCL is publicly funded and I think that the public sort of has a right to know where their money is going essentially, so publicly funded research should be communicated to the public and it helps just to showcase the value of universities and so that people know why it's important that universities are funded and that research is funded because of yeah, if we tell them what the results are, and I think you can also think about it as sort of an extension of your role as educators. 

00:35:08 

You're not just educating you know your students, if you're teaching you're not just educating your peers, other people in your field but you're also, if you do media engagement you're also educating the public and that could be... you might be able to sort of debunk some myths that you might have seen relating to your field. And yeah you might be able to sort of enact some change through, just through more dialogue and openness and yeah sharing your expertise. 

00:35:30 Alina 

Chris, we have a tradition of asking our guests to share a tip of the day with our listeners – what would be your one tip of engaging with media today. 

00:35:37 Chris 

I would say my top tip would be to trust yourself and trust your expertise. You don't need to be the top expert in the field, you've been researching this for months, you've been researching this for years, you know a thousand times more about this topic than most people outside of your field, so trust that you are an expert and also that journalists are on your side... they're not trying to catch you out, they're just trying to tell a really interesting story and it's a collaborative thing, dealing with the media to get the best story across. 

00:36:08 

One thing to add if you want to be approached by media journalists, register as an expert at UCL, you can find the link in our show notes and this is the database of UCL experts and it would be much easier for the journalists to find you if you register there  

00:36:22 Alina 

Chris, thank you so much for your time and expertise today. 

00:36:26 Chris 

Thanks very much Alina; thanks for having me on, and I hope this has been really useful for our listeners. 

00:36:29 Alina 

Thank you for listening to Academia et al. I'm Alina Pelikh and thanks for joining us today. 

00:36:35 

This season has been brought to you with support from the Doctoral School Researcher Networks / Academic Societies Fund. You can follow the IOE Early Career Network on X, the website formerly known as Twitter at @IOE_EarlyCareer. If you liked what you've heard, have suggestions for content or want to be our next podcast guest, send us an email at ioe.earlycareer@ucl.ac.uk. And a quick favour before you go, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, we’d really appreciate if you could give the IOE podcast a rating 

00:37:04 

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Academia et al. is brought to you by the IOE’s Early Career Network. 

This podcast is presented by Dr Keri Wong and Dr Alina Pelikh. The theme music was created by Roni Xu. Amy Leibowitz is the series producer, and Sarah-Jane Gregori is the executive producer. 

00:37:49 

Thanks so much for downloading and listening to this IOE podcast.