Science Mag peeved: Embargo’s not even up and a bad case of missing link-itis breaks out
What is it with “missing link?” Why are some reporters and their editors forever replaying that oldie by goodie – the late 19th century frenzy over Eugene Dubois’s Java Man, along with its subsequent and misbegotten stepchild, Piltdown Man? I would almost be willing to countenance a Holy Grail every day if it meant the abandonment of that other Pavlovian key to bigger headlines, the freakin’ missing link.
There are some reporters out there, not actual idiots but real science writers (enabled by happily knee-jerking editors) who given the opportunity can write witty and insightful prose about almost anything with -ologies and muons or professors of science involved, but who go certifiably and nomenclaturally impaired over a new fossil of any creature anywhere in the vast branching bush of lineages that radiated from something apish 5 million years ago or so and that, in its one surviving twig, is us. To them, if it’s a link and it’s new, ergo it is AustraloHomo missinglinkithicus extravagansus, mate. Last year we had two missing links – the semi-bogus news that a lemur-like skeleton found in Germany was a missing l that would change everything, and the other a genuinely important, and long-awaited, published analysis of a very early, bipedal hominin, Ardipithecus, whose first remains were discovered 16 years ago in Ethiopia.
The news is that on Thursday an embargo of a new and interesting specimen from S. Africa expires. The report is in Science. Those among Tracker readers with access to the press material provided by the journal can see that it’s an account of a putative new species among many along the hominin line, worth the writing but nothing so stupidly atavistic as to be slotted, or should I say caricatured, into the dusty and overcrowded bin of missing links. So, one hopes not to see too many “missing link” headlines.
The other news is that a few outlets are writing it up, in advance, but utterly without any detail. One in particular is larded with missing link hyperventilation. The embargo-straining episode has Science magazine, in a stern message at its password-protected press site, telling reporters that the embargo is still on. That message also warns of a “disservice to the goal of communicating science accurately” to write coy teasers promising immensely important M.L. news because it erodes efforts to promote “public trust in the integrity of science.”
I dunno if it’s that horrible. It’s just an embargo. But it is cheesy and intellectually hollow.
Examples of these Johnny come earlylies:
- Sunday Telegraph (UK) Richard Gray: Missing link between man and apes found ; Not any detail other than it fits in the transitional time when genus Homo was separating from genus Australopithecus. And the phony killer line, “If it is confirmed as a missing link between the two groups, it would be od immense scientific importance…” No, not immense but merely gratifying to a few specialists who follow such things closely. Nothing – exactly nothing – here changes the overall scheme of hominin evolution. It’s backfill. Essential science, but not immense. CLARIFICATION: I’ve added that this was the Sunday Telegraph, not Daily T, which I learn at this late age maintain separate staffs – see comment below.
- Times (UK) Hannah Devlin: Bones in South African cave establish new link in chain of mankind ; New branch deep in the bramble, probably more like it. But good for her and the Times. It’s merely a link. But in chain of mankind? Hmm. That could be a weirdly branched, interlocking chain. Still, no missing l$%!*&k. And nothing that demands a preview before the event.
A nice and funny compilation of missing links in paleoanthropology and a lot of other fields, and comment on this current episode, is to be found at:
- Scientificblogging – Hank Campbell: Missing Link Discovered …. Again ;
Pic: The Missing Link, from Dreamworks Monsters v. Aliens. Source.
- Charlie Petit
April 6th, 2010 at 6:56 pm
When I first saw those articles, i admit i saw red. As one of the reporters assigned to write about this story, it drove me into a frenzy to see British tabloids yet again break an embargo — this time on research that Science hadn’t even provided embargo access to yet.
NSF did release an embargoed press release on it last Thursday, which matches the timing behind the release of these “teaser” articles. As far as I’m concerned, the Brit tabloids broke the embargo, but they filed the serial numbers off the work enough to squeak on by — although the Telegraph listed the site where the fossils were found, they didn’t put the species name on there or the journal, etc.
Embargoes are essentially gentlemen’s agreements, and you can’t have a gentleman’s agreement with weasels. Entrusting the science section of a British tabloid with an embargo is like entrusting your baby with a child molester for babysitting.
April 6th, 2010 at 9:44 pm
Ditto. It’d be one thing if these reporters had been following Berger’s work closely for a long time, gathering detail by hand, and didn’t want to be upstaged by the daily crowd glomming onto a prominent journal release. That would be entirely fair. But that’s clearly not what happened.
And though I don’t have hard data to back it up, I’d expect that breaking embargo means you get pageviews that would otherwise have gone to reporters who followed embargo. As far as I’m concerned, the authors of these dreadful articles aren’t just hacks; they’re thieves.
April 6th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
re: pageview thievery — oh, no doubt. And isn’t it funny how the Daily Telegraph (EDITOR’s NOTE – It Was Sunday Telegraph/ CP) released their story on Saturday, just when reporters at other outlets would be unlikely to immediately follow suit and when Science offices, being closed, would be unlikely to respond?
April 7th, 2010 at 8:23 am
Charles–It was the Sunday Telegraph that did the story (though it was probably posted Saturday online). Many of the Sunday UK papers have completely independent staffs from the Mon-Sat papers and as a result the Sunday writers either 1) are late with the news or 2) break embargoes/break news when they can. So I wouldn’t blame it on deviousness of the Daily Telegraph–the daily science writers are often as annoyed at the Sunday writers as you are. These Sunday papers are why Nature and Science often hold bu embargoed news til Monday–I guess NSF didn’t get the message. Hannah at the Times was a work experience student with me and after asking Science/me for a copy of the paper Sunday (we declined), she had to make a tough decision whether to follow up with a detail-thin story on Monday–I’m sure she had some pressure from editors asking why the Times “missed” the Telegraph’s story. It will be interesting to see what type of coverage results Friday.
April 7th, 2010 at 4:14 pm
Re the “missing link” issue, it’s hard to avoid in online publishing… I’ve made the case countless times that it’s an outdated, overused, meaningless term. But I always get overruled because it’s THE keyword in search. So it goes in the headline and all throughout the story to get picked up by Google as easily as possible. The justification is that we can report the story as responsibly as all get-out, but without the right search words, it’ll just get buried. In an era of tightening budgets, it’s hard to win any argument that will impact traffic goals.
April 7th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
@Victoria: My plan is to quote a bunch of people who say it’s not a missing link — get the best of both worlds. (Best of both words?)
April 7th, 2010 at 5:57 pm
@Charles: Genius!
April 8th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
@Victoria: A very understandable dilemma.
On a related tangent, I wonder sometimes about how many of our traffic-enhancing strategies, including those focused on search engine optimization, are grounded in solid data and proven hypotheses, and how many are based on hunches, wishful thinking and preconceived notions.
To take the latest example, “missing link” is a hot search term. But its use is going to affect your — apologies for this word — brand; if I see an outlet using it, my snap judgement will be that they’re not credible. So I’ll be a bit less likely to look at other of their stories in the future; the chance of my subscribing to the outlet’s RSS feed, and providing a great many pageviews thereafter, drop to nil; and I won’t spread the story through my social network. (And then there’s the question of whether there are advertising or payment-relevant differences in the audiences of “missing link” and “non-missing-link” approaches.)
Maybe all this doesn’t matter, and lowest-common-denominator SEO really is the best possible approach to monetizing pageviews. But I’d like to see rigorous data to back this up, and not just marketing spiels from SEO consultants with products to sell.
April 8th, 2010 at 2:53 pm
@Brandon: I think I’ve delivered that very tangent to fellow newsies on numerous occasions!
Fwiw, I then get trumped when we use what we know about SEO – including littering a story with a term some folks might find distasteful – and our story gets hundreds of thousands of pageviews. I’ve also then argued that the story might have done as well *without* the offending SEO. But that’s a harder case to prove.
As you say, a lot of this traffic stuff seems more like trial and error than the results of a solid statistical analysis. My bigger concern is what it all means for the long-term fate of journalism. It often feels like traffic goals have replaced enterprising and investigative stories as measures of success in some cases, because too many outlets [online especially] don’t have the staff, time, or budgets to chase anything other than sensational headlines.
As for the brand issue, our policy is to cover even the tawdriest topics with strict standards for accuracy and scientific integrity. So even if there’re a few objectionable catchphrases, the full story should have its editorial bases covered.