Science is messy. Should we tell the readers? Tell our editors? Or would that discourage attention to the endeavor we love? Do we still have to follow the money?
The source of the underwater plume of dispersed oil droplets. (BP Webcam frame grab)
The flurry of stories about that Gulf of Mexico oil plume–here today, gone tomorrow–is yet another example of why daily journalism (nay, hourly journalism) is a terrible way to cover science. [The Tracker is tempted to invoke Churchill's comment about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others, but will resist.]
To wit:
A couple of days ago we had the news out of Woods Hole, retailed by the New York Times and others and blogged of in this space, that the huge oil plume deep in the gulf was still there and might persist for years. Yesterday came a new report by a different research group saying that the plume was gone, utterly. The Times’s online version today picked up Greenwire‘s story, by Paul Voosen, saying the plume has been gone for nearly a month. (Wonder what the Times will print in tomorrow’s paper edition. ) This morning the Washington Post did the Times one better, staffing the new story with David Brown who wrote that the gulf’s “ecosystem was ready and waiting” for the spill, primed with microbes that gobbled it up. Brown’s story is full of fascinating and relevant microbiological facts and evolutionary biology.
The San Francisco Chronicle‘s David Perlman had the story as well, leading with the discovery of “a voracious species of primitive oil-eating bacteria.” So did Margaret Munro of the Montreal Gazette. And Christopher Joyce at NPR.
Amina Khan of the Los Angeles Times quotes the lead scientist, Terry Hazen, on what the bacteria are doing now that they have run out of oil to eat, “They’re eating their [dead] brethren.”
The fact is that science, like journalism, is committed by human beings. Both proceed with small steps, incremental findings, discoveries of previous mistakes, misunderstandings, corrections or sometimes even retractions. Both tribes wish to make a big splash and sometimes over-interpret their findings or simply remain silent when others drop the question marks and substitute exclamation points.
In this episode, interestingly, one of the world’s greatest scientific journals is also implicated. Science published both sets of findings, in separate issues.
This may be a teachable moment. Christopher Reddy, one of the scientists involved at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, thinks so. In an excellent piece, available online at CNN‘s site (How did that happen?), Reddy explains the situation from his perspective, blaming not just journalists but scientists as well.
Reddy seems to understand the ways of both scientists and journalists. “We desperately want to please a reporter, who for the first time cares about what you do,” he writes. “And scientists, including me, have egos, so we want our thoughts and work recognized.” It’s a thoughtful, candid article, fit for both tribes.
What the Tracker has not seen in any news account [note inserted after posting: See Brandon Keim's comment below.] is the funding source for the research that says the plume is gone. Hazen and his team are at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Vacationing Head Tracker, Charlie Petit, read the LBL news release all the way to the bottom (some vacation) and learned that Hazen’s Energy Biosciences Institute at LBL is funded by a $500 million grant from… wait for it… BP.
-Boyce Rensberger
August 25th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Reddy has a point about the WHOI findings being interpreted as more conclusive and damning than they were. But as mentioned in the comments on the previous Hazen oil spill post, that’s in part because of how the findings were handled by Science and also by WHOI. Daily journalism is often a very bad way to cover science — though would Reddy prefer we didn’t cover Deepwater Horizon at all, and just wait until the “dust settles”? — but it’s a fact of life, and the unavailability of WHOI researchers prior to the last-minute presscon fueled knee-jerk coverage.
Also, it wasn’t irresponsible to portray the WHOI observations, with attendant caveats, in its real-world context: NOAA’s announcement that the oil was gone, followed by other researchers who said NOAA was — in the words of Chuck Hopkinson at the U of GA — “absolutely incorrect.” To quote the WHOI study directly, “Our findings indicate the presence of a continuous plume … that persisted for months without substantial biodegradation.” “[…] if the hydrocarbons are indeed susceptible to biodegradation, then it may require many months before microbes significantly attenuate the hydrocarbon plume….”
Time and Wired mentioned the Hazen study’s BP funding source.
August 25th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Thanks, Brandon. The Tracker site was always intended as an interactive one, welcoming readers’ comments, additiions and corrections. Also fulminations if the language is fit to print.
August 25th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
I couldn’t agree more that neither the press, WHOI nor Science draped itself in glory this past week. And I hope this is a teachable moment. For one, I would not have written my lede this week as strongly had I not been so dismayed with the coverage I saw of the WHOI study. The moment I saw “plumes,” along with a conference at the National Press Club, I knew whatever was in the study was going to be overblown. No better way to grab attention than an August press conference in DC.
There a few problems that I see:
1) WHOI organized the press conference, I believe, and they should have know that it would draw a large amount of attention from journalists unable to read a scientific study. They shouldn’t have been surprised that people working under tight deadlines would miss that the study was culled from June data; that the oldest oil they observed in the plume had only been in the water for five days; that they were using indirect measures for biodegradation, and their own data could be interpreted to support microbial activity.
2) Science should have waited to at least put a few of these studies out together — I know Dave Valentine has his own microbe study coming out soon, too. Knit all these into a special package, put together the first surge of science reporting, and then subsequent work will likely see its profile slowly dip, allowing us down in the trenches to do our job.
3) Many environmental reporters are not science reporters, which has always dumbfounded me; to be the former, you should really be the latter. And so we had overheated stories on the plumes based on small samples, some possibly faulty dissolved oxygen sensors, etc. These reporters then follow the stories they launched into the scientific journals, and start conflating the oil budget “conflict” — aka, wrangling over the semantics of “accounted for,” “gone,” and “diluted” — with WHOI’s pure descriptive science. What a mess.
[In citing Hazen's announcement that they couldn't detect the plume for three weeks, I feared falling into this category of relying on anecdote. I still worry I didn't play up the dilution angle enough. But it felt like a needed corrective, and given that he had been monitoring the plume for months, it didn't seem as a large a stretch as the first announcements.]
4) Particularly with the plume, reporters and the public struggle portraying matters of scale, and also what it means for oil’s components to be diluted. The plume was around 2 ppm, maybe a bit higher, back in June — that’s something like a drop in an Olympic-sized pool, right? Even without biodegradation, it doesn’t seem shocking that, after a month, thermodynamics would do its thing and dilute the oil so it’s no higher than the gulf’s oily baseline. Maybe benzene is still a concern at those levels, but I’d suspect it’s a problem the gulf has dealt with before.
Anyway, just some thoughts. Not sure what to make of them.
I enjoyed your coverage, Brandon.
August 25th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
Both scientists and journalists share blame, but the saddest point may be that some of it is beyond our control. Too much of the public – and too many politicians – mistrust both science and journalism these days. And when trust goes in any situation in life, earning it back is very, very hard.
As a Gulf Coast resident, I think there are some basic scientific facts that both journalists and scientists have at times underplayed or forgotten.
One is that we know there are oil-eating bacteria in the Gulf. Absolutely no question about that, though we don’t know how they responded to the massive BP spill. Yet many people (and I know firsthand) just don’t get this key point. (Shout out to MBL’s Microbial Diversity course for teaching me that microbes actually rule the world, not us…)
Second is that most everyone seems to have downplayed the importance of dilution. Yes, oil spills are terrible. But the Gulf – the same Gulf that churns up hurricanes and tropical storms every year – does dilute even oil over time.
August 25th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
To build off Kevin’s point, if I’m Bill Keller, I’m ordering a Week in Review piece on dilution, dose makes the poison, visualizations of parts per million, and a breakdown of some of the more than 17,000 different chemical components in crude. (I bet a lot of people are wondering what alkanes, aromatic hydrocarbons and asphaltenes are.) I’d love to write it, but that’s not exactly Greenwire’s cup of tea.
August 25th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
At PopSci.com, in the case of the WHOI and LBNL studies, we aimed for greater depth. The impending back-and-forth among scientists was evident from the day NOAA released its report, so that’s how we approached the story.
We had several conversations about the WHOI study’s implications on the day leading up to the embargo lift, and we decided to take a broader view, discussing how it was just one snapshot of the disaster. For that reason, when we turned around and wrote about the microbial degradation four days later, it wasn’t a 180-degree turn. We’d already reported that much more work was needed before anyone could make definitive statements about the plume and its future. Anticipating “small steps, incremental findings, discoveries of previous mistakes and misunderstandings” is exactly why we handled the story the way we did.
I have to wonder if Reddy knew the Hazen paper was coming when he held the press conference. He said several times that much more data was coming down the pipeline, and he and Camilli were careful to say that their study left out several factors — including biological activity inside the plume.
While daily coverage is often a bad way to handle big science, the Web leaves us little choice. That’s why we felt it was important to keep saying “this is not definitive, there’s more to come.” And we intend to deliver on that.
Also, for what it’s worth, PopSci’s story also mentioned the BP funding, in the third graph.
August 25th, 2010 at 5:08 pm
I think we can safely say that while the “major” news outlets cited in your story did not note the source of Hazen’s resources, the online news community largely did (particularly the online science journalism community that includes Wired, Pop Sci and, yes, my own employer Scientific American):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-fast-microbes-consume-gulf-oil-spill
I’m just saying…
August 26th, 2010 at 9:20 am
Excellent contributions, all. I suspect this story and its coverage will make good fodder for science journalism classes to discuss for some time to come.
FWIW: I could not find any mention of the apparently vanished plume in today’s paper edition of the NYTimes. Not online, either. So if you rely only on what used to be considered the-newspaper-of-record, you wouldn’t know what’s what in this case. I used to work at that newspaper and recall well the attitude that if another news organization beats the Times to a story, it ain’t news.
Hey, Kevin, thanks for mentioning MBL’s microbial diversity course. MBL’s Science Journalism Program offers an excellent array of courses in the basic science needed to cover a lot of science, medical and environment stories. It was a big help to me in 1987.
August 26th, 2010 at 10:05 am
Boyce-
You’ve solved it.
What’s needed is to allow rabble-rousing politicians and TV personalities on the left and right to take the MBL and Knight Sci. Journalism Fellowships. They need the education even more than we journalists do.
I can just see it, the MBL Class of 2011: Sarah Palin, Stephen Colbert, Bill O’Reilly and WH Press Secretary Gibbs, all in once class.
Make ‘em all do that complex math in Microbial Diversity for three weeks, and they’ll shape up quick.
August 26th, 2010 at 10:55 am
One question I find myself asking: could a different story framework be better suited to the Gulf oil story and its limitations? Future-of-journalism types have banged around the idea of “iterative reporting” for a while — the idea is that rather than having a series of stories that are isolated from each other (linked only by hyperlinks, or in-story mentions), you have a constantly-evolving website section dedicated solely to a suitable story topic.
So for the Gulf oil, you could imagine having a Deepwater Horizon site. On the home page would be a constant “what’s known, right now” column, with an concise and regularly-updated description of the situation; and another column which runs stories/posts as they’re published. Those stories would be run in a template that also carried the “what’s known, right now” information. And so in any one glimpse, a reader could get a sense of both the immediate and the big picture. The reporter’s job wouldn’t change, but his or her work would be better conveyed.
All this would be very easy to make from scratch — it could be done on a WordPress template in half an hour. Making it happen within an institution’s existing online framework would be harder, but still doable.
August 26th, 2010 at 11:23 am
Brandon’s idea sounds good. I think the NYT is experimenting with something that could evolve into that, if you gave it a better name and led with that day’s turn of events.
The Times thing is called Times Topics, and is buried on their website. It says that “Each topic page collects all the news, reference and archival information, photos, graphics, audio and video files published on topics ranging from Madonna to Myanmar. This treasure trove is available without charge on articles going back to 1981.”
Add data visualizations, current pix and updates. Voila.
August 26th, 2010 at 11:39 am
I’m a big supporter of the idea, too. Google collaborated with the Times and Post on the idea, with its Living Stories project, which is now defunct. The code is there for anyone to use, though.
http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/
The Times Topics have a lot of promise, but in the end it seems like their backbone remains a simple index of related stories, with multimedia gloss. If I remember right, their health care reform page had a lot more going on — it was excellent. That could be the model for some enterprising news org.
It may be up to new media to really pioneer this — I don’t know if I see newspapers truly breaking away from the story as their base unit.
August 26th, 2010 at 11:45 am
Brandon’s idea is good, but I think if it was associated with any one established media outlet many would distrust it, because of the point Boyce made above. The Times gives big play to one oil spill story, then virtually ignores the related science the following week.
Not sure if the Wikipedia approach would work on single topics – then the question of editors and funding comes in.
But a page of diverse All-Star science reporters really covering the heck out of a major topic could attract a lot of readers quickly.
August 26th, 2010 at 2:13 pm
NPR’s Chris Joyce did identify BP as funding source for the research both in his on-air and online piece.
August 26th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Paul,
I took a look at Google’s Living Stories platform (thanks for telling us about it), and I’m very encouraged that it could be used for the kind of thing we’re discussing here. They even have a WordPress plugin.
I loved your illustration of 2 ppm (http://voosen.me/2010/07/two-parts-per-million/), and I’m thinking you could be the one to push this idea further. What do you think?
One difficulty of the Living Story approach seems to be that the entire package on any given story is provided by just one news organization, in the experiment, either NYT or TWP.
Could Google’s code be used to allow content from several news organizations in *one* living story? Could various individuals put up their own content into an existing package? Does there need to be an editor? If some disinterested entity (Are you reading this, Phil and Diane Finch, KSJF’s new-media person?) were to host the site, would it need to assign a staffer to edit/moderate?
I would welcome your input, Paul. And that of anyone else. I’m just a fill-in Tracker these days, but I would be willing to do what I can to try this experiment.
Boyce
August 27th, 2010 at 1:34 am
This seeming whipsaw of papers at Science is a time for self-reflection by reporters and journal editors alike. For one – was the apparent contradiction of the two papers even real? The Woods Hole team reported the deep plume’s persistence but off data from June. The second report, from the Hazen et al at LBL and elsewhere, reported what they saw more recently. Both teams expected some microbial degradation all along. Both were surprised there is little decline in oxygen in the water. The first thought it was because few bugs were eating the oil, the second learned that the biodegradation seems to have gone fast without large oxygen consumption. The papers data don’t contradict, they seem to me quite consistent – the plume was there, a metabolically distinctive microbe got busy, the dispersed oil largely went away. Maybe another paper will contradict both. But many journalists were too fast to peg it as a duel between competing authors, not as narrative chapters of an unfolding, twisting tale. Several reporters did, one must note, handle it as a collegial sequence, not academic combat – such as seen in the Post piece by Brown and Farenthold.
And I am waiting to hear from Science’s eds why they did not, or perhaps could not, have run the papers the same week and arranged the authors to jointly take news agencies’ questions.
By the way, for the record, I did no heroic one-day digging to learn that BP paid for Hazen’s et al grants and lab space. I already knew the money trail – I live in Berkeley, that arrangement was common knowledge around here. I’d already in the tracker and by other means beat the drums, largely in vain, for somebody to make more of the spectacle of a BP-funded research institute, established on Steve Chu’s watch as LBL director a few years ago, suddenly hard at work on the ramifications of its benefactor’s screw up. This is not like a big pharma company’s studies that tend to show how good the company’s drugs are. It is however an arrestingly sweet and compelling twist in this news.
August 27th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Charlie–CJR covered the oil spill papers in its Observatory blog and has comments from both Ginger Pinholster and Brooks Hanson about the timing of the papers. In short, the decision to publish the 1st paper was made before the 2nd paper was back from review and accepted–Science often has little control over how long that process takes so the editors didn’t have the easy decision of, wait a week on the first paper.
August 27th, 2010 at 9:34 am
Charlie, I spoke with Hazen and Camilli on Monday and both said that their studies were not at all opposed to each other. (Camilli also said Hazen’s newer plume findings were not terribly surprising.) They had spoken several times, in fact, about just that, including Monday, when Hazen let Camilli know that he was going to announce his team’s inability to detect the plume. I suspect where they diverge is their hypotheses on the ratio of oil that has been degraded vs. diluted, but that will eventually come out with the mass accounting.
August 27th, 2010 at 9:46 am
Boyce, you may have been the first person other than my mom to visit my personal site. I do have some reservations about graphical displays of ppm measures. You would somehow need a system that also reflected relative toxicity; plenty of stuff seems to be fairly nasty at even low parts per billion, even if crude doesn’t fall in that group.
While I am a fan of the Living Stories concept, I do have doubts whether science is best arena to pioneer it. Stories like the gulf spill are few and far between, and while I suppose you could fine a decent coterie of big subjects for L.S. coverage — the LHC, the latest from Kepler, etc. — science in general is so heterogeneous that I wonder whether there are better areas where this should start.
I do have an idea on that, though. Greenwire is far from a science pub; we’re more about policy and politics. And beyond the obvious topics, like Midterms 2010, DC’s regulatory apparatus, which provides the frame for many of our more popular stories, could be perfect for Living Stories: I’m thinking about all the incremental news on EPA’s move to regulate GHG emissions — what a L.S. that would be by now! — or the conductivity gauges they’re using to clamp down on mountaintop removal mining.
Despite being online-only, we’re not the most bleeding-edge organization when it comes to technology, but this something I may pitch exploring. Thanks for the encouragement.
By the way, ProPublica and the Spokesman Review also have L.S.-type elements on their sites, though I don’t think anyone has nailed the format yet.
August 27th, 2010 at 10:08 am
Re: Living stories: Thanks for sharing that and especially the WP plugin! On the topic of IP and sharing — I’m pretty sure that, like the new Poligraft services, which spits back story text annotated with the political money trail of mentioned parties, a nonprofit Living Story maker would be covered under fair use. But I’d ask there to be prominent language asking visitors to click on links to each original story, even if they just shut the new window a second later; pageviews are the metric of success.
Re: Publication timing: So on the one hand we’re being told, “figuring out what happened to the Gulf oil is a slow process; relax, hold your horses, wait for the data, this takes time, no hurry.” But wait — this is all so fast-paced and crazy, we just couldn’t wait!
Re: Conflict or not, this seems to be one of those cases where conflict means something different in a scientific than everyday context. I.e., the findings are not mutually exclusive, the lead researchers are not going to rumble in the parking lot after the high school dance.
But, Camilli et al: “This suggests that if the hydrocarbons are indeed susceptible to biodegradation, then it may require *many months* before microbes significantly attenuate the hydrocarbon plume to the point that oxygen minimum zones develop that are intense enough to threaten Gulf fisheries.” Hazen: “Despite the varying field and microcosm conditions, the oil *half-lives are 1.2 – 6.1 days.* The field half-lives should in part reflect the effect of mixing and dilution, but the similarity of the rate of disappearance of alkanes in the plume to the rates observed in the laboratory suggest it is possible that the actual degradation of alkanes lies within this range.”
“Many months” and “half-lives are 1.2-6.1 days” are not the same thing.
What I’d like to know now is … what is the oil degrading into? I’m completely guilty of waving my hands and saying “oil degradation” as if it were a final step, and not a stage in the transformation of the many compounds in oil.
August 27th, 2010 at 10:42 am
Brandon does raise in his comment a good point — maybe we shouldn’t be writing about “oil” is such a general sense at all. Hazen was looking at alkanes, which tend to degrade faster and constitute the largest portion of the oil, while Camilli was looking at aromatic hydrocarbons, if I remember right, which degrade more slowly thanks to their ring structure — though they do degrade — and have the nastier stuff like benzene.
I may be wrong, but from my understanding the Alcanivorax-type bacteria use alkanes et al for energy — catabolism? — and carbon. The end result is a lot more reproduction going on; a lot more bugs. Also some CO2 and water, but maybe there’s other waste, too… not certain.
The best available review I’ve found of Alcanivorax-type bugs is below, though it’s a little outdated:
http://hzi.openrepository.com/hzi/bitstream/10033/19793/1/Yakimov%20et%20al_final.pdf
August 28th, 2010 at 9:27 am
Environmental debates–science or policy, and especially entanglements of both–would be good to put into the Living Stories format, but I am thinking it could work for other kinds of running stories in all of science and medicine as well.
Obviously, Greenwire should not be the home for this. I’m thinking some journalistic outfit that stands apart from any one news organization but is dedicated to the best principles of journalism should do it. Like, say, the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships.
That’s why I was wondering about the ability of many different news organizations contributing copies of their output to a Knight Living Stories Center. I differ with Paul in that I *do* think science, sensu lato, could be a good subject.
I’m going to ask Diane Finch, Knight Fellowship’s new media person, if she thinks her program could be the home of such a thing.
August 30th, 2010 at 11:46 am
A Knight Living Stories Center does sound like a great idea, Boyce. I would certainly push Greenwire to send all of our science reporting, even the stuff currently stashed behind the paywall, out to such a site. And I’d be willing to contribute some off-work time to the effort.