Writers: Don’t Be Afraid to Ask Dumb Questions
Many moons ago, covering what would be the first of many American Astronomical Society meetings for Space.com, I sat in a press conference with perhaps two dozen other reporters, covering some new finding or other. I’d been reporting on space and science full-time for only a year or two, and had reasonable confidence in my abilities, but it was my first live press conference, and some scientist was tossing out jargon like Frisbees that soared right over my head. I wanted to pull out a trick I used in phone interviews, and ask the scientist to back up, start over, and briefly explain their finding as if they were talking to my grandmother. Anyway, as the newbie, I was reluctant to look dumb in front of all those other seasoned reporters.A few seats ahead of me sat John Noble Wilford, the eminent Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times. I revered him as the best science journalist and explainer of things ever. Last thing I wanted to do was embarrass myself in front of him! The Frisbees continued flying, zingers that weren’t going to make it into my story because I just didn’t understand what the frick they were talking about. I was worried I’d leave the press conference with an empty Word document and have to write the story from the press release, which was at least partly in English (for a reporter at a live press conference, that technique has a name: lame).
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