Anna E. Lavoie Memorial Lecture — Brianna Abbott ’17 and Mallary Tenore ’07

If you missed this year’s Anna E. Levoie Memorial Lecture, catch up on the Providence College Podcast. Hear Brianna Abbott ’17 and Mallary Tenore ’07 discuss science and health communication in the era of COVID-19. Abbott, who majored in chemistry and creative writing, is a health reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Tenore majored in English and Spanish at PC and teaches journalism at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication.

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Creators & Guests

Producer

Chris Judge

Multimedia and Live Event Producer

What is Providence College Podcast?

The Providence College Podcast features interviews with interesting members of the Friar Family. These in-depth conversations with PC students, Dominicans, faculty, staff, and alumni provide a rich look into the lives of noteworthy Friars. Occasionally we will also bring you on-campus lectures and presentations. Go Friars!

00;00;00;22 - 00;00;28;07
Speaker 1
Hello and welcome to the Providence College Podcast. I'm Liz Kay. If you missed this year's Anna e Lavoy Memorial lecture, you're in luck. Listen now, as alums Brianna Abbott and Mallory Tanner discuss science and health communication in the era of COVID 19. Abbott majored in chemistry and creative writing, is a health reporter for the Wall Street Journal. After graduating in 2017, she earned a master's degree in journalism with a concentration in science, health and environmental reporting at New York University.

00;00;28;26 - 00;00;52;08
Speaker 1
Mallory Tanner majored in English and Spanish at PC and graduated in 2007. She teaches journalism at the University of Texas at Austin's Moody College of Communication. She has a master's degree in nonfiction writing from Goucher College in Maryland and is the author of the soon to be released book titled Slip Recovery, Sickness and the Space in Between, which exports the Complexities of Eating Disorders and Recovery.

00;00;53;26 - 00;01;19;02
Speaker 2
Great. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here and very happy to have this opportunity to come back to campus. It's been over ten years since I've been back. So, so much has changed and I'm just really delighted to be here. And so happy that there is this new communications empire. So I think my slides should be coming out momentarily and.

00;01;19;02 - 00;01;45;15
Speaker 2
Oh, yes. Okay, perfect. All right. So as was mentioned, I'm a proud Cliffie graduate for education 27. And I currently work at a university in Texas at Austin, where I work in a Moody College of Communications primarily, and also in the McCombs is a school. So I teach mostly writing in a journalistic sense, and also teach writing to accountants for learning how to write well and clearly and concisely.

00;01;45;26 - 00;02;08;25
Speaker 2
And also associate director of the Nice Center for Journalism in the Americas, UT-Austin, which I'll talk about in a little bit. So during today's talk and later explain how we moved from history to city, from Bill Fryer's to Fargo Sportsnet. And so I'll talk a little bit about that transition. And in the second part. ALSOP More specifically about my work during COVID 19.

00;02;10;14 - 00;02;27;27
Speaker 2
So I just want to take you back in time a little bit. I started off in journalism when I was a junior in high school, when I had an internship at a very small weekly newspaper called Palestine Tab, which is my hometown newspaper. And while I was there, there was a reporter who really took me under her wing.

00;02;27;27 - 00;02;49;04
Speaker 2
Her name was Theresa Ito, and she was a PC graduate. And so she had told me about PC. She really encouraged me to apply. And I decided to actually carry for it. I applied and fell in love with the campus. And while I was at PC Year, I think it was my second day on campus, I very promptly went to the Powell office and showed them I'm there full.

00;02;49;04 - 00;02;49;22
Speaker 3
Of newspaper.

00;02;49;22 - 00;03;11;10
Speaker 2
Articles from the Halston tab and said, Can I join the Cabal? And fortunately, they brought me on board and as a reporter. And then by senior year I was editor in chief of the newspaper. So it was a really great experience to be able to get practical hands on experience of writing stories and editing stories. And I really loved my time at the Cowles.

00;03;11;10 - 00;03;32;10
Speaker 2
So it's a great place to continue to sort of corner sales and develop new ones. And there are lots of influential alums who I met along the way. One was Don Sequin, who graduated from PC in 1945. He is the co-founder of USA Today and I had a fellowship and his name at UC or ATC or out there.

00;03;32;10 - 00;03;51;03
Speaker 2
I'm going to confuse my opinions there. And APC. And he it was really someone who helps me to figure out sort of what I wanted to do with my career. He was really instrumental in helping sort of minority students to get into the field of journalism, and so I really admired his efforts and considered him a great mentor.

00;03;51;08 - 00;04;12;00
Speaker 2
He passed away a few years ago, but then my other great mentors were Peter Clarke. He's often referred to as the godfather of good writing, and he just happens to be the godfather of my daughter. Madeline, His dictionary that he's working on this 20th book now on Rite Aid, which comes out next month. So he's just a great resource and mentor.

00;04;12;05 - 00;04;29;11
Speaker 2
And I remember sitting in my dorm and Saint Thomas Aquinas sophomore year, and I was just starting to Google journalism and PC grads and trying to find some graduates who had gone off to do journalism. And his name popped up and I saw him was going to be at a writers conference in Connecticut that I was also planning to go to.

00;04;29;19 - 00;04;52;19
Speaker 2
And so I just emailed him on a van and told him I would be at the conference to see if he would be willing to meet with me. He said yes and encouraged me to apply for this six week fellowship at the Poynter Institute because I was getting ready to graduate and so I applied board internship and ended up getting an edge and a six week fellowship turned into a six year long job at the Poynter Institute.

00;04;53;02 - 00;05;18;18
Speaker 2
If you're not following Poynter, it's a great resource for people in communications and and specifically a journalism think tank where professional communicators go to the Poynter Institute in Florida to learn all about journalism, ethics and reporting and storytelling and leadership and management in newsrooms. And so I learned so much while I was there. I taught journalists how to use social media as a reporting and editing tool.

00;05;18;18 - 00;05;42;10
Speaker 2
I was while I was there because it was very much sort of nascent at the time. Twitter had just come out. All these different social media sites were beginning to pop up and journalists were trying to figure out how do we use these for our storytelling. So I did that and then was also managing editor of Poynter Nord, which is a site that publishes news and information about the media industry, as well as best practices for journalists.

00;05;42;16 - 00;05;50;13
Speaker 2
So it was there for a little while and continue to do some teaching for the institutes and.

00;05;52;00 - 00;05;52;18
Speaker 3
Into like like.

00;05;52;18 - 00;06;05;02
Speaker 2
The side of the military. I don't know if it's loft or what. And I always keep talking in the interest of time. So they were working on I.

00;06;05;28 - 00;06;06;10
Speaker 1
Would put.

00;06;09;05 - 00;06;32;04
Speaker 2
Area we go so avid voyeur. I had both working for this very small nonprofit. It was called images and voices of help for I've over shorts. And while I was there, I really helped to develop this storytelling genre that we called restorative narrative, which is looking at stories that tell stories about communities that are rebuilding in the aftermath of trauma and tragedy.

00;06;32;09 - 00;06;58;05
Speaker 2
So really looking at how do people move on and find resilience in the aftermath of despair. And they're not stories that are all sort of, you know, everything's great. Let's be hopeful about everything. But they're really stories that are honing in on the resilience as opposed to only covering trauma and tragedy and problems, and did a lot of work there around solutions, journalism, helping journalists to tell more stories of solutions instead of only focusing on problems.

00;06;58;17 - 00;07;21;22
Speaker 2
And so while I was there, I did start to think about, you know, how this would relate to stories on health, that communication. And I ended up playing a bigger factor in my work years after the fact. But in a lot of work there and as executive director, I there's so many different cells beyond journalism. So while I still had a foot in journalism, I was also learning about event planning and fundraising and program management.

00;07;22;09 - 00;07;53;19
Speaker 2
So that was really helpful in terms of just building those skill sets. And then some reason this investigator added so that while I was at images and Voices of Hope, I had my first child, my daughter Madeline. This year, she's seven. Later had my son top of his five. But my children have really helped me to think about this idea of living life in the form of the question, always cultivating that curiosity, which I think is really important when you're in the field of communications.

00;07;53;29 - 00;08;12;11
Speaker 2
And at this point in my career, I was really beginning to think about what do I want to do? Where do I want to go from here? I always knew I wanted to be in journalism, but I felt like I wanted to be doing something in a slightly different. And so I thought about my career up to that point and how it had really been largely at the intersection of journalism and training.

00;08;12;18 - 00;08;31;04
Speaker 2
So I decided I wanted to go into academia and at the time my husband and I had just moved from St Petersburg, Florida, to Austin, Texas, and so I connected with some people at UT Austin, got a job there through my connections at Poynter. So connections are always helpful. Everybody got me the job at Feulner and then.

00;08;31;12 - 00;08;31;19
Speaker 3
They would.

00;08;31;19 - 00;08;55;29
Speaker 2
From Friday and on the at the job that you'd see and and while I was at UC and end up coming on board as the associate director of the Knight Center for Journalism, which is a training and outreach program for journalists in Latin America, but also globally. So we offer free journalism events and training opportunities, and we have a trilingual digital newsmagazine geared toward covering freedom of the press issues in Latin America.

00;08;56;11 - 00;09;18;00
Speaker 2
And so I've very lots of different hats there to many different things. It's a relatively small organization that does a whole lot effort. But it was while I was there that I really kind of foster this love for teaching and ended up becoming part time faculty in the school of journalism. And as you can see here, this is a picture of me and some of my students, and it's easy to write.

00;09;18;00 - 00;09;44;09
Speaker 2
So in 2020, after I'd been at the Knight Center for about three years, the pandemic, of course, hit. And that really pivoted a lot of the work I was doing and changed a lot of my focus of the Knight Center in particular. And when Cognizant struck, we realized we really need to do something to help journalists and communicators figure out how to cover this global story that is constantly evolving and ever changing.

00;09;44;23 - 00;10;14;17
Speaker 2
And so at the Knight Center, we had these massive open online courses, which we call MOOCs as they're free courses that we offer to journalists and different languages. And we put this one together quite quickly in May of 2020. And we brought on board a science journalist named Mary McKenna to teach this, where we course in which we are really helping journalists to figure out what is the pandemic, who are some of the sources they could turn to, how can they sit through misinformation, Asian and not spread it?

00;10;14;25 - 00;10;36;29
Speaker 2
And how can they look for these reliable sources? How can they figure out what different communities are needing at any given point in time in terms of the news coverage that they're looking for? And so we created this new book, which was really quite influential. We partnered with the World Health Organization and the United Nations Development Program and UNESCO's to put this together.

00;10;37;14 - 00;11;02;07
Speaker 2
And it ended up reaching over 9000 students from 162 countries. And when I see students endlessly need professional working communicators, as it had a huge global reach. And what was great about that course is we also had this discussion forums which created these peer to peer learning communities where journalists that come together and talk about all the different challenges that they were facing and seek guidance from each other and also from the courses dropped there.

00;11;02;26 - 00;11;20;10
Speaker 2
And so then about a year later, April 2021, we held a second MOOCs, which was specifically focused on the vaccines, because we knew that that was a real critical need to offer journalists training in this area. And so we put together a second NUC with mostly the same party.

00;11;20;10 - 00;11;21;00
Speaker 3
Partners.

00;11;21;00 - 00;11;46;15
Speaker 2
In Estonia also, and with the European Union. And this one attracted 4400 students from 160 countries, which shows that there was a real need for training for quite around vaccine coverage. So we looked at inequities in terms of distribution with vaccines. We looked at the different types of misinformation coming or coming out around the vaccines and how not to continue perpetuating that.

00;11;47;00 - 00;12;05;24
Speaker 2
We looked at how do you fact check stories about the vaccine? How do you localize stories about it? And so it was really instrumental to be able to have this training opportunity for journalists. And I was sort of the one behind the scenes, you know, putting all these together, working with the funders, working with the instructors, helping them to all come to fruition.

00;12;06;11 - 00;12;35;03
Speaker 2
And in addition to the mix, we also had on trip webinars that we held to just offer some quicker training. It's a bit of a time investment to take part in a course that takes place over four weeks. So we offer these webinars which were typically about 90 minutes to 3 hours long, and we brought in subject matter experts, not only journalists, but also medical doctors, epidemiologists, others who could really help journalists to understand the fuller scope of the pandemic.

00;12;35;14 - 00;13;15;04
Speaker 2
And so collectively, these webinars had a great reach. We also partnered with an MIT News Tonight Center, our night journalism program. And so they have a really great science communication program, and we worked with them on these webinars and they were translated into 13 different languages. So we tried to make them as accessible as possible, knowing that this was an unprecedented global story and in doing all of this training, I helped put together this COVID 19 hub that essentially we got some funding to put together this hub, which is a collection of all these different resources that we have been putting out since the pandemic started.

00;13;15;10 - 00;13;40;11
Speaker 2
And we're continuing to try to update it, knowing that even though hopefully the worst of the pandemic has passed, it's still not gone, and that there needs to be evolving coverage of it. And as this was all transpiring, I was also getting my MFA in nonfiction writing from Nature College. It was an online program. It was supposedly low residency, but it was no residency because of the pandemic.

00;13;41;11 - 00;14;01;21
Speaker 2
I got my MFA because journalism is one of those weird professions where you actually don't really need a master's, but it's great to have one. And that was even true as a part time faculty member at U.T.. It wasn't required, but I knew I wanted to continue working in academia as I wanted my terminal degree. I also knew I wanted to write a book which was a lifelong dream of mine.

00;14;01;25 - 00;14;21;28
Speaker 2
And so with this program, I was able to sort of work on a thesis that laid the foundation for what would become this book that I'm now working on. And the book is about my own experiences with anorexia, which I suffered from when I was an adolescent. And it looks at the ongoing ness of recovery and the nuances of recovery from the disorder.

00;14;22;08 - 00;14;42;08
Speaker 2
And so while I was in the program, I was working on this book as of happened to get COVID before the vaccine had come out, and this is in September of 2020. And at the time I lost my taste and smell. Right. So that was quite challenging. As someone who had suffered with anorexia pretty acutely as an adolescent.

00;14;42;18 - 00;15;03;05
Speaker 2
And I found that as I lost my taste, I was triggered in some ways and that I, I didn't have a desire to eat. I found myself restricting food intake. And I said as that to be something to that. As I was looking online, trying to see if they were stories about this. And there really wasn't. And after six weeks, once I got my teeth back, I bounced back and I was okay.

00;15;03;05 - 00;15;26;25
Speaker 2
But I said, there has to be someone writing about this. So I pitched a piece to the New York Times about it and ended up getting published. And this was happening around the same time that news organizations were starting to cover eating disorders more, affording one study. There was a 38% increase in eating disorder symptoms during COVID and a 48% increase in hospitalizations duty in disorders.

00;15;27;02 - 00;16;05;27
Speaker 2
So journalists, I think, were really beginning to realize that this was a huge story and as well as just mental health issues in general during the pandemic. So I saw this as an opportunity to start writing more about eating disorders and to really help these and I journalistic skills to inform people during the pandemic. So I wrote a piece recently about what media coverage get wrong when they cover eating disorders and have also written a series of other personal essays, or The Washington Post, Tampa Bay Times, Dallas Morning News just really trying to help people to understand the complexities of eating disorders, which can be a bit knickknack for people who haven't experienced them or

00;16;05;27 - 00;16;30;29
Speaker 2
knows somebody who's experienced them. And all this is happening. I've been working on the book and, you know, writing these essays, and I ended up creating this international survey as part of my reporting for the book. And it got about 600 responses from people in 43 countries. And one thing I was struck by is just the number of people who said that COVID 19 was a contributing factor to their eating disorder.

00;16;31;17 - 00;16;34;04
Speaker 2
So some people said it either contributed to their.

00;16;34;04 - 00;16;34;23
Speaker 3
Disorder.

00;16;34;23 - 00;16;57;12
Speaker 2
Or it caused them to relapse or rise. And this is just a couple of snippets of quotes from the survey. But I found this to be really important, and it really motivated me to want to continue writing and telling stories about eating disorders, particularly at this moment in time when there is more attention put on mental health, largely because of the pandemic and its effects on people.

00;16;58;07 - 00;17;19;02
Speaker 2
And so then working on the book, as I mentioned, is then a lifelong dream for quite some time. It's found through different iterations. I wrote a first draft of it after graduating from PC, which I have since discarded, but it still was helpful in terms of just thinking about the book. And while I was in grad school, I got a literary agent and I've been working with her.

00;17;19;02 - 00;17;39;18
Speaker 2
I had created my proposal, which I never do. Book proposals are like 85 page document, and I worked my book proposal with the help of my agent, started sending it out to different publishers. It was about a year and a half long process with many, many rejections. And I mentioned that because there will be times where you're going to get lots of rejections that just stick with it.

00;17;40;08 - 00;18;05;25
Speaker 2
I persevered and ended up finally getting a book deal from Simon and Schuster. The year that imprints Simon element so that the lockdown in December and actually that's just announced last week and happy to be able to share it with you all here today and the book industry it takes a while for these things to get published, as I have about a year and a half left to write the book, and then it'll probably be out in 2025.

00;18;06;16 - 00;18;26;17
Speaker 2
But just really it's helped me to think a lot about the importance of journalism and communication during COVID 19. And so I think that this work that we do is really noble and importance, and I'm really happy to be able to talk more about it during the Q&A portion of the session. So thank you so much.

00;18;27;10 - 00;18;32;23
Speaker 4
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

00;18;32;23 - 00;19;01;08
Speaker 3
Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm honored to be here with Mallory at the AMA Elevating Memorial Lecture as doctor over, please. And my name is Brianna Abbott and I'm a health and science reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and I'm also a Providence College graduate from 2017. And I wanted to start off my presentation with this picture, which I took in March of 2021 after I returned to the newsroom at the Wall Street Journal offices in Manhattan.

00;19;01;08 - 00;19;24;08
Speaker 3
After being away for about a year after the pandemic forced all of us to work remotely. And I was coming back to clear out my desk because we were switching to a hybrid model so no one's desk was anyone's own anymore. So you had to come in and get all your stuff. And so I walked into this newsroom covered in dust and sitting at my desk was the yellowing staff of newspapers.

00;19;24;18 - 00;19;47;06
Speaker 3
And on top of the newspapers was an article that I had written about this pandemic that was just declared a public health emergency. And I thought it was very eerie and apocalyptic at the time. So I took a photo and now I am presenting this photo to all of you. And so before we get into all of that, I'd love to start with a bit of my background.

00;19;47;20 - 00;20;06;28
Speaker 3
So when I came to PC as a freshman in 2013, I did not want to be a journalist. It was not on my radar. I wanted to write novels and I came in sort of declared as an English major. But I'd also always loved science and had taken AP chemistry in high school, and it was one of my favorite classes.

00;20;07;09 - 00;20;28;19
Speaker 3
So I lobbied to join the chemistry majors Intro to Chemistry Class as an English major in case that was something that I also wanted to pursue, and I figured at the very least it would help me fulfill my science requirements. And so I eventually just kept taking classes on both tracks and figured eventually I would choose over either English or chemistry.

00;20;28;19 - 00;20;48;12
Speaker 3
I would have to be one. And I was never fully able to enjoy and enough double majoring in both. And I split my time between the cattle office. Like Mallory, I was the editor of the Opinion Section and the old Alumni Building where I did analytical chemistry research with Dr. Breen. I am also very jealous of this new building.

00;20;48;12 - 00;21;14;26
Speaker 3
By the way, this is a useful but frequently, if you've never been in the old Al mag, you are lucky you did so coming to the Anyway I met PC. I still wait. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I thought about getting my end as I had writing novels. I thought about getting ap t and doing research and then with some help from Dr. Eberly, I sort of realized that writing about science was a job that you could actually have.

00;21;15;05 - 00;21;33;19
Speaker 3
And I thought, Oh, great, that that seems like the job for me. And so after that, I went to NYU for Graduate School of Journalism. We didn't have a communications writer at P.S. at the time, and I felt like I really needed to sort of of my journalism skills if I wanted to do it professionally. And so I did.

00;21;33;19 - 00;21;56;00
Speaker 3
PS Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program at NYU and so it's Science journalism podcast, and there are programs like this across the country sort of hidden within our journalism departments. And so I did that for about a year and a house, and it taught me basic journalism skills. And I took classes like medical reporting, environmental reporting and data journalism.

00;21;56;16 - 00;22;20;01
Speaker 3
And I was also required to do interviews. And so I ended up writing about autism for researchers and families. I spent a summer at Scholastic where I wrote about math for kids, and I also had a three month stint at Nature Medicine. And so after that, I graduated and I landed internship at the Wall Street Journal, and I've been there ever since.

00;22;20;10 - 00;22;53;06
Speaker 3
And that was sort of the beginning of 2019. And so what do you actually do as a science journalist? So I associate was it is my job to keep on top of the news and trends in whatever field that are covering, whether it's cancer or infectious diseases have a thing like that. So I often start by reading advance copies of scientific papers that are set to come out in places like German, New England Journal of Medicine to see if there's anything that might be interesting to a general audience.

00;22;53;12 - 00;23;17;17
Speaker 3
I also attend press conferences and, you know, get reports from companies and universities and things like that. And then what I do is I also spend a lot of time talking to researchers and doctors in the region and say, you know, everything that I've learned, I figure out what's new and interesting, and then I explain it in a way that's sort of accessible and shows why to why it's important.

00;23;17;26 - 00;23;36;07
Speaker 3
And so sometimes I writing about parts and studies that have to do with them. Sometimes I writing about measles, sometimes we get a press release from the New York State Department of Health saying that there was a polio case in New York for the first time in ten years, and you have to drop everything that you were doing and get some rehab within an hour.

00;23;36;16 - 00;23;57;15
Speaker 3
So what I do really depends on the day. We're usually juggling a couple of different stories at once. And Sundays is all writing and some days is just researching and talking to sources. And so while if it was a journal, like I said, I started as an intern, I started, you know, covering measles outbreaks, writing sort of one off pieces.

00;23;57;15 - 00;24;23;04
Speaker 3
When the vaping related illnesses started happening in the summer of 2019, I was put on that as wanted to leave reporters, in part because our veteran public health reporter was out of the country at the time. So it fell to me and I did that for a couple of months and we sort of eventually realized that that was due to vitamin E and unregulated THC products, even though a lot of the attention was still on jewel and flavors.

00;24;23;04 - 00;24;42;22
Speaker 3
And so like the evidence was going in a different direction of the conversation. And as a science journalist, you have to sort of take all of that together and sort of accurately explain what's going on. And then after that, that sort of watered down and I got put on a new story, and that was an emerging respiratory virus that was spreading in Wuhan, China.

00;24;43;12 - 00;25;02;21
Speaker 3
The first time I wrote about it, it was January of 2020, and I had then a full time reporter in a newsroom for less than a year at that point. And soon I was starting to get questions from friends at restaurants and opinions about this and serious virus that was, you know, spreading on the other side of the world.

00;25;03;02 - 00;25;22;09
Speaker 3
But it became pretty apparent that it was spreading here, too, and that we didn't quite know where it was. And so I went to sample this article here, which happened on a day where we were all the CDC press corps, and they told us that the the COVID test that they were sending out to the state health departments wasn't working for some reason.

00;25;22;09 - 00;25;50;17
Speaker 3
And one of the reagents wasn't behaving consistently. So they had to remake it and, you know, send it back out to the labs. And it's actually surprisingly difficult to describe what a reagent is to someone who has never been in a lab before. It took a really long time. We came up with the word chemical substance, which felt very weird as a chemist, but part of the job is really seeking things or concepts that are like cement hand.

00;25;50;17 - 00;26;12;21
Speaker 3
You don't even think about it to a scientist and then explain what it is to everybody else so it doesn't have to be perfect as long as it gets the point across in its art raw then something else that help around the sun too is I started doing more reporting on COVID testing and this is where I, as background was really an advantage because I already knew what a PCR regime was.

00;26;12;21 - 00;26;28;22
Speaker 3
I had used one before in a lab, and when they said that, you know, in some of the negative controls on the test, they were starting to get a small positive signal. I knew what that meant, sort of without them having to walk me through it. I so asked them to walk me through it so I could sort of explain it to people.

00;26;28;29 - 00;26;56;24
Speaker 3
But the fact that I sort of had that background knowledge going in sort of helped me build trust with these sources as someone who could sort of get the science right, which was sort of incredibly important to them and to us. And so and people kept having questions about the science and things just escalated very quickly. And people had a lot of questions and we did not have a lot of answers, but we had to respond quickly and get the best information out there that we could.

00;26;57;04 - 00;27;20;18
Speaker 3
And a lot of that also happened within our own newsroom because a lot more people were put on the story that didn't necessarily know anything about science. And so part of my job, too, was reading other stories or helping other reporters with the science parts of it. When we had sent around a memo to the entire newsroom explaining the difference between SARS-CoV-2, the virus, and COVID 19, the disease, and what that meant.

00;27;20;28 - 00;27;47;23
Speaker 3
And we were also, you know, reading different studies that other reporters were sending out saying, hey, is this interesting? Is this important? Should we cover it? And we were sort of, you know, the team that was making a lot of those calls. And another thing that I had to do was start writing about the government and the CDC itself and sort of holding them accountable when they got something wrong or if the guidelines didn't make sense with what we knew about how the virus is spreading.

00;27;48;04 - 00;28;07;16
Speaker 3
And that was pretty new for me, just because when I was covering measles or vaping the CDC word was pretty much law and like you didn't question them or sort of need to quash it. But now, you know, we were in a new era where I had to learn how to explain how and why the CDC was making these decisions and whether or not outside scientists agreed with them.

00;28;07;16 - 00;28;35;17
Speaker 3
And so that was definitely a new concept for me. And, you know, at the same time that this was happening, I, like a lot of people left in New York in March of 2020 to go back to my parents house. And so I was doing a lot of this accountability journalism from before of my childhood bedroom village, so veritable the light passes into the wall and it moved my zoom screen over So like a background look at professionals, I mean, so it was it was a weird time.

00;28;35;23 - 00;28;59;13
Speaker 3
And then when we came back to New York to at a certain point, I was going back in more than like quarantining in between for two weeks. I was also in a cramped New York City apartment with three other journalists sort of reporting out this story. But where my friends and there wasn't a lot to do. And so, you know, we would do these like late night yoga sessions to detach and try and calm down.

00;28;59;13 - 00;29;26;21
Speaker 3
And as soon as it was over, I would run to my phone to make sure I didn't miss any news or email from my editor because the job was really whole time like four months writing multiple stories a day to sort of trying to keep up with the incessant pace of the news. And then, you know, things after the vaccine got here and we covered that rollout in some of the data, it really started to improve and things were changing.

00;29;26;21 - 00;29;47;25
Speaker 3
And unfortunately, the virus was also changing. And that's when you started to see a lot of these areas of advance come around. And that was its own challenge because all art and science that we had painstakingly learned over the past year didn't always necessarily apply to the new variant that we had, sort of re-ask all of these basic questions all over again.

00;29;48;04 - 00;30;06;16
Speaker 3
And any time a new variant emerge or other triggers would be like, are the symptoms new? Is it more severe than before? And we would have to say we've had this thing for like a week and we had no idea. The science unfortunately doesn't move that quickly where you were just going to immediately get an answer. But it's going as fast as it can.

00;30;06;28 - 00;30;40;23
Speaker 3
So a lot of that is just bridging the gap between researchers and people who don't necessarily understand the the piece of how science normally plunges. And so we kept reporting and we kept writing. And something else that we really focused on, too, was the human impact of the pandemic, which was really the most important thing. And so a lot of that work involves, you know, talking to families whose loved ones had passed away from COVID or people who still had debilitating lingering symptoms on.

00;30;40;25 - 00;31;03;24
Speaker 3
Later, I talked to principals who are trying to, you know, keep kids in their classroom, but also keep them healthy and, you know, people who were just doctors and nurses were witnessing all of this inside of an ICU. And that work was probably the most draining, but it was also the most important out of everything that we were doing.

00;31;04;04 - 00;31;29;20
Speaker 3
And we've, you know, started reporting on some of the off of that list, like four things on mental health and learning loss and all of that sort of became part of the COVID story as well that we had to cover. And, you know, like I said, the situation is a lot better now. I went from writing three or four stories a week or sometimes a day to three or four stories a month, and now I'm able to write about, you know, other things.

00;31;30;00 - 00;31;52;08
Speaker 3
But my coworkers there and I wrote this story about a week ago on the third anniversary of the World Health Organization, saying that this was a pandemic. And we sort of talk for a bunch of researchers about the unknown question that we still have, because while things are a lot better, COVID is still a new virus and the story is changing, but it's not over.

00;31;52;16 - 00;32;19;20
Speaker 3
And so it's something that we're still working on as the story and the science continue. I thank everyone for having me. And yeah, I think now we're going to end by Lauren and Samantha up here as well and do our Q&A. So I'm excited to stop you guys about that morning. How long we are the student panelists for the lecture today.

00;32;19;20 - 00;32;45;07
Speaker 3
So my name is Lauren Peck. I am a senior chemistry major, and my own experience with science and communication involves more on the research side and peers and doing the research that I do in the department with bacteria, Carol, I've presented in the classroom and at national conferences, and this has led me to look for it in my future career.

00;32;45;07 - 00;33;14;12
Speaker 3
And next year I will be attending graduate school to pursue to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry and health. That's my well, the script is still Oh, okay. So my name is Sam and also senior. I'm a biology major and a sociology minor, and I experience in science communication pros for college. I thought I would go to med school and five years ago I realized that is not what I wanted to do.

00;33;14;12 - 00;33;39;11
Speaker 3
So I scrambled and was able to get an internship at a life sciences trade organization called Rhode Island Bio, and it's Bayer. I helped carry out their mission of promoting a life sciences with communication, education and advocacy. Well, it is my first taste of communications with my knowledge of science, and I loved it. So after graduation, I planned on doing a master's in science for life, science and technology.

00;33;39;11 - 00;33;47;18
Speaker 3
And we'll see where that takes me. But that being said, I'll start us off with the first question and it is what advice would you share with.

00;33;47;18 - 00;33;48;20
Speaker 2
Recent graduates.

00;33;48;20 - 00;33;55;04
Speaker 3
Looking to embark in the field of communications?

00;33;55;04 - 00;34;21;24
Speaker 2
I think it's a great question. So I think communications is such a great fields in that it is relevant to so many different disciplines and professions. Every profession and organization needs people who are good communicators. And I think that there's so many different modes of communication that are always evolving, whether we're talking about podcasts or social media or broadcast TV, right?

00;34;21;29 - 00;34;48;21
Speaker 2
But I think that good writing is integral to any sort of communications feel. And so I think being able to really use your writing skills and continue to hone those will be really important for those of you going off into communication. And let's say to you that as you think about your work and communications and go about your values are as a communicator, that's something that we don't necessarily think about when we're first starting out in the field.

00;34;48;21 - 00;35;07;29
Speaker 2
But I think it can be really important. And when I was at a printer institute, I started to really appreciate the values of transparency and that ethics and truth which have continued to be foundational to the work that I do. So really looking at what are these organizations, what do they stand for? Do they align with my values?

00;35;08;16 - 00;35;37;22
Speaker 2
And lastly, there's something I just wanted to mention, which is something I tell my own communications students who are about to graduate and go into the field. And that is something that I like to call the BI CS, which is curiosity, creativity, courage, creative thinking and cultural competency. And those are really important. And that last one, cultural competency is this idea that different communities have to breed experiences with the journalists in particular, but also with communicators in general.

00;35;37;26 - 00;35;57;27
Speaker 2
And so there are some communities, for instance, that maybe feel as though the media only covers them when something bad happens, right? And so part of being a good journalist and a good communicator is being transparent about the type of work that we do, really trying to reach diverse communities and really letting people know, okay, I'm a journalist, right?

00;35;57;27 - 00;36;18;03
Speaker 2
I'm going to interview you for this story, which is about X, Y, Z. Just because I'm interviewing you doesn't mean the whole story's necessarily going to be about you, but your perspective will enrich my understanding of the story, right. And being really transparent about the work that we do as journalists, as communicators, I think can go a long way toward building trust.

00;36;18;12 - 00;36;22;25
Speaker 2
So that's something I would just encourage you to keep in mind as you pursue a career in communications.

00;36;24;00 - 00;36;51;06
Speaker 3
Yeah, that was great. Thank you, Mallory. And I think I would just add that if this is something you're thinking about and like, especially if you're coming from a science background and you're interested in communications, but you might not necessarily have done a lot of it outside of your set curriculum. My best advice is to just like find a place to do it and jump in because it can be a little daunting if you don't have, you know, professional writing samples, which is like what a lot of publications ask for.

00;36;51;06 - 00;37;10;19
Speaker 3
But like there are a lot of different, like internships and fellowships and looking for people with as I sat around to write communications. So I would just like go for it and get your foot in the door and see if you like it. And then like clips, which is just like journalism lingo for like a piece of writing, like you get that.

00;37;10;25 - 00;37;33;13
Speaker 3
So like once you get one, it's easier to get the next one. So you just have to sort of take that leap to get you started and. Q So our next question is if there were any particular faculty or Dominicans or staff who influenced or inspired you for your time here at P.S..

00;37;35;22 - 00;37;54;07
Speaker 2
Yeah, definitely. There were a lot. But one who comes to mind is Richie class. I know he retired a couple of years ago, but he was the advisor of the call, so he was someone who I spent a lot of time talking to when I was trying to figure out how to deal with challenging situations. And he was just a great sounding board.

00;37;54;07 - 00;38;18;12
Speaker 2
So I learned a lot from him. I ran into him at the airport a couple of years ago in New Orleans, of all places. I got to reconnect with him there, too. Kept in touch on and off throughout the years. And so him and then also other Guido. He was also someone who I turn to a lot throughout my years at sea, and he taught me a lot about Providence as a idea that directs everything toward its rightful end.

00;38;18;21 - 00;38;43;00
Speaker 2
And I was thinking about him recently because I was listening to this podcast with the author Elizabeth Gilbert, and she was talking about memoir writing, and she said that basically anyone over the age of 35 or 40 could write a memoir with the same title, which is not what I had planned it. And it made me think of this idea of providence and the fact that God writes straight and crooked lines.

00;38;43;00 - 00;38;49;28
Speaker 2
And life doesn't always happen as planned. And so I keep a lot of his teachings in mind as I go through life.

00;38;51;13 - 00;39;31;11
Speaker 3
Yeah, And I would say I mentioned, you know, two of mine in my presentation and are also in this room, Dr. Brennan, Dr. Overly, and Dr. Brian was my principal investigator, a doctor, overly was my advisor, and I would go to them all the time for, you know, career advice, research, all of that sort of thing. And doctor over they I would swap recommendation sometimes and I remember this story this journalism story related to your doctor brain, actually where I had I was on the council and I was still like writing half editing, and I wrote this like very scathing piece about how, like Alma was very old and like, we were getting a brand

00;39;31;11 - 00;39;50;08
Speaker 3
new business under it. I was very bitter. Oh, that was very old. I think it was a you know, and it was like, Get out, old lady and make like that. And then her I got a call from someone in administration and they like brought me into their office. It was very scary. And they were like, So we're actually designing a new science building.

00;39;50;08 - 00;40;08;10
Speaker 3
And here's Isabella and sure, 12 all of you a doctor and he was a guy you need to like ask people. They think they're right about it. And I was like, You know what? That is good advice and power, but not that after a is this will help Robert but you know vibrant professors also got to stick.

00;40;09;15 - 00;40;09;24
Speaker 1
To.

00;40;11;16 - 00;40;25;01
Speaker 3
Thank you so much for both of those responses. Now we'd like to ask in general, how do you generalists decide when communication is important and how do you make it understandable to a larger society?

00;40;25;01 - 00;40;28;19
Speaker 2
I want to go first since you're really immersed.

00;40;28;19 - 00;40;48;23
Speaker 3
In your SO how did you decide what is important? So first of all, it really depends on your audience. So I'm written for like a range of different publications as an intern and like what you would write for the audience of Spectrum or Scholastic is different than what you would write for the audience of the Wall Street Journal.

00;40;48;23 - 00;41;06;19
Speaker 3
So like, you really have to know who you are trying to communicate to is sort of the first question. There. Later, The Wall Street Journal, for example, we're a like business professional publication, but it's also a general audience. And so we have a lot of people who don't know anything about science, but we also have a lot of doctors.

00;41;07;01 - 00;41;33;28
Speaker 3
And so you have to, you know, be simple enough that anybody can understand it. But then you also have to be right, because you have a lot of doctors reading your work and it's something is a little off. They will email you and tell you. So it's it really does depend. And it also depends on like what is going on in the world, because there was a period of time where we have covered we were covering every piece of news, like every study that came out, every test that got you authorized.

00;41;33;28 - 00;41;57;15
Speaker 3
Like we were writing stories constantly. And now those things are still happening, but we're writing about it a lot less because the the piece of it is not as important anymore. So if in that you can, you know, take a step back and not write everything that comes through. So that's something that you really learned with time. But it's it's really about your audience and it's also about, you know, what's what's going on in the world at the top.

00;41;59;05 - 00;42;19;07
Speaker 2
Yeah, I second that knowing your audience is a really huge part of it. And I think too, in terms of making it more comprehensible and understandable, I think that decoding jargon is really important. And sure, you can attest to, as Brianna, sometimes when you're talking to people who are very immersed in their subject matter expertise, they may see in very jargony terms.

00;42;19;26 - 00;42;45;11
Speaker 2
And this applies to so many different fields, laws, science, police officers, Right. How to talk in jargony terms. So I think decoding that is really important. The chapter that I'm working on right now for my book is about the neurobiology of eating disorders, which is then fascinating to learn about, but it's also about incredibly challenging. Right. And the two most important questions I've had to ask are can you help me explain this and why put that right?

00;42;45;17 - 00;43;05;13
Speaker 2
So never being afraid to ask those questions. If you've done your research, you should have the confidence to go into an interview knowing that it's okay to ask these tough questions and to ask for help understanding something that's complicated. Because if you don't understand it, then you're not going to be able to write about it comedically and about it in a way that other people can understand.

00;43;06;00 - 00;43;26;29
Speaker 2
I will also say that in terms of making something more understandable, it can be really helpful to have people in your stories write the kind of people centered stories, stories that are just all down with tons of data and numbers can be really hard to sift through, and they're ultimately less relatable. So any time that you can include a scientist, right, who's doing really interesting.

00;43;26;29 - 00;43;28;04
Speaker 3
Work or you.

00;43;28;04 - 00;43;41;04
Speaker 2
Can create analogies. Ray anything along those lines can help make the information more palatable is ultimately going to make it easier to understand some.

00;43;41;04 - 00;44;11;22
Speaker 3
Thank you for that advice. So our next question is when the COVID 19 pandemic hit, the media outlets across the world were playing different scientific communication and safety protocols. So as journalists, how do you handle the miscommunication that happens? And how do you tackle content contradicting sources to get the information out to the public in an expedited manner and make scientific or again, understandable?

00;44;11;22 - 00;44;37;13
Speaker 2
Yeah, So really important question for right. I'm thinking of something that John Quinn, who I mentioned in my presentation, had said and he said, get it first at first edit rights, which I think is really important to keep in mind is this idea that ultimately we are truth tellers, we are trying to disseminate information that is correct. And so I think that understanding that is really importance and also owning up to our mistakes.

00;44;37;13 - 00;45;01;01
Speaker 2
So, I mean, the reality is that no matter how hard we try to get the information right, journalists are still going to make mistakes. And I think being transparent and open about that is really important. And a lot of people don't know that most news organizations have a correction section, right, where they post corrections and they're very open about that and then they publish about it so that it doesn't look like they're trying to cover up their mistakes.

00;45;01;08 - 00;45;27;18
Speaker 2
And so I think doing everything we can to get it right is ultimately super important. But also acknowledging when we get it wrong is important as well, and being really transparent about that. And I think too, that there a lot of times, as you mentioned, are contradictory sources and I think that as journalists, we need to do our research and figure out, okay, what is sort of the hard data information that needs to be communicated.

00;45;28;09 - 00;45;55;14
Speaker 2
But sometimes we also need to recognize when there are contrary viewpoints and when there are people who are in disagreement. Right. And being able to communicate that and say they see Joan said this, but since Amicus said that. Right. And being able to sort of show the different sides of the story, I don't believe that as journalists, we can tell all sides of the story because there's an infinite number of sides that any given story and it's never as simple as he said, she said.

00;45;55;29 - 00;46;14;25
Speaker 2
But I think being able to relay different sides of a story and be inclusive when it comes to that is really important. And then also provide the context that we gathered through our reporting and provide that context in the story so that we can really expand people's knowledge and understanding of the topic at hand.

00;46;15;28 - 00;46;36;14
Speaker 3
If only I would I would agree with all of that. And I know that this was that was really hard thing for us at the beginning of the pandemic, down to the very early when it became no longer feasible for me to track the individual COVID cases in Excel sheet, we had to like, figure out which source we were even getting, like our COVID case number overall, we were like, Do we use Johns Hopkins University?

00;46;36;19 - 00;47;03;23
Speaker 3
Do we use the CDC, which is slower? And so we had to have that conversation internally. And then eventually, like, the important thing in that situation was you just like, pick one and then it is really hard. And I really sort of Abu Mallory was saying that like you have to start with with the data and then different folks who are even experts in the field, but something like COVID where the science isn't really in yet, like you're going to have different opinions.

00;47;04;02 - 00;47;32;28
Speaker 3
And so like it's important to talk to a range of people and that sort of discussed the range in opinions for either, you know, what might happen or what is certain They mean that that's still going on even today with things like long COVID. And so it's important to sort of show those sides. But like all these signs, aware that the data sort of supports because there is, you know, not data based opinions and that, you know, end up not panning out.

00;47;32;28 - 00;47;49;08
Speaker 3
And then you have to sort of like leave those behind. But even with, you know, an area where the data could go either way, that's when you have to be really transparent and say, you know, we don't we don't know. It could be a it could be, yeah.

00;47;49;08 - 00;48;16;12
Speaker 2
And it's gray. And as you're talking, it made me think about two things that we did and those myths that I mentioned. And one was this idea of pre gain, right? So turn less are always trying to sort of like debunked disinformation or misinformation. And a part of it was this idea of prevent gain and really anticipating questions or skepticism that people might have said the vaccine and thinking about what are some of the questions people might have, how could we answer those again on the front end of those?

00;48;17;11 - 00;48;41;10
Speaker 2
And the other thing to you was really not and D really nods perpetuating misinformation by sort of restating it. I came across this headline that said, Do you miscarriages or does the vaccine cause miscarriages or Hache? And the article was aimed at trying to sort of debunk this myth, but in doing so is also kind of reiterating the same misinformation.

00;48;41;10 - 00;48;55;15
Speaker 2
And so trying to be really careful about that is sometimes a doing that we can entertain these hypotheses that really kind of reinforce falsehoods that were trying to walk that line could be tricky, but it's something that journalists are always having conversations about.

00;48;56;07 - 00;49;27;19
Speaker 3
Yeah, if you have a headline, that's a question and the answer is no, you should probably pick a different headline that good. So we were rule of the drill that that we use and that sort of the most, you know. So now three years since the start of the pandemic, how do you feel the field of communication, science and journalism has changed specifically regarding the intersection of science and health news and information?

00;49;27;19 - 00;49;59;12
Speaker 2
Yes, I would say one thing is that health and science is is now no longer relegated to the science reporter or the health reporter. Adding size and health are topics that so many journalists are covering now, especially since the pandemic hits. And I think, too, that the field of communications and journalism become a lot more aware of mental health and the fact that the pandemic has had and mental health issues like eating disorders, depression, suicide, anxiety.

00;49;59;17 - 00;50;24;16
Speaker 2
And so I've seen a lot more news organizations pay more attention to those particular topics since the pandemic started, which I think is really important because it does help to reduce some of the stigma around some of these mental health issues. And so I think to a lot of times those stories offer up points of relate ability, and they help us realize that we're not alone, which was really important during the pandemic when we were isolated and were allowed.

00;50;24;23 - 00;50;54;04
Speaker 2
So I think stories and communications can really help to bring people together, and we've seen more of that happen during the pandemic. I would also say to that just since the pandemic, there has been, I think, more attention drawn to news literacy as an idea, trying to help people understand how to understand the news and journalism. Years ago you would read a newspaper and there was a very distinct news section, an opinion section, now that everybody sees up online.

00;50;54;04 - 00;51;21;17
Speaker 2
Right. And so there's less understanding of what is an opinion piece versus once a news piece. And these organizations, since the pandemic started in particular, have really been trying to make more concerted efforts to create very specific labels on news stories and opinion stories, to help people to understand that, okay, this is a commentary piece. This is not a reporter who is just sort of spouting off opinions and trying to receive you trolled.

00;51;21;21 - 00;51;48;00
Speaker 2
Right. Because I've seen so much more of this idea of there being fake news. And so I think really helping people to understand more about the news they're consuming has been, of course, and it's also a put more pressure on journalists for the better, I think, to really be transparent about the type of stories they're telling and labeling them in such a way that people understand, okay, this is opinion, this is news, this is feature, this is sports, whatever it might be.

00;51;49;11 - 00;52;08;10
Speaker 3
No, definitely, there has been such more of an emphasis on science and health reporting going a word like, for instance, sort of before the pandemic, the science and health team was like underneath a corporate umbrella at the Wall Street Journal. And then now we have like we're it's now and had become like our own euro, which is new.

00;52;08;10 - 00;52;26;25
Speaker 3
And that sort of remaining in place we hired a lot more reporters or a team is bigger than what we had earlier. So there's definitely more of an emphasis on science and health communication. And like we said, sort of the stories that we tell on the differentiating between, you know, science and opinion, which is which is very important.

00;52;27;05 - 00;53;03;14
Speaker 3
And yeah, act as if the thank you. So now that Providence College offers a minor in communication, how do you feel this new opportunity can create a path towards journalism easier for current PC graduates? And I think that that's definitely going to be useful. So I love the cowbell. I love my time there. I learned a lot when I was there, but because I was on the opinion section, sort of like we talked about before, I didn't really would get those basic journalism skills while it was there.

00;53;03;14 - 00;53;27;00
Speaker 3
It was mostly to sort of like writing essays, and so I felt like I personally really benefited from graduate school, where I learned a lot of those journalism basics. But so I'm really excited now that Pizzi does have this communications minor feat and start doing that stuff a bit earlier to see, is it something that you might want to do for a career and also sort of have those basic skills to start out with?

00;53;27;00 - 00;53;37;10
Speaker 3
So yeah, I think it definitely, I don't know, as I, I don't know if I would have had Bru in my stable, but I probably would have tried to fit in a couple of hospitals. So definitely really excited about that.

00;53;39;00 - 00;53;56;03
Speaker 2
Yeah, I totally agree. I think that it's so important for PC to have a communications minor and I hope it become the major. I think it's just critical. I really wish that I had had that when I was at PC. A lot of times people ask me, Well, why did she go to a school that didn't have a journalism major?

00;53;56;03 - 00;54;14;27
Speaker 2
If you wanted to be a journalist? And I really loved PC and I also was of the belief that I didn't necessarily need to major in journalism to become a journalist. I really wanted to be able to get a liberal arts education. But having the practical experience of the cowl and then various internships was critical and super importance.

00;54;15;04 - 00;54;36;02
Speaker 2
But I think if I had had that as a student, I would have given me more of a leg up and I would have been even that much more prepared to go into the field of journalism. And I think that being able to use any communications and how this communications minor is really important in terms of learning things like good ethics, learning things about fact checking and copyediting.

00;54;36;02 - 00;55;00;10
Speaker 2
How do you effectively communicate clearly and concisely and all these things that we don't necessarily learn And silver in the field, I think being able to learn those in college is just incredibly important and it's going to really pave the path, I think, for a lot more PC students to go into the field of communications.

00;55;00;10 - 00;55;03;18
Speaker 3
Well, thank you so much, Bella and Mallory, for sharing your.

00;55;03;18 - 00;55;04;16
Speaker 2
Experiences and.

00;55;04;16 - 00;55;22;28
Speaker 3
Giving us so much advice. So I would like to open up Q&A to the audience. We ask that when you answer questions, you speak into the microphones in front of you. There should be a florin in the front and that will turn the light on and it'll be green. Then once you're done asking your question, you've just.

00;55;23;08 - 00;55;24;03
Speaker 2
Hit the grapevine and the.

00;55;24;03 - 00;55;39;25
Speaker 1
Light should go off. Yes. So you folks didn't really talk about your English majors for Merrimack, but the one thing you do well, clearly in college.

00;55;39;25 - 00;56;02;07
Speaker 3
Sorry, after Governor, we will definitely do that. So I that but I also love I love my English major at PC in a creative writing program and something that I was just sort of thinking about is like you encounter a lot of journalists who are really good at reporting and getting information and that sort of thing, and then they have to write a big narrative piece.

00;56;02;07 - 00;56;31;18
Speaker 3
And like the writing skills aren't as strong, right? So like journalism is a lot about telling a story really, really well. And that really hooks the reader. And I did feel like when I went into grad school, I did had not only that science, I the leg up from the creative writing side because, you know, I could write anecdotal leads to stories that focus on characters and that is really sort of white grass people in journalism because the human stories are most important.

00;56;31;18 - 00;56;45;29
Speaker 3
And, you know, and it also just teaches you to sort of read and analyze stories, which is incredibly important and part of our job as well. So I'd say that my creative writing background was just incredibly useful and still is for for what I'm doing now.

00;56;47;19 - 00;57;11;06
Speaker 2
Yes, sorry. Dr. Graber But that now I loved being an English major and Dr. Graber is a professor. And yeah, I think me being an English major seemed like a natural fit, knowing that I wanted to pursue a career that was writing related. And I was also my friend Colin, who graduated with me, was a fellow English major that English and said is a major Excel paper being here.

00;57;12;02 - 00;57;38;27
Speaker 2
But I loved being an English major and I think what I learned in my time as an English major here was that to become a better writer, you need to read, writes and talk about reading and writing and those three things I was able to really do as an English major here. And when I left PC, I really missed that are components that talking about reading and writing because I did so much of that as a student at C and being able to engage in conversations about William.

00;57;38;27 - 00;57;39;28
Speaker 3
Faulkner's prose.

00;57;39;28 - 00;58;13;15
Speaker 2
Or, you know, just all these different writers and thinking about, okay, how can we dissect this? To think about what the writer was trying to do and having those conversations was so informed in terms of expanding my thinking around the written word. And I when I went to get my MFA, I mean everything that I had learned, a PC, it was incredibly helpful in terms of being able to then apply that to my MFA, where we were doing a lot of the same thing, just reading lots of prose and trying to figure out, does this mean write invited the writer, approach it in this way?

00;58;14;06 - 00;58;21;19
Speaker 2
So yes, even though there wasn't a journalism major, I think English served me just as well.

00;58;21;19 - 00;58;55;13
Speaker 3
If as journalists, how do you feel social media impacted the whole COVID 19 news environment? Because we know there was a lot of misinformation, but we also know there was a lot of valid information. So I'm just wondering, is perspective, though, that journalists you feel that you were putting out fires caused by social media? Sure. That's a great question.

00;58;55;13 - 00;59;17;15
Speaker 3
And sort of like you alluded to in the question, there were definitely benefits that I got from it and and cities serious issues with it. So I sort of and thinking even of it, I followed it and I feel like the only people on Twitter anymore are like journalists and academics. So it was like void that there be little worlds at this point and politicians and things like that.

00;59;17;22 - 00;59;37;24
Speaker 3
So I followed a lot of the genealogists and public health officials. And so that was really great because I would like wake up in the morning. It's like something I would do. As I was making coffee, I would scroll through and you really quickly get the reaction that the piece of news from a lot of different experts at the same time, and they were just tweeting it out.

00;59;37;29 - 01;00;00;07
Speaker 3
And obviously you would never use that in an actual article, but like you'd be like, oh, this person had an interesting tweet on Twitter. Let me reach out to them and have a conversation with that. And sometimes you would really find sources that way. So in that sense, it was a really useful reporting tool and at the same time, there were a lot of ideas that were getting tweeted out that were misinformation and not helpful.

01;00;00;07 - 01;00;22;18
Speaker 3
And so sometimes over something that would take off in that ecosystem that you would eventually have to bring up or debunk in a certain way or at least look into that wasn't necessarily like that during earlier, like health emergencies. And so it was definitely a double edged sword. And I think that I don't spend nearly as much time on Twitter as I used to, I sort of put that way.

01;00;23;13 - 01;00;31;15
Speaker 3
But yeah, it's yeah, there were definitely pros and some serious cons as well.

01;00;31;15 - 01;00;52;23
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's a great question. And thinking back to when I started at the Poynter Institute and my first story there was about Twitter and the line, the first line of the story was, I never thought I'd be a Twitter. If you Twitter tweets that because the word tweeted was around then. But but at the time it was the theory is that how journalists could use Twitter as a reporting and writing tool.

01;00;53;12 - 01;01;12;00
Speaker 2
And at the time, The New York Times had 400 Twitter followers and now they have 65 million. Right. And I remember people me saying, why are you writing about this tool that is never going to help journalism, that's never going to get big? And, of course, you know, here we are where it's huge, even though some people have left Twitter, understandably.

01;01;12;00 - 01;01;29;28
Speaker 2
But social media in general is huge and it's a beast and it has for sure I'd be called journalists in a lot of ways, but it has also contributed to kind of the madness of covering the pandemic. I am a fan of social media. I particularly like Twitter, and I use that for a lot of sort of reporting purposes.

01;01;29;28 - 01;01;49;23
Speaker 2
So it's the way that I find sources and it's a way that I keep up to date with a lot of things I'm interested in, particularly with regard to eating disorders and the reporting that I'm doing for the book. But I also and disheartened when I hear people talk it out as information. And then when I ask, well, where did you find that?

01;01;49;23 - 01;01;56;12
Speaker 2
What was on social media or, you know, someone I fall on Twitter, is that it? And so I think, again, this comes back to the news literacy and this idea.

01;01;56;12 - 01;01;56;23
Speaker 3
That.

01;01;57;07 - 01;02;17;22
Speaker 2
We need to understand where the news and information that we're getting is coming from and who it's coming from, and recognize that for many people they may just only follow this blind very person in social media who is not a trained journalist. That is just some some person who's spouting off information that may or may not be true.

01;02;17;22 - 01;02;40;07
Speaker 2
And that has no reporting behind it. But the person may not know that, Right, because they may not understand what a journalist done versus what this, you know, oh, communicator turns on their social media. So I think there's a lot of sort of education that needs to happen. And I think that it's all the more reason why journalists in particular should be transparent about the work that they do and the.

01;02;40;07 - 01;02;41;13
Speaker 3
Amount of reporting that.

01;02;41;13 - 01;03;08;11
Speaker 2
Goes into the stories that we tell. But we're not just sort of spouting off falsehoods. We're really doing a lot of reporting to help inform communities and educate them. And so I think that the social media has created a lot of opportunities for us, but also challenge us in new ways and created new opportunities to be really radically transparent about the work we do.

01;03;08;11 - 01;03;09;18
Speaker 3
And the other oh, doctor tech.

01;03;11;07 - 01;03;31;27
Speaker 1
I first first of all, and anybody with a provincewide email can get a free subscription to the Wall Street Journal for your local library flood site If you go there is for free out of state. You get a notification every time you publish the story and they'll screen Every poll saw her book coming out and it's relatively early in their career.

01;03;31;27 - 01;03;44;14
Speaker 1
And is there a subject you've come across I would love to dive into and you to write off a feature story or a longer piece? It sounds like you're always moving, but it's you had time to take a breath whether you really interested in acorns aside.

01;03;44;23 - 01;04;11;08
Speaker 3
Yeah. So that's a great question. The last track. Yeah. So I like I said at the very beginning, I always wanted to be a novelist, so I would love to, you know, write jokes one day or something a bit longer. The Wall Street Journal word length is pretty short, just like as a publication. So like our longest, our rules are about like 2000 words, which for some other publications is like a short study series.

01;04;11;08 - 01;12;37;09
Speaker 3
So that can make it hard sometimes. But yeah, now I am doing a lot more reporting on cancer, which I really love because it combines that like very hard science that I really like with very few.