Want quick publicity? Send out a press release on your unpublished manuscript!
January 24, 2014 Filed under Blog, Featured, Potpourri, Publishing
As this article from slate.com describes, yet again someone has received a lot of media attention for their unpublished research. This time the study was on the eventual decline of Facebook.
The slate article does a fine job of undermining the premises of the paper and showing them not to be valid (particularly the one about how searches on google for Facebook don’t necessarily mean a decline in Facebook), but I am concerned about the growing number of research studies that get media attention when they haven’t been peer reviewed.
Is simply putting something on arxiv.org now enough to warrant media attention? It is an unsettling trend, and for the media that doesn’t necessarily discriminate between studies that have been peer reviewed and those that have not (not that all peer-reviewed studies are right, but it is at least some step toward not being wrong).
I coach people how to pitch the media, so I am not surprised by the media picking up a story that may or may not be correct. We see it all the time, some of it on a large scale. Anyway let me explain why it happens. Most media has had cutbacks in staff and the remaining staff is under tremendous pressure to fill space in their media quickly. They try to find something their audience is interested in and then in some cases they end up using the press release almost word for word. In many cases the person running with the story does not have the background to evaluate it, they just use audience interest as their guide. I am not saying the current system is right, I am just explaining how it works. Thanks, Edward Smith.