‘energy, explained’ podcast: What responsible reporting on scientific research looks like

Amy Sisk

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Amy Sisk reports for StateImpact Pennsylvania and WESA, Pittsburgh's NPR member station. She comes to Pennsylvania from another energy-rich state, North Dakota, where she told stories from coal mines, wind farms and the Bakken oil patch for Inside Energy and Prairie Public Broadcasting. Amy's stories often air on NPR, including those from the eight months she spent following the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. A reporting trip to the Bakken during its boom years sparked her interest in energy. Ever since, she's covered the industry -- from the way it is regulated to its influence on policy to its impact on people and the environment.
Susan Phillips

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Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

Scott Detrow / StateImpact Pennsylvania

A water withdrawal pool in Bradford County.

January 14, 2019 | 6:00 AM

Journalists receive a lot of pitches about scientific research. As the intermediary between scientists and the public, reporters must vet studies to determine their newsworthiness.

How should journalists go about covering research, so that they add to the public discourse rather than inflame it?

For a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to do that responsibly, StateImpact Pennsylvania’s Amy Sisk talks to two reporters who’ve covered studies tied to fracking and health for this episode of the “energy explained” podcast. StateImpact’s Susan Phillips is based at WHYY in Philadelphia, and Elana Gordon is a Knight science journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who reported on health for WHYY’s health and science show “The Pulse.”

In the podcast, Gordon notes that journalists are wise to look more deeply into research.

“There’s a lot of incentive, depending on where a study comes out from, of the newness, of the breakthroughs, to capture a broader general attention,” she said. “But science is incremental.”

Phillips recently reported on a study that showed a slight improvement in groundwater quality in rural Bradford County since the 1980s despite Marcellus Shale gas development. She says journalists should vet studies that come out, such as checking whether the study is in a peer-reviewed journal.

“Then I’ll call other people, like Elana said, who are in the field but have nothing to do with the study and ask them, is this worth reporting on? Is there anything new here that the audience can get from it?” she said. “And then the other thing that you really want to look at is, who funded the study?”

There’s more from Phillips and Gordon that can help readers assess the stories they read about scientific research. Take a listen: