Written by Elaine Maslin from The James Hutton Institute
To help a group of scientists and experts across Scotland’s Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institutions (SEFARI) build their skills around media engagement, SEFARI Gateway recently funded two media training sessions with former senior editors who now specialise in media training and strategic content at Second City Creative.
The sessions were organised by Elaine Maslin (from The James Hutton Institute) and in this blog Elaine talks about the training and shares some useful practical tips.
You know your subject matter inside out and it’s time to share it with the wider public. What better way is there to do that than through broadcast media – the most used source of news in Scotland? But the moment a camera is trained on you, the microphone has been switched on and the broadcast journalist readies to ask the first question, you freeze. It’s hard to even remember your name. It’s a situation we all fear. But it’s also one we can master and turn to our advantage so that we can better share our science and the impact it has.
The recent media training sessions, filmed by a professional cameraman, were, therefore, geared towards helping those with relevant stories to tell, but also with limited media experience. The goal was to learn some of the tools needed and get the expertise within SEFARI to a wider audience when under the spotlight.
We brought together research colleagues from across The James Hutton Institute’s Aberdeen and Invergowrie campuses, as well as from the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen and Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland (BioSS). Taking part in the training were Dr Katharine Preedy, from BioSS; Professor Karen Scott, co-director of the University of Aberdeen Centre for Bacteria in Health and Disease and Professor Baukje de Roos, an internationally recognised nutrition scientist, both based at the Rowett Institute; from the Hutton, there was Professor Ian Toth, Director of the National Potato Innovation Centre, Agronomist Andrew Christie, Dr Tim George, who was recently appointed Deputy Director of the International Barley Hub, Dr Tom Parker, a peatland and soils expert, Dr Jagadeesh Yeluripati, who works in environmental and computing science around monitoring and predicting how much carbon is in soils, Dr Alice Hague, an environmental social scientist focusing on climate change, Dr Ingo Hein, head of potato research at the Hutton, and Fanny Tran, from ecological sciences.
Read the full blog about the training on the SEFARI website: available here!
