If you are a subscriber to Newsweek, you probably remember these stories from the past few months: "Vaccine Revolution," "Aliens Invade America!," "A Gymnast's Long Fall," "Is AIDS Forever?," and a cover story, "Science Finds God." They all had something in common, aside from their science focus: at the end of each article was the credit line, "With Marian Westley." In addition, a story titled "A Long, Wacky Summer," on recent weather patterns, carried Marian Westley's byline. Who, you may have wondered, is this Marian Westley, who reports with equal aplomb on matters as diverse as epidemiology, meteorology, the predations of nonnative plant species, and the interface between scientists and theologians? Actually, Westley is a graduate student in biological oceanography at the University of Hawaii and a member of AGU. She spent the summer of 1998 as the AAAS/AGU Mass Media Fellow at Newsweek in New York.

The goal of the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellows Program, now entering its 24th year, is to get more science news into general interest media. It provides a living stipend to the Fellows, 20 in 1998, all of whom are advanced students in science or engineering. The newspaper, magazine, or broadcast outlet provides a mentor in journalism and assigns the Fellow primarily to science stories. Of the circa 375 alumni Fellows, about half are currently journalists, either full- or part-time, according to AAAS.

Westley is the second Mass Media Fellow AGU has sponsored under the AAAS program. Last year's Fellow, Victoria Bruce, is now a science writer with NASA's Earth Observing System Project and has just begun serving on the AGU Public Information Committee. During the summer of 1997, she wrote for The Oregonian. Westley says she enjoyed every minute of the 60 to 70 hours she put in weekly, and she learned a lot about news values in general and the place of science news in the hotly competitive world of weekly news magazines. A lot of selling is involved, she found: selling a story idea to your section editor and then trying to squeeze it into an already overloaded issue. While she had always assumed that a scoop was highly prized, she discovered that this is not always the case. One story she reported on was rejected until a similar one ran in The New York Times, at which point her story was hurriedly resurrected.

Westley found it easy to gain access to scientists for interviews, as they felt comfortable talking with her, even about subjects she had never studied. As a group, scientists are not cynical people, she found, and they were more than willing to take time from their work to answer her questions. But she found it was not always easy to understand their answers. "Few of the people I interviewed spoke English. They were born native speakers, but long ago forgot how to speak a jargon-free and acronym-free sentence."

In fact, Westley told her colleagues at a wrap-up session concluding the 10-week program, while at Newsweek, scientific jargon became a problem only once, when she conducted an interview concerning her own field of study. She realized to her chagrin that she and the interviewee had quickly lapsed into terms that would have been incomprehensible to readers who were not themselves oceanographers.

Newsweek's science editor, Sharon Begley, offers high praise for the Mass Media Fellowship program and for Westley in particular. "To have someone on staff with a scientific background is invaluable," she says, "but less for the content of their knowledge than for their frame of mind.
These young scientists approach science news with greater skepticism than other journalists and have the ability to see the flaws or gaps in arguments. We can check facts easily, but we cannot find a substitute for the scientific mind."

Begley adds that the Fellows also receive a reality check. They learn how a news magazine works, its planned content constantly changing as the week unfolds. They discover that a story they have labored over for weeks may never get into print, sometimes being yanked at the last minute. Also, science news is not always presented the way a scientist might prefer. "Newsweek isn't Science or Nature; for lay readers, you must get them interested in science first, and this means you have to present it in a readable way," Begley says.

As for Westley, Begley says she was "a delight." She willingly stayed till midnight once or twice a week and never lost her sunny disposition, even when one of her stories was dropped.

Marian Westley was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to a U.S. foreign service family and grew up in Nairobi, Kenya. She graduated cum laude from Yale with majors in physics and English. As an undergraduate, she wrote for the Yale Herald and tutored New Haven school children in math and science. After graduation, she returned to Kenya for an internship with the U.N. Environmental Program and did freelance writing in science and technology for children.

She is now back in Hawaii to continue her work on the role of oceanic primary production in glacial-interglacial change, analyzing a sediment core from the Gulf of Alaska. And she will also pursue her twin interest in journalism. Armed with a portfolio of clippings from Newsweek, she is seeking freelance writing assignments on a variety of topics. "There is lots of exciting science in Hawaii," she says, "and not that many science writers." And the future: science, journalism, both? She shrugs and smiles. Too early to say.
 

Marian Westley, AGU Mass Media Fellow, 1998
 

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