Life as a science editor: Hannah Devlin
How is journalism changing?
We've broadened the types of things we do, and there's a lot more focus on video journalism. If I'm going to an event or a lab where I think there might be interesting sounds or visuals, I might take a multimedia journalist with me to film things or do a short interview with the researcher on camera that we can put on the website. We also have a science blog and produce an iPad edition of the newspaper and 'Eureka'.
What’s your favourite story?
That's a difficult one! One thing that definitely stands out is going to visit the Large Hadron Collider when the first collisions took place. I remember being quite overwhelmed by the excitement and the atmosphere there. A female physicist brought her baby with her, as she thought it was such a big moment that she wanted to be able to tell her child about it afterwards. For me, that really summed up how excited people get about science.
Taking part in experiments as a journalist guinea pig has also been fascinating. One experiment was designed to switch off the part of the brain responsible for producing speech and language. It uses a very powerful magnetic pulse delivered by a paddle-shaped instrument that you hold close to your scalp.
It's not painful, but it makes a clicking noise and you feel a strange impulse in your head. That was for a feature in 'Eureka' about how the brain produces language and how we understand words. It was actually a former colleague of mine who was doing the experiment, who I trusted very much, otherwise I might not have agreed! I had to count back from 80 and suddenly started stuttering - I could think of the number in my head but I couldn't get the word out. It was a strange experience!
Where do you want to go in the rest of your career?
I've only been working in journalism for a few years, even though I've ended up in quite a senior position quite quickly. I'm not sure where I want to go next.
There are huge opportunities in media that didn't exist a few years ago. Then, there were relatively few different types of job: you could be a print journalist or work for the radio or TV. Now, there are all sorts of blogs, podcasts and websites that communicate science stories. I think there's much greater diversity than there used to be, and that's opened up a lot of new opportunities for people.
Do you compete with the science reporters on other newspapers?
Often, people expect that we'll all be rivals; I suppose we are, to some extent, as we don't want one of the other papers to get a really good science story and for us to miss it. Personally, though, we all tend to get on very well and some reporters are really good friends of mine. Because we usually go to a lot of the same conferences and events and see each other quite often, there tends to be a good camaraderie between the science reporters.
Something else people might expect is that different newspapers are represented by different types of people. For example, you might think tabloid journalists are somehow representative of your average tabloid reader, and vice versa for the more right-wing papers. That might be true for some other beats, but I don't think it's true for science.
This article is part of the online content for ‘Big Picture: Careers From Biology’.
Image: Hannah Devlin.