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Fraying medical infrastructure. Disease. Nuclear war. The Science desk at The New York Times is responsible for covering some of the biggest threats to the Earth and to our way of life.
But in addition to hard-hitting investigations, reporters also regularly serve up novel observations that show why our troubled planet is so worth saving.
Michael Roston, a senior staff editor on the Science section, edits Trilobites, a bite-size column about new discoveries intended to delight or surprise readers. Recent columns explore topics like unexpected animal friendships, a peekaboo squid and even seal milk.
“One of my favorite stories was one where we described the process of marine biologists sneaking up on whales, as they’re sleeping, with cameras,” he said. “We want anybody who is seeking some dose of fascination to come to these stories.”
In an interview, Mr. Roston, who began editing Trilobites in 2016, discussed the importance of the column during an overwhelming news cycle. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
What kind of finding makes for a great Trilobites piece, and where do these ideas come from?
Scientific societies and publishers are out there every week hawking their studies. If something sounds really cool, I will reach out to a writer and say, “Hey, is this something that might provoke you into an act of fascinating journalism?”
I’m also very fortunate that I get to work with an army of freelancers. It’s kind of a force multiplier, because people have topics that they’re really fascinated by, and they see things that other people might overlook.
Cara Giaimo, for example, might spot an exciting story about ants or plants. She and I have also worked on stories about things like the secret neon party that’s going on in the animal kingdom, where a lot of the animals are fluorescing in strange colors under ultraviolet light that we can’t see in the dark.
Another writer, James Crugnale, is very attuned to what’s going on in the birding world. From him, you get great stories about devil birds turning up in the wrong parts of the continent or snowy owls that have mysteriously turned orange.
Are you aiming to connect these pieces to the larger news conversation, or are you less concerned with that kind of timeliness?
We want people who come to The Times’s website to feel that they’re finding the newest conversations in the science world. That’s one slice of it, but there are other times where you do come upon something and say, “Well, this isn’t really part of the news cycle right now, but it’s actually really fascinating,” and I think that’s reason enough to talk about it. It’s an opportunity to step back and follow something that fascinated one of our reporters.
Are there any other unique challenges in putting these pieces together?
We have to think very carefully about the right way to visualize things, because sometimes the pictures or videos released by scientific institutions are very simple.
You may think something is going to be very visually interesting, and then you discover that we have only some low-resolution picture. So we have to spend some time coming up with an alternative way to present something visually.
Fortunately, I get to work with a really great photo editor, Matt McCann, who is just enormously creative and incredibly relentless in terms of his willingness to find the right images.
What are you working on now?
I have one piece about how researchers used scientific techniques to very precisely date when a giant volcanic mudflow happened at Mount Rainier in Washington. It’s basically done by counting the rings of trees that were destroyed by this giant volcanic mudflow, which is called a lahar.
How do you imagine the impact of this column? How do you hope it lands for people?
At The Times, we’re having these history-making conversations about how we’re going to cover things every day, but there’s also space to talk about the topics in this column. On a day when we’re talking about earthquakes and financial crises and political disasters, I get to walk into our morning or our afternoon news meetings and pitch a story about a fish that cloned itself. Getting the editors of The Times to crack a smile will always be a career highlight.
The post A Bite-Size Column About Delight and Wonder in Science appeared first on New York Times.
