Q&A with Ivan Oransky: Report Your Niche to the Nth

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September 3, 2013

Can I just say it? Ivan Oransky must have found a wrinkle in time. Look at his LinkedIn page and tell me how he does it. Vice President and Global Director for MedPage Today. Adjunct Instructor for University of Massachusetts Amherst. Co-Founder of Retraction Watch. Founder of Embargo Watch. Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at New York University School of Medicine. Board Member for the Association of Health Care Journalists. And Adjunct Associate Professor at New York University Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program. Those are not past jobs. Those are all current jobs. How does he keep all those records spinning? I should have asked his wife. But, instead, I asked him, and here is what he had to say. (Part 1 of this interview ran on Friday, by the way.)

Q: Fans of yours marvel at how you balance your editing, blogging and teaching duties. On a day when you’re doing all three, walk me through your schedule.

A: I’m going to do the thing that journalists should never do, and create a realistic composite, because I’ve never kept a diary. And since I haven’t taught since starting at MedPage Today, this is what a day would have been like when I was still at Reuters Health.

I try to be at my laptop by 6:30 most mornings. If we didn’t have a Retraction Watch post ready to go at 9:30, I’d work on one then, gathering comments we’d requested perhaps over the past few days. Otherwise, I’d have cleaned out my inbox, or picked some studies to cover, or something like that. My class at NYU’s SHERP is one day a week, starting at 10 and lasting until 1 – with a break during which I might approve some Retraction Watch comments, or talk to Co-Founder Adam Marcus about whatever he’s working on. After that I had a short Scienceline meeting with students. I’d then have headed back to the office and picked more studies, taken care of other management and administrative tasks, etc. I’d probably have stayed at the office until 8-ish, to catch up on some of the hours I spent teaching, but some of my time-shifting happened on weekends too, when I could pick studies in relative peace. When I got home, after walking the dog, I’d probably have gotten back online to respond to emails and work on the following morning’s Retraction Watch post(s). It’s a long day, thankfully only one day per week, but I’m having more fun in journalism than I’ve ever had.

Q: One of the things that has made Embargo Watch and Retraction Watch successful is their consistency. Most part-time bloggers have difficulty doing their regular work and still keeping their blogs fresh. How do you and Adam make sure that you keep current while continuing to stay focused on your main job?

A: Part of what keeps Adam and me consistent is that Retraction Watch has become a bit of an obsession, to put it mildly. On those mornings we don’t have anything ready to go, I wake up just slightly anxious. That goes away once I’ve written a post. We get constant feedback and tips from readers, which means we always have more to write about than we can possibly manage. The fact that it’s an obsession means that it would probably be more difficult not to be consistent than to wake up early and stay up late to write posts. I feel the same about Embargo Watch, but the volume there has slipped from nearly every day to about once a week as Retraction Watch has taken up more and more time.

Q: The popularity of your blogs seems to me to speak to a growing sophistication among readers in how science works and what people should expect from research institutions. Have you noticed this type of trend in the audience, and what other factors may be at play?

A: I think that large swaths of the population have always been interested in keeping institutions honest. The Internet has allowed scrutiny of more and more of those institutions. Anonymous tipsters can send documents electronically, or post them, instead of having to meet reporters in parking garages. Science is no exception. Laypeople can now easily read studies once only accessible in dusty libraries, meaning that anyone can point out potential flaws in papers. Slowly but surely, the investigations into those alleged issues are being carried out in the open. The scales are falling from our eyes.

Q: With both of the Watch blogs, you are regularly asking tough questions of journals and researchers. Has this caused any blowback for you and your staffs at Reuters Health or MedPage Today?

A: Early on, there was one journal press officer who asked for the name of my boss at Reuters and threatened to contact him if I didn’t write an Embargo Watch post the way he wanted. I was happy to give it to him. But that was just bluster, and I don’t remember anything similar since. It was awkward for me to write about embargo breaks by Reuters colleagues, but there wasn’t any blowback one way or another. I can’t really say what effect, if any, the blogs might have on the MedPage Today staff, since I just started here. But I see the kinds of questions Adam and I ask on the blogs are the sorts of questions reporters should be asking of journals and researchers anyway, so if there’s blowback, that reflects pretty poorly on institutions that would like us to think of them as transparent and self-correcting.

Q: The blogs certainly have raised your profile. What advice can you offer for health writers looking to brand themselves in a similar way?

A: I think it helps to find a tiny niche and report the hell out of it. Depending on what you’re covering, your reporting can add value, unearth stories many people never wanted told, and force major news outlets to pick up your stories (hopefully with credit). It helps if that niche is underserved by mass media outlets, and has a built-in constituency that has strong feelings about the subject. With Embargo Watch, that means I have a small but very dedicated readership of science reporters and public information officers, many of whom have grown exasperated by embargoes, or want to defend them to the death. Retraction Watch is tapping into a community of scientists and observers frustrated by a lack of transparency among journals and institutions. (It doesn’t hurt that we happened to have launched in a boom market for retractions, with two record-setting years in a row.)

That brings me to my other bit of advice: Think of your online presence as orchestrating a conversation, not as using a megaphone. Too many reporters seem to think of social media only as a way to get the word out about their latest work. What a waste. There’s a community of people who wants to talk to you and to each other. Give them a voice, and they will be your best ambassadors and tipsters.

Image by USDAgov via Flickr