Andrew Revkin has reported on the environment for the New York Times since 1995, covering subjects that have included Hurricane Katrina, climate change, the Asian tsunami, science policy and politics, and the North Pole. His job took him to the Arctic three times in three years, and he was the first Times reporter to file stories and photos from the sea ice around the Pole. He also has worked as a senior editor of Discover, a Los Angeles Times staff writer, and a senior writer at Science Digest. Revkin has a bachelor’s degree in biology from Brown University and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, and has served as adjunct professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, teaching environmental reporting. He is the author of several books, including The Burning Season: The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest, Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, and The North Pole Was Here: Puzzles and Perils at the Top of the World. He recently started a blog, Dot Earth, about “efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits.”

What are you looking for from scientist sources?

I’m looking for accurate information in comprehensible language, ideally. The scientist’s main role is to come up with ideas about how the world works and test them, but another equally important role for them is to communicate those findings well. That’s not always easy to do because scientists didn’t go to graduate school to learn how to communicate well; they went to learn to learn. To help with that, I fish around to find experts I know who can help me to unravel something, often not even to quote them but to help me understand the significance of a finding or the context for writing a story. I look for someone who can be a Greek chorus for me, who can tell me the things that science is all about: what’s happening or what’s likely to happen, which is the realm of science that’s harder to do.

Do you have a background in science? Does that matter?

I don’t think in the end it matters too much. The thing I’ve learned that’s more important for the journalist than data is a better appreciation for how science works. It is a moving process, not a static set of findings, so for me, it’s more important to have the ability to appreciate science and communicate it, and that’s something that anyone could find out about science without advanced training. I have a biology degree and worked with marine biologists during the summers in college, but even in that experience, it was gaining the appreciation for science that was more helpful in what I do today. The one thing that would be more helpful for a science journalist to know – and this is true for journalists covering many topics – is to have a background in statistics. I do think some scientists are reluctant to talk to people that they don’t think have a lot of understanding or experience in their field, but that just limits our ability to understand in the end.

How important is the scientist to your story, generally?

Very – the enterprise is conducted by people. I can’t do it without the scientist.

How do you handle the balance between scientific accuracy and "dumbing down" information?

I really try not to dumb down but try to stand back and see if I can explain a finding so anyone can understand, and that entails the inevitable use of metaphors and the inevitable lack of detail – although some of that is going away, because these days my Web-based stories have links to primary sources and all sorts of other, more detailed information that gives a reader access to much more background information if they choose to find it. So the Web is making it less and less necessary to dumb down information.

One thing that frustrates me about some scientists is that there isn’t a lot of feedback on those occasions when something gets dumbed down by me or some other media source like television, often because there isn’t enough space in the newspaper or on television, there’s very little time, or we’re moving too fast to meet a deadline. There have been times when I’ve heard after the fact that some scientist wasn’t pleased with the way I described it or more likely didn’t describe it or shortened it. They may not be contacting reporters after the story comes out because they feel that media will always get it wrong, but I think it’s all the more important to reengage precisely because science is a trajectory. We’re all covering a moving story, and just as journalism is a two-way street, science is a two-way street. That kind of feedback is vital if you want to get it right the next time.

What suggestions would you give scientists for how to successfully communicate to journalists and the general public? What should they keep in mind?

Ideally, it’s important to have some outreach. Scientists should make an effort to be in touch with journalists ahead of time, not just on the day of release, but long before it, at a time when there’s less urgency or stress and with the goal of helping the reporter understand the subject. It is harder and harder to do. Journalists have less and less time for this and scientists don’t have time. But that advance outreach is important to how we cover stories and our understanding of the process.

Talk about some ways scientists have been useful to you in covering a story.

Being willing to look at a paper, even if it’s not by them, to give a sense of where it fits in this ongoing saga, whether it’s climate change or environmental policy. Being accessible to help me gauge what’s a big advance, what’s a little step forward, what’s a side-step in the research process.

What would you like to see scientists do differently in interviews with you?

For the scientist’s sake, end the interview with the journalist by saying “Let’s review,” just as you would with a class of graduate students. These conversations with reporters are a two-way street and one way to avoid errors is to ask, at the end, “What are you taking away from this?” and “Let’s review what I said one more time.” It’s helpful to the scientist and helpful to the journalist.

What's different about your medium/outlet/format that scientists should keep in mind?

It’s continual. There are no punctuation marks; it’s 24/7. That’s not so important to scientists, but it does frame how we have to write, adds to time pressures, and affects the time in which you can get something wrong

What’s a story you'd love to do, but haven’t been able to? What's missing that a scientist could provide?

Some of the best stories I’ve done have been when I’ve been able to go along with scientists into the field and watch how the process works – whether that’s at the North Pole, or in Greenland, or for burning season in the Amazon with the botanists who couldn’t tell me what tree they were standing next to after having studied trees in the Amazon for 20 years, and that, to them, was unremarkable. That helped me absorb the context and the process enormously. Of course, it’s not possible with things like string theory. If I can get into the field, it helps me absorb the essence and helps me explain it.