Yesterday, I participated in a press teleconference announcing new observations and research on the brightest bang ever seen in the sky. Astronomers on Earth saw it March 19, 2008, but it actually happened 7.5 billion years ago when a massive star collapsed and formed a black hole, producing an event astronomers call a gamma-ray burst. For about 40 seconds, its optical flash was visible to the naked eye. You’ll see lots of coverage of this in the science press today and tomorrow.
Astronomers from around the world combined data from ground- and space-based telescopes to study the gamma-ray burst called GRB 080319B. Near-light-speed jets beam outward from GRBs. One of the jets just happened to be pointed right at us, which is why it looked so bright. Picture it as a shotgun blast of gamma rays.
As I was thinking of what to say in this blog, I ruminated a bit on press conferences. So here’s some of the splash and foam from my stream of consciousness.
I recalled an excellent documentary I saw a few weeks ago about the press coverage of the Kennedy assassination. Press conferences in those days were white-knuckle affairs, tense with the reality that you had to be RIGHT THERE — on the scene — to get the story.
It looked something like this: A police officer steps out of a doorway. Cameras and print reporters with snap-brimmed hats crowd around. There’s jockeying for position, particularly by the photographers. Shoving and even the occasional punch thrown weren’t unheard of. Then the mad scramble to find a phone and file the story before the others.
When I went to my first press conferences, it wasn’t quite so gritty, but there was still tension in the air. Sometimes you had to be aggressive in a packed room to get your question in. I remember approaching someone in a hallway for an interview and being hip-checked out of the way by a fleet-footed pixie of a TV reporter half my weight and a foot shorter. She sure knew how to get the story.
Today I just dialed a special access number and provided a pass code assigned to me by a press officer by e-mail. The teleconference was conducted at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. I was in Wisconsin.
The technology is superb these days. You can listen to experts comment on the discovery while watching PowerPoint presentations online. By punching in *1, a friendly operator puts you in the queue to ask a question. No shouting and wildly gesturing to get noticed — you just wait your turn. They can hear you, and you can hear them. And you can benefit from insightful questions from other reporters. Not to mention not being hip-checked by fleet-footed pixies.
I guess it takes a little of the romance out of it, but then again, flying out to Goddard for the afternoon wasn’t an option.