Here's a lesson (ie A Memo to Myself): when reading a big batch of news stories based on an embargoed journal article, don't assume that they represent the first news on the topic to reach the general public. I did a short time ago. So, now to extend recognition to a reporter who got the story by being at a meeting where it truly broke weeks before the journal ran it.
- Science Magazine (Oct. 25) Michael Balter: Ancient DNA Links Native Americans With Europe ;
How hard could that have been to find? It only I'd looked, way back a week before Thanksgiving but well after the above news story by journalist Balter ran in Science Magazine. That was when a letter in Nature described a paleoanthropological revelation: DNA from a skeleton of a boy who died and was buried near Mongolia in lavish grave gear – lavish for so long ago – revealed two surprises. The lesser of the two attention-getters is that his genes placed his gene pool smack in the middle of ice age peoples previously associated with western Eurasian and fully European residency and a long way from Mongolia and nearby Lake Baikal. The bigger surprise is that he also carried genetic markers found in today's Native American populations. As Native Americans are well-demonstrated to be largely of East Asian origin, this means that the boy's tribe or its close migrating kin were destined, later, to mix with the more classically Asian peoples farther to the east. Their blended heritage went on to reach the New World 15,000 years ago or so. Thus researchers have gotten a snapshot of the mingling of New World bloodlines from before they fully blended and were carried by descendants across the Bering land bridge. (see Nov. 21 post: Lots of ink for report saying Native American Pleistocene ancestryu includes both Asians AND Europeans)
The minor drama here, for science journalists interested in such things, is that NY and Paris-based Balter, a staffer on the news side at Science and sci journalism teacher at NYU, managed to scoop Science's rival general-service research journal Nature on a significant spot of news.
It is useful also to note that, while Balter's story had all the essential elements of the news, when Nature published the report a sizeable crowd of journalist treated it just like breaking news. Everybody won – Balter and Science get credit for a scoop, but Nature's news splash was still the larger one. Some reporters of course knew, or quickly learned, that it had already broken. Who knows how much more news the Nature publication of it would have generated had it been fully new news.
In retrospect, I was in distinctly poor form while writing the earlier post. Signs in the coverage I did see with a cursory search bore a clear signal that the news had been more than foreshadowed. For instance, the NYTimes's Nick Wade noted in his dispatch on Nov. 20 that one of the lead authors of the Nature paper had presented the findings "last month at a conference in Santa Fe on Native American origins." Which was the same meeting Balter covered, "PaleoAmerican Odyssey" Oct. 16-19 sponsored by Texas A&MJ's Center for the Study of the First Americans.
Balter is a seasoned hand at writing paleoanthropology, so it is no surprise that his piece reads with authority. But it also demonstrates a verity – if one is at a meeting among a whole lot of experts when news breaks, the story not only gains immediacy but the reporter has outside sources immediately at hand: crawling all over the place through the halls, aisles, and the coffee room in the afternoon not to mention the watering holes in the evening. One is unsure if he encountered any embargo-bred resistance from the leaders of the research effort, both of them at the meeting in Santa Fe, but Balter did know, and report, that the work was in press at Nature.
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