Interesting American Astronomical Society meeting here in Seattle.
The "big" result is undoubtedly the COSMOS collabortion release, although there were several other significant "big" results announced.
Nothing earth shattering, so to speak, but that happens only every 2-3 years, can't have it every single meeting.
This year was interesting for me, because I got the press releases in advance, still have 25 to go, from todays late releases and wednesday's releases.
It is always interesting to see what the press picks up on: the really big results are obvious, but only a few percent of the press releases end up getting any serious publicity, fairly evenly split between what we would all agree is newsworthy; and quirky, obscure or minor but cute results - "human interest" science stories.
I also have some more appreciation for why journalists tend to just dump press release copy and cut to size - it is a lot of work keeping up with the announcements.
It'd be nice to do a considered coverage of all the other science - there are maybe 2000 or so separate results on several hundred topics, most of which are good solid incrementally progressive science, what everything else is built on. But it is not humanly possible. I was co-author on two posters and three thesis talks at this meeting, I made all the talks, and saw "my" poster, but I never even saw the other post I co-authored. I'd seen e-copies of course and seen previous versions at other meetings, I just didn't make it to the poster slot for that poster while it was up. It is a big meeting. And, that was the one thing of mine the AAS press office picked for a press release... this year.
So, most of what I note is press release material that I like, or that I think is important or cute, or that I think people will want to hear about... reason for that is the press release material has publicity material prepared, textual explanation and summaries, pretty pictures and web links. Makes life much easier.
There are a half-dozen results that I saw or heard about that I'd like to go into in depth, if I stay awake I'll maybe cover two before the meeting ends... some I'll get to in the next few weeks if I remember or find my notes.
So, what the AAS press office cherry picks from the 2000 or so abstracts to publicise determines the less than 1% of all the results any one outside the community will hear about.
Fortunately they are good at picking results that resonate with the press and public.
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"collabortion"? C'mon, it wasn't _that_ bad.
I think this is a very fair description of the media experience at the AAS. One thing I'd add is that, besides the pressure of keeping up with all the announcements, journalists have the porblem of actually understanding the science. I covered the AAS meeting for Nature's online news when it was in Seattle in 2003.
My background's in biology, so those are the meetings I tend to go to, and I can understand the specialist presentations, have a reasonably good idea of what's important, new, etc., and ferret out stories that haven't been press released. But at the AAS, I tried going beyond the press briefings to a few of the the actual talks, and I just didn't understand what people were talking about, never mind if it was newsworthy or not. For the non-specialist journalists at meetings like this, I would guess that's a common experience, which is why you rarely see something reported that hasn't been press released.
This might sound like a confession of incompetence, but actually I think that one of the essential skills (and main pleasures) of being a science journalist is to be able to turn out a story on something that, until you encountered it, and thought 'wow, that's really cool', you knew absolutely diddly-squat about.