A Standard Model (for physics journalism)

Physics journalism is often a mystery to its primary subjects: physicists. In this talk I will try to demystify physics journalism by going behind the scenes with several particle physics stories. I will break down the typical course of a story, from conceptualization to publication. I will also disclose aspects of my own process—emails, interview notes, and rough drafts—to help explain specific editorial choices.

We will first review some of the history of science journalism and key principles of science writing. As case studies on the process of physics journalism, I will discuss stories I have reported about familiar subjects in particle physics, including: LHCb’s tests of lepton universality, the Muon g − 2 experiment results and theory prediction, an obituary for Steven Weinberg, CDF’s W mass anomaly, the 10th anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery, Snowmass and the P5 report, and recent measurements of entanglement between top quarks by ATLAS and CMS.

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