Deez Interviews: Meet the NASA video/social producer making Pluto gifs and hanging out on ~space Twitter~
Happy Friday, Deezers! If you’ve ever wondered why NASA’s social media game is positively intergalactic (sry), it’s content geniuses like Katy Mersmann who you have to thank. She talked to us about the past two years she’s spent working at the Goddard Space Flight Center and using her journalistic expertise for the good of #science. Enjoy!
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(Credit: NASA, duh)
The interviewee: Katy Mersmann (follow her @KatyMersmann)
The gig: Earth science video/social producer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
The hustle: I spend my time scripting, producing and editing short videos for social media and the website, scripting and producing social stories for Snapchat/Instagram/Facebook and getting content ready for NASA Earth’s social media channels.
Sometimes that means talking with scientists whose research I’m covering, working with writers to make sure their features and my videos compliment each other, and meeting with our visualizers on new visualizations of science data.
And sometimes it means, you know, actually editing videos together or filming and editing snaps for NASA’s social stories. I also do some posting to the NASA Earth social media channels, specifically @NASAEarth on Twitter and NASA Earth on Facebook, but I’m not the main person posting content there.
So, you technically work for the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), but you basically work for NASA. can you explain that a bit?
Universities Space Research Association (USRA) has a cooperative agreement with NASA to provide all the cool work we do. A lot of people who work at Goddard, especially in communications, are contractors or work for a similar cooperative agreement.
So basically USRA is my employer and I have HR and management all the way up through the company … But I work ~at~ NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. So my office is here, and I work with other USRA employees, contractors from other companies, and civil servants in service of NASA’s mission.
When it comes to the goal of communicating NASA science, we all work as one cohesive unit. I sit specifically on NASA's Earth Science News Team, which works across the agency to report on new research and science updates using NASA’s Earth science missions and data. Basically everything I produce is for NASA and gets published on NASA’s websites and social media accounts, like @NASA, @NASAEarth and @NASAGoddard.
So, how did you get into this job?
It’s a bit of a meandering story, but to start, I just applied for an internship. An ex was really interested in space too, and he found a listing for a communications internship at NASA Goddard our senior year and said we should both apply.
We did, and I got the internship working generally in the Office of Communications. I fell in love with the place and the job and was pretty unsubtle about wanting to come back.
So I went back to the University of Missouri (MIZ!) in the fall for the one-year master’s program and stayed in touch with the social team here at Goddard (shoutout Twitter for facilitating my employment). I ended up coming back as a writing intern to work specifically in the Earth science division.
That summer, one of the Earth science producers was in Alaska supporting some scientists in the field, and the other producer got called into prolonged jury duty, so my supervisor was like “Hey you uh said you have some video production experience right?”
I produced a few short social media videos and at the end of the summer, they suggested I apply for a multimedia fellowship with the Earth science department through USRA. I did and after about a year and a half as a fellow, I moved into this permanent position, doing basically what I was already doing but without a looming end date.
What's been your favorite moment/memory of working with NASA??
Ah! So many! It really is a dream job everyday, which *I know* sounds super trite.
When I was a baby intern, New Horizons flew by Pluto, the first time something built by humans came that close to the dwarf planet (Pluto is not a planet, do not @ me).
Another intern and I worked on a gif that showed how NASA’s views of Pluto had evolved over the years, from the first like six-pixel image taken when it was discovered to this beautiful, close-up view of the surface. The gif went bananas viral and was even posted on Facebook by the Obama White House. That was completely surreal.
Since then, I’ve had some other really cool experiences. Last summer, I flew with a science team over Alaska and Canada in a NASA plane, taking atmospheric samples. I was the only comms person with the team that year and produced a handful of videos, a Facebook Live, a story for Snapchat and Instagram, and a tumblr post, all in a week. It was a whirlwind (literally - the plane did spirals in the air) and it was really cool to be embedded with the science team like that.
But really, the people I work with all the time are just so, so freaking cool that it’s pretty much always good. Everyone is really super encouraging and we’re all just a bunch of nerds getting to talk about science everyday.
What ways has your training as a journalist come in handy while making space content?
Oh man. Fact-checking is so so SO important. We run our videos and features by the scientists to make sure everything we’re saying and showing is accurate. Even comms people who’ve been working here for years still send everything back to the science teams to make sure we’re explaining things in a way that stays accurate and portrays the research in its truest form.
And then yeah, breaking down jargon is a pretty big thing, too. Fortunately, there are people who’ve been working here far longer than me who have figured out some standard simplified explanations for some of the usual suspects in Earth science...
It can be a bit of a back-and-forth with scientists, trying to balance the plain language simplifications with not undermining or mis-communicating their research. Fortunately, they usually get what we’re trying to do and often offer up some really helpful explanations.
Beyond, that I would say that using social media for reporting was something I learned in the convergence program at Mizzou and that serves me every single day here. NASA is pretty innovative in using social media, so it’s been nice applying the storytelling methods I learned in journalism school with NASA, where we take social super seriously and view it as a meaningful and important communications tool.
What is it like working at the Goddard Space Flight Center??? Do you meet astronauts and stuff??
It is honestly just the best. Goddard is huge, like 10,000 employees huge, and is supposedly the largest collection of research scientists in the world. (I have never had that fact-checked but I’m pretty sure it’s close to true.)
I don’t meet very many astronauts, because Goddard isn’t as heavily involved with human spaceflight as the Johnson Space Center (Houston) or Kennedy Space Center (Cape Canaveral). But I meet lots of incredible scientists and engineers and work with a really rad group of people who LOVE science and are really passionate about communicating it effectively.
Goddard is also where the Hubble Space Telescope and soon-to-launch James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were built, which is really sweet. JWST was being built during my internship and fellowship, and the clean room where they worked on it has these giant second-story windows, so you could walk over and watch the engineers build and test the mirrors.
I’m also really fortunate that I support the entire agency, rather than just scientists at Goddard. So I get to work a lot with other Earth science comms people at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California and other centers around the country. Once a year, we have an Earth science comms retreat and it’s a little like a family reunion with everyone getting to actually see and eat dinner with people we talk to virtually everyday.
Overall, it’s an amazing place to work. NASA is pretty consistently voted the best place to work in the federal government for a reason, and a lot of it is the people. There’s a great culture of mentorship and healthy feedback on content, because we all know we’re working toward the same goal.
Who is the audience you have in mind when you produce video/social content for NASA?
The broadest, most basic answer is that we make most content similar to how journalists do, at roughly a middle school reading level. But there’s A LOT more that goes into it than that, especially on social media.
We take audience metrics pretty seriously, and try to pay attention to the platforms themselves. So when we’re on Snapchat, we’re definitely thinking younger and focusing on stuff that feels authentic and natural in the platform; I often write out tiny skits to explain scientific concepts rather than rely solely on visualizations.
And our wizards on Instagram think about it in a very artistic way, focusing on the most exquisite, eye-catching images, because that’s what we’ve become known for.
For me personally, I like to imagine an ideal individual I’m making this content for. That’s another holdover from J-school, where you had to be able to describe an individual who fit the demographics of your audience.
I’m pretty passionate about women being involved in or interested in STEM, and because I do so much work on social media, I like to imagine there’s a 15-year-old girl out there who may be inspired to muddle through chemistry class because she sees that science is an important career where you can change the world.
That’s pretty starry-eyed, but it helps me when like I’m embarrassed to be on-camera in a Snapchat, or I’m cringing at editing the sound of my own narrator voice.
In your experience, which platforms are the most excited about space content?
Ooh, that is a GOOD question. For starters, I’m going to say that most of my answers actually come from the Earth science side, rather than the like planets-and-nebulas space science side, just because that’s where the majority of my experience is.
I think we do a pretty good job of packaging our content so it appeals on different platforms, but generally I think Facebook is still one of our most enthusiastic bases. For NASA Earth, at least, it’s certainly our largest (we are *inches* away from 10 million likes).
One of the other producers runs the Facebook page for Operation IceBridge, which is an airborne mission that studies ice in the Arctic and Antarctic. They have a smaller following, but their base is hyper-engaged; like they pay attention to where the plane is flying and engage with the pictures and video.
We definitely get our best reporter attention and enthusiasm on Twitter, because Space Twitter is LIT.
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That’s it for this week! Be sure to follow Katy @KatyMersmann (but also @NASAEarth, @NASAGoddard, and @NASA) and have a great weekend!
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