Event Horizon Telescope Campaign

Summary 2

The Preparation of the Campaign 3

Brussels Press Conference 6

Washington DC Press Conference 8

Santiago Press Conference 10

Tokyo Press Conference 11

Taipei Press Conference 14

Shanghai Press Conference 15

Mexico Press Conference 16

European Satellite Events 16

Press Coverage 17

The Social Media Impact 19 Memes 22

ERC media monitoring 26 Social media 28

ESO Products 28

Side Stories 29 1. The Hawaiian perspective: Pōwehi 30 2. China’s largest stock photo provider draws fire over use of black hole image 30 3. Katie Bouman 31 4. Political Connections 33 5. Candy, Cereal and Software 35 6. Photo-op stand becomes a tourist destination 36 7. “Rebound University” 37

Other results 37

Appendix A: Pros and Cons 40 A few selected Pros 40 A few selected Cons 40

The_Image as it was called during the preparations.

Summary1

On 10 April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration announced the first-ever image of a black hole in the galaxy Messier 87 (M87).

A coordinated campaign for the promotion of this high-profile science story had been in preparation between all the involved institutions since November 2018, with weekly video conferences (sometimes several a week).

Six coordinated press conferences began at 15:00 CEST/13:00 UTC and the image was made public at 13:07 UTC: 1. Belgium (Brussels, English) 2. USA (Washington, D.C., English) 3. Chile (Santiago, Spanish) 4. Japan (Tokyo, Japanese) 5. Taipei (Mandarin)ray 6. Shanghai (Mandarin) News of this result was covered in most major media around the world and went viral on social media. This led to unprecedented coverage, and the numbers are still increasing. According to news chief Ray Villard at STScI, the EHT image made 3500 online articles with 4.5 billion potential readers. The Hawaiian Bennet Group reports similar a number for a narrower subset of the storyline: “Aggregate Readership: 4,673,590,910 for reflecting media results directly attributable to Bennet Group's collaboration with JCMT and SMA”.

1 This overview uses content from Peter Kurczynski (NSF)’s summary: https://perimeter.teamwork.com/files/3835517 and from Eduardo Ros. 3

Several of us made the “taxi-driver test”: asking random laypeople about black holes (for instance in taxis), which led to an almost 100% coverage in the awareness of the story among random people in the developed world (N = ~100).

As a result, most people on the planet now know that humans have taken a picture of a black hole. This has led to a significant boost for EHT, for astronomy, for science and for international peaceful collaboration. In Europe, science was put on the agenda in Brussels, which was a great relief for politicians and news consumers in general.

To quote Astrophysicist and author Ethan Siegel2:

“The story of the Event Horizon Telescope is a remarkable example of high-risk, high-reward science. During the 2009 decadal review, their ambitious proposal declared that there would be an image of a black hole by the end of the 2010s. A decade later, we actually have it. That’s an incredible achievement.

It relied on computational advances, the construction and integration of a slew of radio telescope facilities, and the cooperation of the international community. Atomic clocks, new computers, correlators that could link up different observatories, and many other new technologies needed to be inserted into every one of the stations. You needed to get permission. And funding. And testing time. And, beyond that, permission to observe on all the different telescopes simultaneously.

But all of this happened, and wow, did it ever pay off. We are now living in the era of black hole astronomy, and the event horizon is there for us to image and understand. This is just the beginning. Never has so much been gained by observing a region where nothing, not even light, can escape.”

The Preparation of the Campaign

Since November 2018 a group of more than 30 communicators and communication-savvy scientists, were brought together in weekly videocons by the EHT Outreach Working Group led by Mislav Balokovic. A Teamwork site was set up to allow the group to collaborate. The scientists in the group took a leading role in the communications work, and the excitement was very high due to the potential of the result. The main focus was on data security (containing the image and the result), and the production of content.

ESO’s Calum Turner took the lead on writing up a joint press release with space for “localised” content and quotes, and this was jointly edited by the 50–100 participating communicators over the course of several weeks. Collating and integrating these comments was an unprecedented effort, and allowed everyone in the collaboration to share their inputs, concerns and views. Most of the press releases published, notably NSF, ESO and the EHT collaboration, respected the agreed format, but not all.

While this approach allowed a broad range of opinions to come together, it dramatically increased the coordination workload and would have benefitted from a predefined approval structure. However, the level of coordination allowed for a broad collaborative approach, leading to many translations (including into Hawaiian, the first such case) and a common pool of impressive visuals, such as a Japanese comic. A set of in-depth factsheets about the EHT and the history of the science leading up to the result were never finalised and were unfortunately not published.

2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/04/11/10-deep-lessons-from- our-first-image-of-a-black-holes-event-horizon/#be8191e55e64 4

It was agreed to send out the media advisory on 1 April, despite some differing opinions among EHT partners about the form and timing of this communication. In the end, the 10 days advance notice gave journalists enough time to prepare, and created a sense of suspense in the media with lots of rumours and interest which in itself provided additional visibility to EHT partners.

The complexity of the campaign is illustrated with a MindMap. 6

Brussels Press Conference

The Brussels press conference was held at EC's Berlaymont Building. Over 60 journalists attended the press conference in Brussels, while some 120 registered to follow it online. The YouTube live feed reached a peak of some 200 000 viewers. After the press conference, ERC President Jean-Pierre Bourguignon and Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt opened an EHT exhibition in the Berlaymont building in Brussels.

The ERC liaised between the EHT project and the European Commissioner for Research and Innovation and the Commission’s Spokesperson’s Service to meet and reconcile all partners’ interests and deliver a successful communication campaign in Europe.

The Brussels live feed on YouTube had ~200,000 viewers at the peak.

Moedas being surrounded by journalists.

The ERC has never had this kind of success. The press conference in Brussels was broadcast live by the European Commission audio-visual service. The press conference YouTube stream has by now been seen by 3.1 million, has had 13.6 million impressions, 72 thousand shares, 62.9 thousand interactions, 59 thousand likes, 2.3 thousand comments. After one day, it entered the top three of most viewed videos on EUTube account. It was the top video for all black hole videos on YouTube on the day of the announcement. In terms of engagement, it was the most successful EUTube video ever.

More than 500 entities embedded the live stream on their websites: Le Monde, Euronews, Bloomberg, Sky, El Confidencial, Evening Standard, Agenzia Ansa, Science Alert, Le Soir, La Libre, CNET Magazine, Wired IT, T-online DE, Sputnik News; Observador PT; Quotidiano, Independent, BBC News. 8 At least 92 TV channels, including BBC News, Sky News, Deutsche Welle, TVS Slovenia, produced 648 TV reports using live satellite broadcast from the press conference or the audio-visual material prepared in advanced by the ERC and Commission’s AV service, and distributed on the day of the announcement.

Washington DC Press Conference

The Washington DC press conference was held at the National Press Club. There were 56 reporters in the room (roughly the same as in Brussels).

According to NSF, 0.75 million saw the live webcast + 2 million impressions on Facebook Live. This is a total of 1.25 million. The YouTube stream has by now accumulated 1.1 million views.

The US press conference panellists. Credit: www.news.cn.

Afterwards the presenters went to the US Congress House Committee on Space, Science & Technology to present the result.

Shep Doeleman presents in the Evening party at National Air & Space Museum. 10

Santiago Press Conference

The Santiago stream had 150,000 live viewers and around 35-40 journalists in the audience.

The JAO ALMA Instagram channel doubled from 25,000 to 53,000 followers.

Tokyo Press Conference

The Tokyo Press Conference was held at Kioi Conference. 61 journalists and 14 TV cameras attended the event. Mareki Honma and Kazuhiro Hada, both NAOJ Mizusawa VLBI Observatory, were the speakers during the press conference moderated by Hitoshi Yamaoka, Head of NAOJ PR office. Accompanying researchers were: ● Fumie Tazaki, Tomoaki Oyama, Tomohisa Kawashima, Hiroshi Nagai (NAOJ) ● Shiro Ikeda (Institute of Statistical Mathematics), ● Kenji Toma (Tohoku University) ● Motoki Kino (Kogakuin University/NAOJ) ● Masato Sasada (Hiroshima University) ● Hiroki Okino (The University of Tokyo) ● ShuichiroTsuda (SOKENDAI) ● Yuzhu Cui (SOKENDAI) The NAOJ livestream on YouTube & niconico had ~85,000 views. The press release on the NAOJ website had up until 30 April 286.305 page views. NHK and TV Asahi (major Japanese TV stations) live streamed the press conference on their app and Twitter account. ~300 newspaper articles were published up until 30 April.

Mareki Honma addressing the audience. Credit: www.news.cn. 12

The image and the result also became popular in Japan. The tweet by @ALMA_Japan to show the image gained 960,000 impressions and 32,000 engagements, both are the highest in eight years of the account history.

NAOJ produced a comic to introduce the brief history of the radio interferometer and the EHT project, both in Japanese and English. The comic was distributed through twitter and the NAOJ web site. The tweets (2 posts) gained 680,000 impressions and 53,000 engagements in total. The comic was also distributed in the PDF and several science centers in Japan posted it as a part of their exhibitions. A simple poster to show the result made by NAOJ (only in Japanese language) was also widely used in the science centers.

The result was mentioned in the regular press conferences of the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Japan (MEXT) and the Chief Cabinet Secretary. 13

Taipei Press Conference

The Taiwanese live stream has by now been seen by 1.1 million. 15

Shanghai Press Conference

Credit: www.news.cn.

Mexico Press Conference

See https://youtu.be/CDuuAKrcPKI

European Satellite Events

The importance of the publication led to several satellite events. The following institutions streamed the Brussels press conference and facilitated a local Q&A session: 1. The Netherlands — Nijmegen: Location: Radboud University FNWI, Huygensgebouw, Nijmegen 2. Spain — Madrid: Location: CSIC Headquarters, Madrid. Youtube link: https://youtu.be/y80_lQKTNYk . Speakers: José L. Gómez, Iván Martí-Vidal, Rebecca Azulay, Miguel Sánchez-Portal, Antxon Alberdi

3. Italy — Rome: Location: INAF Headquarter, Rome. Speakers: Elisabetta Liuzzo, Ciriaco Goddi, Kazi Rygl 17

Credit: askNews. 4. United Kingdom — SKA Science Meeting: Location: Alderly Park Conference Centre, Macclesfield, Cheshire, 5. South Africa — Pretoria: Location: University of Pretoria 6. Sweden — Gothenburg: Location: Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, 7. Denmark — Lyngby: Location: National Space Institute, Denmark’s Technical University 8. Germany — Garching: Location: ESO Garching Headquarters 9. Brazil — São Paulo: Location: Universidade de Sao Paulo 10. Argentina — Cordoba: Location: FAMAF, at the National University of Córdoba 11. Russia — Moscow: Location: Astro Space Center, Moscow 12. Portugal — Porto: Location: Porto Planetarium/Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences

Press Coverage

Naturally, the impact of a worldwide campaign of this magnitude is hard to measure. Some numbers are reported in the summary above and the 100s of front pages from around the world, some of which were collected by Eduardo Ros (see the cover page), show clearly the global penetration this result had.

On 10 April AAS sent out about 20 press releases which were just a fraction of the total estimated 40-50 press releases produced.

On the same day, the National Science Foundation tweeted the image, with the post accumulating over 29,700 retweets and 53,400 likes within 12 hours.

Multiple major news outlets reported on the story, including news articles by ABC News, Telegraph, CNN and BBC and thousands more.

The Google Trend for black hole.

Headline number 1 on Google News on 10 April (above any kind of politics).

A few of the magazine covers. Copyrighted by the individual magazines.

The Social Media Impact

A social media campaign was coordinated aimed to stimulate people’s curiosity about this upcoming event and inform them of the possibility to follow the press conference live, as well as to disseminate the image, the science results and the facilities which contributed to the science.

ESO started a teasing campaign on 7 April on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, an idea which initially came from NSF and was adapted to our channels. A message and our key visual were gradually revealed during the period 8–10 April, starting with a completely black image and black text. The teasing campaign was very successful and comments showed that people were very eager to see the image.

ESO’s five teasing messages and the results post on ESO’s instagram account.

On 10 April, ESO hosted the live stream on ESO’s Facebook page (for the first time) and it was cross-posted from the European Commission’s page. The live went smoothly with no interruptions and reached 414 458 people with 928 comments and 2790 shares. After the live stream several other posts were made on ESO’s Facebook page: about the image and the results, the ESOcastLight, the associated blog post, a 17-minute long film about the result, the planetarium and VR products, and the Reddit Ask Science Ask Me Anything (AMA) session scheduled later that day. 20

Insights for the Facebook Live video.

On Twitter ESO decided not to host a live streaming, but did live tweets instead. We posted 40 tweets during the day, focusing on explaining the scientific results, the EHT network of telescopes, the role of European facilities, ESO’s contribution to the results through the ALMA and APEX telescopes, the technology used etc.

ESO’s Facebook and Twitter reached 10 779 709 people on 10 April and had an average reach during the period 8-16 April of 1.6 Million people per day (1.4 Million higher than compared with the previous period).

Average reach per day on ESO’s Facebook and Twitter for the period 8-16 April was 1.6 million, with a big peak on 10 April.

ESO’s social media had the most impact in Europe, but our messages reached people in other parts of the world as well: North America, South America, India, South East Asia and Australia.

The #EHTBlackHole hashtag of the event was trending as number 1 on Twitter globally. 22

The ESO post with the most clicks and most Reach was the Tweet promoting the 17-minute movie. It reached 3.1 million people and had 14,100 clicks.

● The ESO tweet with the main results was seen 1 047 702 times, had 118 226 engagements, out of which 7928 were retweets. ● The ESO Facebook post with the main results reached 158 615 people and 10 000 reactions. ● Other ESO-relevant messages are four dedicated tweets to ALMA and APEX (two each), which reached over 100 000 people each. ● ESO saw a 5% increase in Twitter followers (+3685) and 1% increase in Facebook friends (+4863).

On Instagram, ESO announced the start of the live conference and promoted the actual image and results via another post. With only 6 posts in total, including the teasing campaign, the impact on ESO’s Instagram was impressive. Our number of followers doubled, from 28 038 to 55 545. The main post of the discovery reached 391 230 people, had 50 854 likes and 1059 comments.

On ESO’s YouTube, the videos from the period 10–16 April had 1.05 million views.

At 20:00 ESO and collaborators hosted a Reddit Ask Me Anything Science AMA session with scientists from the entire collaboration, who answered people’s questions. We had 1600 comments on the thread.

Memes In addition to the impact seen on social media, another remarkable aspect of this result was the amount of popular culture references that were shared on social media, demonstrating that the image not only had reached people far wider than seen for other results before, but also that people seemed to be as excited about the results as the scientific community, and shared them heavily on social media.

Facebook at this moment.

In the hours following the public release of the image, it gained significant popularity online as an “exploitable” or “meme”. For example, a post made by Redditor Dragonjazz, referencing Surprised Pikachu meme, gained over 33,600 upvotes in four hours. Some examples are below.

The black hole even featured in evening satirical/humor programs like television El Intermedio, La Sexta, Spain (see here). And Heute Show, ZDF, Germany (see here).

El Intermedio, La Sexta, Spain. We now know where all the missing socks go...

Heute Show, ZDF.

ERC media monitoring

The ERC and the European Commission published a joint press release - EU-funded scientists unveil first ever image of a black hole – and shared the story on social media. The ERC also published, in collaboration with Horizon Magazine, a web article, a magazine interview with the three grantees and a video, and distributed the news through an email update to more than 50,000 recipients.

The black hole image campaign resulted in around 970 media items that mentioned the ERC, with an estimated potential reach of some 920 million people.

27 Out of these media mentions, around 320 were harvested between 1 and 10 April — after the media advisory was published by the ERC, ESO and other members of EHT collaboration. The story was also pre-announced by the European Commission in a midday press briefing on 5 April (min. 7:30). The highest peak in coverage was registered on 10 April, when the news was broken, and over 650 media mentions were counted on 10 April and the 14 days following the official announcement.

Media mentions over time.

In the days after the announcement, mainstream media around the world published interviews with the protagonists of the story and ERC grantee Heino Falcke was particularly visible. In Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (DE), he highlighted the importance of the black hole discovery and of the contributions made by the Europeans, also thanks to the ERC. Features of Prof. Falcke in BBC Mundo (UK), El Nacional (VE) and Semana (CO) stressed that it was the ERC to provide the initial funding for his black hole research after years of quest. He was also interviewed e.g. by NRC (NL) and the Flemish main daily news show "Terzake" (BE, min. 28:40). ERC President Jean-Pierre Bourguignon was featured by France 24 on 11 April. TVN 24 (PL) interviewed Monika Mościbrodzka and other Polish scientists who participated in the EHT project. RAI Radio 1 - Caffé Europa (IT, min. 0 – 3:10) interviewed head of Commission’s representation in Milan, who emphasised the key role of ERC funding and grantees, the ERC’s mission and the importance of fundamental research.

Top 6 locations of media mentions.

Social media The social media campaign used the full potential of the European Commission’s Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts. Commission’s social media team shared related posts on all its accounts. The actions were among the most successful content an EU institution has ever published: ● Twitter: 5 tweets with a total of 2.7 million impressions and 240 thousand engagements. The tweet of the picture was the most successful ever published by the European Commission. ● YouTube: more than 3.1 million viewers ● Instagram: more than 21 thousand engagements and reached 139,757 people. The European Commission’s #RealBlackHole Instagram post was the most successful content of an EU social media Instagram account ever both in terms of engagements and in terms of reach. ● Facebook: the post with the image reached 1.5 million users.

The ERC also shared 40 posts on the ERC’s own accounts, generating some 3.5 thousand interactions (either likes, comments or shares). The most popular post was on Twitter, a photo of the image. The next most popular was on Facebook, the video story produced by the ERC.

Three social media posts were proposed via SMARP, an EU employee engagement app. 166 users shared them, generating 403 interactions, with a potential reach of 105,590.

The story generated around 2,800 earned social media mentions of the ERC, potentially reaching some 36 million users on Facebook (21m), Twitter (15m) and YouTube (45k), plus an estimated 1,000 reactions (comments and quote-tweets) on the day of the announcement. Among top ERC influencers were the European Commission, Italian news agency ANSA, and ScienceAlert.

The video the ERC prepared on the story was uploaded as native content to all social media channels, achieving some 53 thousand views in total, mostly on Twitter. On Commissioner Moedas’ Twitter account, this video alone generated nearly 2 thousand interactions making it his most successful tweet ever.

Countries of origin among the recipients of the ERC Update show a prevalence of people connected from the United Kingdom (13%). The article reached an above average result in terms of total number of clicks, when compared to articles sent on previous ERC Updates.

ESO Products

As ESO was not a member of the EHT consortium it was a bit hard to position ESO among the many EHT organisations and partners, despite ESO’s important contributions to ALMA and APEX.

A press release was written up with a rich set of visuals: 20 images and 13 videos.

To boost the visibility of ESO, Mariya Lyubenova even succeeded with a targeted observing campaign to take a beautiful new “reference” VLT image of M87.

A special ESO EHT landing page was also set up, and has had hundreds of thousands of views.

The story made it into place #4 on ESO’s Science top-10.

A check soon after the publication on Meltwater found 487 stories for “ESO + black hole” plus an unknown number for “European Southern Observatory +black hole”, which leads us to believe that at least 13%, and more likely up to 20%, of the articles worldwide mention ESO.

The ESO web site had undergone a sophisticated hardware and software upgrade in the months before the release and was ready to sustain far higher traffic than in previous years. Despite this, the ESO web pages were somewhat saturated for around 60 minutes from 15:00 to 16:00 on 10 April (especially for low-bandwidth connections). In the first 6 days after the release, ESO accumulated 36 million hits on its web pages. And 1.1 million views of the press release itself.

It is estimated that the press release got at least 7 times more visitors and traffic than the optical counterpart detection of gravitational waves (LIGO/VIRGO) release (eso1733).

Side Stories

Apart from memes there were several other “side-stories” to this viral news story that took on a significant life of their own. Some examples: 1. The Hawaiian perspective: Pōwehi; 2. The “China’s largest stock photo provider draws fire over use of black hole image” story; 3. The Katie Bouman story: the “student who did the main imaging algorithm”; 4. Political Connections 5. Rebound University 30

1. The Hawaiian perspective: Pōwehi

M87*, the black hole was nicknamed “Pōwehi” by Hawaiian Professor Larry Kimura of University of Hawaii at Hilo (UH Hilo), and spread by press release3. The nickname, meaning “embellished dark source of unending creation,” comes from “Kumulipo”, an 18th-century chant to the creation of the Hawaiian universe. Although the story naturally was a bit exaggerated since the International Astronomical Union is the naming authority in astronomy, it gave the story a new life and huge visibility in Hawai’i and beyond, as well as a long-deserved focus on the cultural aspects of astronomy.

A plot showing press clippings with time from the subset of the EHT storyline related to Bennet Group's collaboration with JCMT and SMA and the nickname.

2. China’s largest stock photo provider draws fire over use of black hole image4 A Chinese photo-sharing community set off a public outcry over allegedly claiming exclusive rights to the black hole photo and a wider debate over copyrights practices in China.

As soon as the black hole photo was released on 10 April, Visual China Group (VCG), China’s leading stock image provider (compared to Getty Images and owns Flickr’s one-time rival 500px), made the image available for sale in its library without attribution to the EHT: “This is an editorial image. Please call 400-818-2525 or consult our customer service representative for commercial use,” said a note for the black hole image on VCG’s website.

Internet users took to social media shaming VCG for monetising a photo intended for free distribution among the human race with a plethora of comments on Weibo condemning VCG’s opportunist business practice. Shares of VCG (500 MEUR in assets) plunged 27% on 12 April.

3 https://www.eaobservatory.org/jcmt/2019/04/powehi/ 4 https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/11/vcg-black-hole-image/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer_us=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ 29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_cs=dSS7G-VdBWKH9PtK7NRZvg 31

Government intervention followed on the heels of online criticisms. On 12 April, internet regulators in Tianjin, where VCG’s parent company is based, ordered the photo site to end its “illegal, rule-breaking practices” and VCG to temporarily shut down its website while amending its practices and tightening its management. The company has responded with a public apology, blaming the incidents on poor oversight of third-party contributors and “We have taken down all non-compliant photos and closed down the site voluntarily for a revamp in accordance with related laws,” said VCG. The VCG website remains closed as of 1 May 2019.

Whereas it is actually not against the Creative Commons Attribution licensing to distribute an image at a cost, hopefully this strong message is received by other stock photo agencies. They are not allowed to change the credit, and need to ensure that the Creative Commons message is distributed with the image as well. Often press agencies change the credit, but it does not seem to have happened this time5.

3. Katie Bouman6

On 10 April 2019, Redditor iKojan tweeted a photograph of Dr Katie Bouman, identifying her as “the computer scientist behind the first-ever image of a black hole” (shown below). Within 48 hours, the post gathered 195,800 points (86% upvoted) and 6,200 comments on /r/pics.

5 https://www.apnews.com/05d573dd29924452a491431922d22e61 6 See https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/powehi-first-image-of-black-hole 32

That day, Redditor GrumpyWendigo posted the photo to /r/photoshopbattles, where numerous edited examples were submitted in the comments. Meanwhile, a post titled “This is Andrew Chael. He wrote 850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black hole image algorithm” to /r/pics, which was subsequently deleted for having an “inappropriate title” The following day, Redditor SmellyTheBluCow submitted a post titled “Katie Bouman should not be getting credit for the picture if the black hole” to /r/unpopularopinion, citing the project’s GitHub page showing that programmers Andrew Chael and Michael Johnson contributed a majority of commits. That day, Chael posted a thread on Twitter condemning “sexist attacks” on Bouman:

Andrew Chael @thisgreyspirit (1/7) So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the eht-imaging software library (https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging …) to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman. Stop. 91.8K 3:48 AM — Apr 12, 2019 37.3K people are talking about this

On 12 April, Redditor DankMemesKing777 posted an edited version of the photo with Minecraft on her computer screen to /r/dankmemes, where it gained over 54,200 points (93% upvoted) and 560 comments.

33 On 11 April, The New York Times published an article about how Katie Bouman accidentally became the face of the Black Hole project. The article features Feryal Özel, University of Arizona, and Sara Issaoun, Radboud University, highlighting that the image was a team effort.

On 11 April, The Washington Post bouman published an article about the online controversy surrounding Bouman’s work titled “Trolls hijacked a scientist’s image to attack Katie Bouman. They picked the wrong astrophysicist.” A whole slew of articles, blog posts, and posts followed and took on a life of its own.

The EHT communications group discussed the case on a videocon and, despite the personal attacks on Bouman, the strong recommendation from seasoned communicators was to not make a public statement to set the record straight due to the Streisand Effect, and the relatively low fraction of female collaborators in the EHT project. One could even argue that this story put the spotlight on an under-represented group in the project.

4. Political Connections The nature of this result as a) positive, b) a big step for humanity, c) benign, and d) most importantly a big peaceful international collaboration across borders and boundaries, was not lost on journalists. It was in other words exactly what Brexit or Trump was not representing and for a few hours or days gave us all a break in all the bad vibes in the news.

UK front page. Prime minister May in the black hole of Brexit delays.

The picture — Marcos Peña fell in a black hole — (headline) The black hole of prices — The black hole of industry — The black hole of science.

Illustration by artist Cristina Fernandes on the events happening on the day in Brussels. Credit: Cristina Fernandes.

5. Candy, Cereal and Software Twitter is much popular than any other social network services in Japan. Just after the press conference, a candy company posted a photo of their product (ring-shaped pineapple candy) with a caption of “black hole,” that gained 3400RTs and 8600 favs. Kellogg’s Japan posted a photo of their product (ring-shaped cereal) after a TV documentary featuring Mareki Honma, in which he ate that cereal “for good luck.” A digital company that produces software to make characters for Vtuber started to distribute a design file of an “eye” inspired by the EHT image.

6. Photo-op stand becomes a tourist destination The other interesting topic is a “photo-op stand” of the EHT image. The panel is installed at the NAOJ Mizusawa VLBI Observatory. The tweet showing the picture gained 9600 RT and 12800 favs. It went viral, and several newspapers introduced it. As a result, the Observatory became a popular tourist destination and welcomed nearly four times more visitors in the holiday season in early May than last year. Some visitors came to the observatory from their home several hundred km away.

7. “Rebound University”

Credit: BBC

Heino Falcke made headlines worldwide on 10 April, after demonstrating the first image of a black hole. The exact name of the university that the researcher works for went a bit wrong. "Rebound University" wrote the British channel behind the job title of the researcher during a live broadcast of BBC News and went viral (at least in the Netherlands) via Twitter.

Other results

● Tagesschau — press conference stream — https://youtu.be/mvgyUmK3Qcs — had more than 360,000 views. ● Space Videos — https://youtu.be/pl9kmx_M9QU — has so far had 240,000 views. ● ZDF live Terra X — https://youtu.be/A8RPRN2964k — has so far had more than 700,000 views. ● ESO’s film In the Shadow of the Black Hole has so far had almost 750,000 views https://youtu.be/omz77qrDjsU. ● ESO zooming into the heart… — https://youtu.be/9DILtg_9dcU — 225,000 views. ● Javier Santaolalla — Date un Vlog — https://youtu.be/X3zxt3hGFHY — 730,000 views. 38

The EHT result was honoured with its own Google Doodle.

And was on the front page of Wikipedia as the prime news of the day.

And even was honoured with two xkcds.

Appendix A: Pros and Cons

A few selected Pros and Cons for the campaign.

A few selected Pros

● Most people on the planet now know that humans have taken a picture of a black hole. ● A big push for astronomy and international peaceful collaboration ● Much more press in Brussels than expected (and more than we could have had at ESO) ● Huge visibility to the politicians. Putting science on the agenda in Brussels… ● The exhibition was well perceived and appreciated. ● An afterglow of public conferences and events followed the conference all across Europe (as an example, the public lecture in Frankfurt on 17 April with Heino Falcke, Luciano Rezzolla, and Michael Kramer was much appreciated (more than 400 visitors); the recording can be viewed here) ● Science overshone the political events of the day (Brexit) ● The Brussels press conference was partly sleek because it was managed by the Spokespersons Service, and among other things, because we limited the time of the presentations (and in Marcin’s opinion the number of visuals used). The rehearsals the day before with a professional communication consultant helped a lot too. ● International simultaneous press conferences made a big appeal to the people in various part of the world that the result is a monumental step in science brought by international collaboration.

A few selected Cons

● The Brussels press conference was to some degree taken over by the politicians and directed by the Spokesperson Service: Only EHT and EU logos were shown on the screen. The other organisations were not really visible, despite their big efforts. ● None of the amazing visuals were shown in the Brussels webcasting (and only one per speaker on the screen). The press conference was put on stage following a political type of conference, as opposed to the standard scientific conference. For the future, we recommend a closer collaboration so that the best of both setups (political and scientific) are put together. ● The factsheets were never concluded and published. A last-minute simpler timeline was produced by Eduardo Ros and Lars Lindberg Christensen on the ESO EHT page. ● After months of discussion on the text of the press releases, not everyone released a common version in the end. ● The EHT Brussels speakers and communicators had to respect the restrictions of the EC which made their work hard. ● Entering the Berlaymont Building was not overall smoothly and had to be announced well in advance (security restrictions). ● The timing of the Brussels event (late afternoon) also didn’t allow us to do more in Brussels (e.g., presentation to European Parliament committee similar to what our NSF colleagues did in Washington). ● The timing of the embargo lift (22:07 in Japan) was not optimal for East Asia. Newspapers, especially for the editions to be distributed to the outlying regions (the number of readers is bigger than in city areas) in Japan could not include the EHT results in their morning issue.