An Early Look at The Future of Science Journalism

I think you're right about the future of science journalism, Matt. And I think the best success in communicating will happen for the work of scientists who can participate personally in the communication effort. One example of this might be a side-blog (a side bar blog) next to an online research presentation, detailing the research process, interesting aspects of the data collection, and antecedents of the work.

Mark,
Very, very interesting idea...

Matthew -

I am a big fan and regular reader of all the sites you mention - DotEarth, the Observatory, the Yale Climate Forum. I also am an enthusiastic blogger on the topics I cover as a journalist, both professionally and personally. But I strongly disagree with the notion that these forms are or should be the future of what I do.

All of these forms - my blogs, DotEarth, etc. - appeal to a self-selected audience that already has an interest in the topics I'm covering. That's fine. But the most important thing I can do is get these ideas, in different form, into the hands of the more widespread general readership that goes out every morning to pick their newspaper up off of their driveway. That's where the important approaches to issues like media agenda-setting and framing can take place. That's the only way we can get people interested enough to then self-select and drill down deeper.

John,
I don't disagree with you, but the problem is that increasingly these mainstream outlets are being taken off the table by economic pressures. Where will science journalists then find work and jobs? It's in these new mediums.

Moreover, new genres and forms of documentaries like Flock of Dodos are great tools for reaching new audiences. So are the type of multimedia tools and sites that museums like The Exploratorium are building.

The key is to have these sites but also to facilitate incidental exposure to science through other vehicles like entertainment media campaigns, that spark motivation and traffic back to these sites.

Matthew -

Part of the problem here is the very notion of the "science journalist." It's very important to tease out the two different threads that make up "science journalism." To the extent that economic pressures cause mainstream outlets to abandon what I call "gee whiz coverage" - the latest black hole discoveries, or string theory, or dinosaur bones - I will be sad (because I love to write that sort of stuff, and to read it). But whatever. We're taking lots of subject matter off the table because of economic pressures.

To the extent that my industry abandons journalism in which science is integrated into important societal issues - energy policy, ag policy, water policy, climate, health care - I think it's a critical failure both in terms of our ethical obligations our economic future. Far more people pick up the Albuquerque Journal off of their driveway every morning than will ever go see Flock of Dodos when it shows up at the local cineplex. I think that sort of coverage - smart and insightful mainstream media writing that helps readers understand issues they never would have self-selected to be curious about until we offer up a headline to lure them into a story - is critical for the long term economic survival of my shrinking industry.

BTW, the Observatory is at www.cjr.org/the_observatory/

I believe you are right that nonprofits will increasingly underwrite science journalism, at least until the for-profit press figures out how to stay alive on the Web. I have a rare perspective, having been a producer of geology-related content and commentary since 1997 on About.com, a for-profit site now part of the NY Times empire. To me, the fact that no serious competition has arisen in all this time says that the for-profit model is marginal. Very few blogs support their writers, and none are science blogs (although I would love to be contradicted).

But the nonprofit sector already employs science writers as public information officers or PIOs, the folks who feed everyone else with their press releases. Who is in the best position to move into the next model of science writing?

I think this conversation would be well suited to expand and address the future of science communication, not just journalism. There is tremendous movement right now in the informal science education community (includes science centers, zoos, etc.) to create live (and virtual) interactive experiences that seek to improve the public understanding of science. And the face of this effort is also changing and growing (see the NSF funded initiative: www.nisenet.org, or these museum sites: http://www.smm.org/buzz/, http://www.redshiftnow.ca/). The science journalism community and the informal science education community would benefit from engaging in conversation and learning together.

We need librarians showing up.

I'd love to see more of you science journalists documenting ways to use the libraries. And pointing to them as your sources. And running sidebars on everything you write online that accumulate citations to your articles over time, leading readers to corrections and updates and refutations and extensions. Science Magazine and other such article presentations are good models for that.

Right now, this article about what's missing is far too close to the bone, I think, about what's missing from science journalists' writings online. Take to heart, please:

http://news.ala.org/ala/alonline/resources/selectedarticles/10reasonswh…

Recently, a small band of university PR people -- most of us former reporters -- created sciencecrossroads.wordpress.com. The idea is to synthesize all the science stories that exist, but aren't getting told on a large scale. We can drop our institutional boundaries, in some instances, for the sake of delivering news to a broader audience.
I've been on both sides of science storytelling, as a reporter at daily newspapers and as a media relations flak at major research universities. I've witnessed the steady decline of science reporting in the mainstream media (I left newspapers after my editor told me "no one wants to read about science"). Paradoxically, I've been part of an increase of science news, the digging up of stories from labs and clinics. We just haven't done a very good job of getting science stories and news into the hands of the general public, which is why framing science and Science Crossroads are important.

While I'm excited about multi-media, synthetical, analytical, opinionated, personal narrative science reporting, I'm a bit more hesitant about leaving it all to universities, museums and think tanks. It's not that I'm sorry to see the "objective", "balanced" science reporting go, but I think institutions like these have agendas that would narrow the scope of science stories in other ways. My experience is that these institutions are more concerned about advertising their own achievements, and not so much about the science per se. While this doesn't have to be a problem as long as the origin of the reporting is made explicit, it doesn't necessarily make for interesting journalism either.

My most important concern however, is that science reporting from institutions invariably focuses on results and findings. What I'd like to see, is more journalism that focuses on questions, and then try to answer them from different angles, but with more emphasis on context and process than on numbers and studies. The questions could be everything from broad, societal issues (like "how much money does this country spend on medical research every year, and what do we get for this money?") to specific scientific ones (like "why isn't there a linear relationship between CO2 emissions and CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere?"). I think this is a kind of journalism that mainstream media would be more equipped to handle. However, since the mainstream media obviously don't make this kind of science journalism a priority, I may just be na�vely optimistic on their behalf - or unnecessarily pessimistic on behalf of universities etc...

Universities that are inheriting all the dispirited science journalists can and should tell their stories directly to the public.
We're trying it at Duke on a monthly magazine called Duke Research. (clever, huh?) Vanderbilt and Harvard have also launched online replacements of the old research magazine.
On our site, note the short prose and multimedia - we can tell a huge science story better with a half-dozen different media than we could with one honking huge 2000 word article. You hear the scientist speaking, see them in their environment and can even shoot them a question. (http://research.duke.edu) It's science, it's journalism, and it's a heck of a lot more fun than working in a newsroom.

Thanks for a very informative article

Hi

Very interesting article, although I have to say I'm less convinced by these new media outlets. As much as you and I love blogging and indie media, I don't see any of it competing with the mainstream media presence online any time soon, especially given the billions of page impressions they serve. It seems that in the blogosphere so far, we're preaching to the converted, and is that really going to change the face of journalism?

Anyway, I wrote a post in reply to this on my own fledgling blog, at http://layscience.net/?q=node/20. I hope you don't mind. I love your blog here, and I'm very passionate myself about trying to improve the media/science relationship.

Take care,
Martin

I think it's quite interesting that we are seeing a rise of "reporter" scientists as we see the fall of science reporting by trained journalists in mainstream media. Those of us who make a profession out of reporting science have seen fewer outlets; some of us have turned to the Web and new forms of media (vodcasts, etc.) out of a need to branch out and get the word out about science.

I turned to blogging in 2002 as a way of getting news out there that I wasn't seeing in mainstream media. The MM may get the big stories out there, but doesn't always find the smaller stories, or go as much in-depth as some online reporters do.

Long before blogging was even a thought, I worked on both sides of the fence, as an astronomy researcher but also as a graduate student doing reseach into the disconnect between media and science. Some ten years after my thesis was defended, I still see gatekeeper action on the part of some scientists, misunderstanding of how science works on the part of some mainstream writers (although this is NOT true of the dedicated science writers out there), and mutual mistrust and suspicion between the two camps. This is somewhat ironic, since both science and journalism at their best both partake in a search for answers to questions. They have more in common than they think.

cc peterson said: "The MM may get the big stories out there, but doesn't always find the smaller stories, or go as much in-depth as some online reporters do."

I don't disagree with that at all, and I share your ambitions. I guess the part I'm skeptical about is whether bloggers really "get the word out about science" the way that some people imply they do. It strikes me that bloggers (and to a lesser extent perhaps popular science writers) are largely preaching to the choir. My question then would be how can we change our approach to blogging in order to reach people we wouldn't get to normally? If that isn't possible, then we're stuck behind a firewall of mainstream science editors.

Martin

I am a science journalist/communicator in Zurich and agree that the future of our profession is the web. Scientists and research institutions will pay us for telling their stories. However, it seems that it is still a long way. At least at the University of Zurich, scientists are not ready yet for the big science communication breakthrough. If you talk to a professor for funding - even if it is just a couple of thousand bucks - he will tell you that he has no money. Not even for writing the odd press release. The biggest hurdles at the moment are the minds of the scientists. They have to learn that communication and story telling matters but that they have to spend money for it to happen. (Mind you, when you write about them in a national newspaper they jump up and down in joy and call you a hero.)

Hi Atlant - funnily enough my parents used to live near Zurich for a bit, lovely city.

I agree with what you're saying completely. There's a problem on three different levels here - professors who don't understand the (often intangible) benefit of working with the media; the press offices at major institutions who dumb things down too far; and then the science editors who control the scene.

As an early-career researcher I have access to media training courses and so on, but there's still little institutional will to take this kind of individual training seriously - scientists do science, press officers deal with the media.

As I wrote on my own site, I'm really not convinced by this new media bandwagon though. What annoys me a little bit is that we have this little army of bloggers saying "woo, look at us blogging, we're the future", but in reality the Internet at blogging has changed nothing about science and the media. The scientists sit in one little group of blogs and chat, and the quacks sit in another group, and the two throw insults to each other from time to time. Meanwhile, it's the traditional media companies - Fox, CNN, BBC, Daily Mail and so on - who are reaching out to the public in ever greater numbers.

The internet has changed the format and the style, but it's still the same story regarding science news and science editors. I don't see how blogging is likely to change that, but then I don't really have any clever ideas either...