Ethics of science journalism - Journal theme section
steffi suhr
Wednesday, 03 September 2008 10:09 UTC
The journal Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics (ESEP) has launched a unique theme section on the Ethics of science journalism, which brings together the views of all parties involved in science journalism and bringing science to the public today: writers (freelance and staff), editors, publishers, and scientists themselves. The theme section is built online and articles are published rapidly with free Open Access.
Scope
Science journalism is facing tough challenges today. The general public, the lay readers, have a desire—and a right—to learn what new discoveries are being made, and how they may affect their everyday lives… and they rely on science journalism to bring them this information. However, topics are often very complex and difficult to relay in terms that are understandable for the non-expert, and they can be politicized or pushed by different lobbies. Topics such as climate change or stem cell research affect humanity on an existential level, and the ethics involved in portraying these topics—how, or indeed whether to portray them—are complex.
Updated 04 March 2009 08:48 UTC
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The second article in this theme section is now published online.
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I have to confess here that it (the second aticle) is by me.
As a result of that, Steffi is an excellent editor, I can attest! -
By the way, I’ve now read the first article in the section, about “fast food science reporting”. I think it is a nicely written piece and I think the author is right about the trend away from the newspaper science supplement. The entire newspaper industry is suffering tremendous losses, and so-called specialist coverage in areas such as scientific research and book reviews are disappearing at the same time that travel and other sponsored supplements are increasing.
That aside, I do think that Michael Gross is confounding the issue of “fast science reporting in a snippet” with the decline of science feature coverage print newspapers. Science has always been reported in “rubbish snippets”, written to fast deadlines, in newsapapers and probably always will be. Science features, however, have moved somewhere else – to Nature magazine for example, which in the time Michael first writes about, had no science news features, but now has two or three a week – and very good they are, too. Or New Scientist, or various online science magazines.
I think is he right about blogging- most scientists don’t blog about their or others’ scientific research (or don’t all the time). A lot of scientists who blog are not primarily writing about research. I think more scientists will start blogging, and will do so about their research, as for example we can see by the increasing number of blogs about scientific research here, on Nature Network, since August – i.e. a period of less than six months.
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The sad thing about newspapers reducing their science coverage is, however, a loss in readership from the general public. Sure, Nature, Science, New Scientist, Scientific American all supply news stories, but science stories in newspapers have a broader audience. When I grew up I certainly had no access to Nature and the like, but to Süddeutsche Zeitung for example.
I am not so worried about PhD-level educated people having to revert to scientific magazines for in-depth reporting. It is the connection to the broader society that is lost. This is not only sad, but also jeopardizes the recognition of the work scientists do, and ultimately, status and funding.
And all this because in my opinion publishers underestimate the interest from their readers. Sure, such pages won’t attract much advertisement. But this doesn’t say much about relevance and/or interest from readers.
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Yes, I agree, Joerg – people have to make a conscious decision to buy a specialist science magazine – the casual reader is lost.
Another point is the science that does get in – through the lifestyle and health features – are sometimes woefully inaccurate, but maybe because they give a nod in the direction of ‘science’ the newspaper may point to that as their ‘science-feature’, consider the scientific box ticked and the readers end up not non-informed but misinformed – which I think must be worse.
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Even with those science sections in newspapers that still exist, there’s an interesting aspect – at least here in Germany.
I was at a science journalism meeting in Bremen two weeks ago and sat in on a rather interesting discussion. Two things I heard struck me most:
- the senior science editor at the dpa (the biggest German news agency) described that their ‘agenda’ is pretty much determined by the press release embargoes of Nature and Science, and that they rarely have time to look at anything else.
- a science journalist from the audience got up saying ‘we don’t want to just translate Nature press releases’.
Surely there are other things for those science writers that still do work for newspapers to write about? How do the subscribers to this forum pick up their topics?
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p.s. If you haven’t already, I do recommend taking the time to read both Maxine and Michael’s articles – they touch on a lot of points that have been coming up around NN over the last few months (well, since I’ve been watching!).
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Just one more nail in the coffin, CNN has yesterday announced what amounts to a drastic cutback in science coverage
Seems though there is plenty of support for their correspondent Miles O’Brien on twitter
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I attended that Science Journalism meeting in Bremen (Wissenswerte) together with Steffi and Matt Brown. Among other things I learned that the science pages are among the most popular pages in daily newspapers. And that there is a trend to rather increase science coverage in some German newspapers (e.g. Die Welt).
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Maxine, thank you for the very nice article on Ethics of science communication on the web. There has been a very heated discussion on this very topic on scienceblogs.com and scienceblogs.de the past few days. A lot of it is in German, but it started out with a blog post by Orac (here is his second post on the topic). One question that was discussed: Should all science blog posts be scientifically sound or is freedom of opinion more important?
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