Feature
Minding the Media Gap
LESLEY EVANS OGDEN
Bridging the shifting scientist–journalist cultural divide
A
s the golden light of evening
meets the deep green panorama
of vineyards and distant mountains
outside Missoula, Montana, I am
seated at the Ten Spoon Winery with
three conservation biology graduate
students. For the first time in its history, in 2014, 16 journalists attended
the Society of Conservation Biology
meeting through a travel fellowship
hosted by COMPASS and supported
by the Wilburforce, Turner, and Darby
Foundations. In the informal atmosphere of sunset and wine, I am the
last to introduce myself, and there is
an immediate and awkward silence
when I utter the words “I am a science
journalist.” Yet, within a few minutes
of conversation, those uncomfortable barriers broke down. It strikes
me as an interesting allegory for a
larger phenomenon. Effective media
coverage of science requires trust
between scientists and journalists. But
to gain trust, there must be mutual
understanding.
Historically, a gap has been perceived between scientists and the
media. Does such a gap still exist? A
growing wealth of research is challenging, and updating the idea that
science and media cultures remain
siloed and distrustful. Various initiatives are working to improve mutual
understanding. Scientists and journalists occupy distinct cultural milieu,
but in a boundary-transcending digital
world, there is evidence that the cultural divide is being bridged, reshaped,
and reinvented.
The Ten Spoon Winery, in Montana, was a friendly environment for reporters
and scientists to get to know one another at the 2014 North American Congress
for Conservation Biology. Photograph: Lesley Evans Ogden.
Is there a gap?
Metaphors such as distance, gap, barrier, fence, oil and water, and creative
tension have often been used to characterize the scientist–journalist relationship, explains Hans Peter Peters in
a paper published in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences
in 2013 (www.pnas.org/content/110/
Supplement_3/14102.full). Peters, a
social scientist at the Research Center
in Jülich, Germany, studies the public
communication of science, exploring
interactions between scientists and
journalists, a research area dating back
to the 1970s.
Peters’s research explores whether
the gap between the professional cultures of scientists and journalists is
more perception than reality. The
answer is yes—and no. “The relationship between scientists and journalists is much better than is usually
assumed,” says Peters. It is a gap that
doesn’t fit the preconception that scientists are on one side, and journalists
or the public are on the other. The
reality, says Peters, is more nuanced.
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It’s not a gap dividing scientists from
the public, but rather “a gap dividing
science from the public,” says Peters,
arguing that the gap is created by the
professionalism of science.
Science is a domain that not everybody is expected to master. “Scientific
knowledge nowadays is often so esoteric that it is largely incomprehensible
to outsiders, even for scientists from
other disciplines,” writes Peters in
Mètode, Popular Science Journal of the
University of Valencia (doi:10.7203/
metode.80.3043). “On one hand, this
boundary protects the knowledgecreation process against ‘corrupting’
external influences of, for instance,
money, political power, or political
correctness. On the other hand, the
boundary creates a barrier for communication and collaboration across
the borders of science.”
Therein lies the challenge for
journalists charged with the job of
making complex and jargon-laden
scientific information accessible to a
public audience. As highlighted by
Dan Vergano, senior writer–editor
at National Geographic, speaking at
the second Sackler Colloquium of
the National Academy of Sciences,
journalists must generate good stories
quickly. Rapid reporting on science
is a task potentially fraught with a
minefield of misunderstanding. Yet,
in a 2008 study published in Science
that sampled researchers in the United
States, Japan, Germany, the United
Kingdom, and France (the top research
and development countries at the time;
doi:10.1126/science.1157780), Peters
and his colleagues found that most
scientists are satisfied with their media
relations. Overall, 46 percent of the
respondents perceived the impact of
their past 3 years of media interactions
to have been “mostly positive.” Only 3
percent reported a “mostly negative”
impact. Nearly 20 percent felt that the
positive and negative impacts of their
interactions balanced out.
“Of course there are risks,” says
Peters. One thing perceived as a problem by scientists is that they do not
have real control over what happens
if they talk to a journalist. In a study
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Christopher Joyce of National Public Radio interviews marine ecologist
James Lindholm at a COMPASS communication workshop for scientists
working on climate change impacts in California. Nancy Baron, the workshop
leader, watches from the sidelines. COMPASS workshops not only help
scientists’ communication to media and policymakers but also foster better
communication across disciplines. Photograph: Kenneth R. Weiss, Pulitzer
Center on Crisis Reporting.
he completed in 1995 (doi:10.1177/0
16344395017001003), and in several
studies since, scientists and journalists
were asked whether journalists should
give scientists a draft of their article
for checking prior to publication. This
turned out to be the area of greatest disagreement. Copy checking with
sources before material is published is
indeed a prickly issue. Even within the
science journalism community, there
is not universal agreement on whether
it should be prohibited.
Nancy Baron, the director of science outreach for COMPASS, a United
States–based science communications
organization, explains that, when it
comes to checking content before
publication, “everybody has different
rules.” For some journalists, explains
Baron, it is a firing offense to share
their prepublished writing with a
source. Scientists should not expect
that a journalist will take them up
on their offer to copy check. “Don’t
hold it against them” if they can’t, says
Baron. Quite often, what journalists
complain about is that in the hands
of a copy-checking scientist, a snappy
quote may be rewritten into frustratingly dull and lifeless text. Whether or
not to copy check remains an ongoing
and unresolved tension between the
camps.
More similar than different?
Baron, one of my instructors at the
2011 Banff Science Communications
program during my own bridge-crossing journey from scientist to journalist, points out that although there
are many differing cultural norms
between scientists and journalists, they
also have much in common. Scientists
and journalists are inquisitive, analytical, skeptical, and competitive. They
are independent thinkers. “They want
to get there first,” says Baron, and
they are passionate about finding the
answers. She describes scientists and
journalists as two sides of the same
coin. In her book, Escape from the
Ivory Tower: A Guide to Making Your
Science Matter, Baron quotes journalist David Helvarg as saying that
“scientists are obsessive compulsives,
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while journalists have ADD (attention
deficit disorder).”
Journalists want to dive in, dig
deep, kick hard, and move on, explains
Baron, whereas scientists delve deeper
and deeper into their topic, a quest that
may last only as long as their 3-year
grant or might occupy them for their
entire career. Because science is slow
and ongoing, that difference of time
frames makes for tension. “It’s really
hard for scientists to understand the
pressures and time frame that journalists are working under,” argues Baron.
Helping scientists more effectively
communicate their research to mass
media was the idea behind the founding of science media centers (SMC)
worldwide. The first was established in
the United Kingdom in 2002. The UK
SMC’s philosophy is that “the media
will DO science better when scientists
DO the media better.” SMCs now exist
in the United Kingdom, Australia,
New Zealand, Japan, and Canada, with
plans being discussed for additional
centers in Denmark and the United
States. Each is autonomous, but they
all share a central goal of providing the
public and policymakers with accurate,
evidence-based information about science through a media conduit. The UK
SMC is particularly focused on controversial news stories and was founded
in the wake of frenzied media coverage of genetically modified crops; the
measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR)
vaccine; and animal research.
As British SMC chief executive
Fiona Fox writes in her blog, SMCs are
“something of a scientific experiment.”
Their premise is that when scientists
engage proactively with the media,
the media’s coverage of science is
improved. Anecdotally, at least, these
media centers are a self-professed success. But perhaps oddly for organizations promoting evidence-based
reporting, a rigorous investigation of
the extent to which they influence
media accuracy in the coverage of
science has yet to be published in the
peer-reviewed literature.
One concern aired about SMCs
is the extent to which their content
and focus are influenced by corporate
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David Malakoff of Science interviews fire ecologist Jennifer Balch at
a COMPASS workshop for scientists who work on fire-related issues.
The scientists’ expertise spanned disciplines and included academic,
nongovernmental organizations, and government agency researchers from the
United States and Canada. Photograph: Heather Reiff, COMPASS.
Julia Moore serves on the exploratory committee for a potential US science
media center (SMC). An SMC would help journalists sort out which science
stories are worth reporting.
funders. From the outset, SMCs have
attempted to allay such concerns with
policies that distribute funding so
that no more than 5 to 10 percent
comes from any single source. (At the
Canadian SMC, where I was formerly
employed on a 1-year contract, that
number is 10 percent, whereas in
the United Kingdom, it is usually 5
percent.) Another criticism directed
at the UK SMC is a claim that the
center contributes to lazy, uncritical, prepackaged science reporting,
a practice referred to in the British
press as churnalism. Joseph Milton,
who worked for the UK SMC before
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moving to the Australian SMC, suggests that this argument does not
give British journalists enough credit.
“In the [United Kingdom], there are
quite a large number of specialist science journalists who actually do have
quite good knowledge,” says Milton.
He does not think they are taking
SMC material and just “lapping it up
and reproducing it.” David Miller,
a professor of sociology from the
University of Bath, is more skeptical. His as-yet-unpublished analyses
show, he says, “that the [UK] SMC
concentrates on particular areas of
science controversy and not others
and also that there is a structural
problem of conflict of interest among
the experts they cite.”
Whereas the UK SMC caters largely
to specialist science journalists, providing frequent in-person press briefings
from its headquarters in London, SMC
Canada caters its mainly online services
to what Executive Director Penny Park
calls the “generalist journalists run off
their feet,” those responsible for delivering more content with less time now
that many specialized science journalist
positions have disappeared. Park thinks
that scientists need to engage with
media in a time line that is realistic for
a journalist, “which means if it’s in the
news,” she says, “you’ve got to step up
and talk about it right away. If you don’t,
someone else will, and it might not be
someone who has the same depth of
background or awareness that you have.”
Plans are afoot for the establishment
of a US SMC. Julia Moore, member
of the Science Media Center of the
United States exploratory committee
and former director of legislative and
public affairs at the National Science
Foundation, was living in London in
2000 and 2001 and observed the establishment of the UK SMC. She saw,
“from both close up and afar, what I
thought was the significant impact
that the science media centre was having on science reporting in that country.” So she brought the idea back
to her US science communications
colleagues. A possible US SMC, says
Moore, is a challenging undertaking
and will need to serve a much larger
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Dominique Brossard, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, studies the
intersection of science, media, and public policy. The culture of science is
changing, she found, with the advent of social media and researchers choosing to
don a journalist hat to self-report their findings.
media market than its global cousins.
To take flight, a US center will need
to secure significant long-term funding and partnerships, a process still in
progress. The role of a future US SMC,
hopes Moore, will be a better twoway street between the scientific and
journalistic communities, assisting
journalists to better grasp the science
and sort out which stories are worth
covering and which are based on weak
or dubious research.
SMCs provide valuable services in
terms of helping scientists and journalists better understand and communicate with each other, say SMC
representatives. Susannah Eliott, chief
executive officer of the Australian
SMC, explains that scientists often
misunderstand the role of media.
There is often this perception, she
explains, that the media is there to
educate the public. “What they need
to understand is that media, at the end
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of the day, is a business, and it’s about
enticing an audience, and that means
being entertaining as much as it means
being educational.” Milton concurs,
explaining that journalism is a competition for eyeballs.
Scientists as communicators
In both the science and the journalism
worlds, those eyeballs have increasingly
been attracted to Internet communication and social media. Dominique
Brossard, professor and chair in
the Department of Life Sciences
Communication at the University of
Wisconsin–Madison, focuses much of
her research on the intersection of
science, media, and policy, with a particular interest in new media. She says,
“The culture of science is changing,
with more and more scientists embracing that notion that public engagement
is important and that they also have a
role to play.” Many science columns
have disappeared from mainstream
newspapers, she notes, but a lot of
young scientists are now blogging and
active on Twitter. Direct public communication by scientists is challenging
and changing the traditional practice
that a peer-reviewed paper only gets
into the public sphere through a press
release or a journalist picking it up at a
conference and serving as a knowledge
translator, she suggests. Young scientists are sometimes putting on their
journalist hat, editor hat, or publisher
hat, she says, “and really changing, to
some extent, the rules of the game.”
Both cultures are in flux, and the division between scientists and journalists
has become much more blurred and
complex, says Brossard. “The online
world is extremely complicated,” she
adds, arguing that there is a need for
more empirical research quantifying
the reach and impact of these new
communication channels.
A 2014 paper that Brossard and
Peters coauthored with colleagues
in the United States and Austria
(doi:10.15252/embr.201438979)
explains that “direct communication implies a shift from external
observation to self-presentation of
science.” But the societal function of
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Further information.
Dealing with the Media video series, by the Australian Science Media Centre.
http://sciencemediasavvy.org
Desk Guide to Working with Media, by the New Zealand Science Media Centre.
www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/wp-content/upload/2014/04/SMC-Desk-Guide-forScientists.pdf
Media Tips for Scientists, by the Science Media Centre of Canada. http://sciencemediacentre.ca/site/?page_id=201
Top Tips for Media Work, by the UK Science Media Centre. www.sciencemediacentre.
org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Top-Tips-2012.pdf
Menninger H, Gropp R. 2008. Communicating science: A primer for working with the media. AIBS Public Policy Office, www.aibs.org/publications/
bookstore/communicating_science.html
Peters HP. 2013. Gap between science and media revisited: Scientists as
public communicators, from the Science of Science Communication
Sackler Colloquium. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110
(suppl. 3): 14031–14032. doi:10.1073/pnas.1212745110.
media goes beyond knowledge translation. Journalists search for science
that is relevant and engaging, filtering the voluminous quantity of studies produced by the juggernaut of
modern science. So, argues Peters,
selection by journalists implies a
stamp of societal relevancy and legitimacy. That function seems to still
be considered important to scientists
themselves. Despite the accessibility of self-presentation of research
through channels such as blogs, survey data collected by Brossard, Peters,
and their colleagues (doi:10.1525/
bio.2013.63.4.8) suggest that, at least
for now, their sampled population
of US and German neuroscientists
remains “heavily reliant on journalistic narratives, in both traditional and
online forms, for information about
scientific issues.”
In our new media landscape, Eliott
says she sees a lot of institutions “rubbing their hands and saying, ‘Isn’t
this great? We can bypass the media
altogether and have our own channel.’” But she highlights that scientists
should not underestimate the value of
high-quality investigative journalism.
“I think it’s terribly sad,” she says, “if
we don’t see the value of investigative
journalism to help provide context.”
Universities are not going to write
critically about themselves in a public
forum, she argues, whereas journalists
can do that. In addition, adds Milton,
“The vast majority of people are not
reading scientists’ blogs.”
When it comes to blogs, the vast
majority of scientists are not writing them either, emphasized Elizabeth
Corley, the Lincoln Professor of
Public Policy, Ethics, and Emerging
Technologies at Arizona State
University, presenting at the 2013
Science of Science Communication
II Sackler Colloquium. In the colloquium’s summary, Corley noted a
recent American Association for the
Advancement of Science survey of
scientists across all disciplines, which
showed that “93 percent rarely or
never wrote about their results in a
blog, only 3 percent talked frequently
to reporters about their research, and
just 39 percent talked with nonscientists. However, when asked about
their level of interest in engaging with
the public, 97 percent said it was an
important part of their work,” hinting
at an important disconnect that Corley
attributes to a lack of support and
time, and a general lack of recognition
or credit toward tenure or promotion
for non-peer-reviewed contributions.
Asked for some tips that might
help scientists improve media reporting on their work, Milton suggests
they be available, willing to help,
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and try to understand the pressures
on journalists, especially reporters
that may have no specialist knowledge. These reporters, he explains,
are coming at it from scratch and are
expected to get their heads around
a scientific story and produce an
engaging article in a very short
period of time. “Most journalists
would much rather get it right,” so
scientists need to think about how to
phrase things, and “a snappy turn of
phrase never hurt,” says Milton. Park
adds that, in an interview, scientists
should never expect to get more than
three points across. “Don’t expect to
tell everything,” she says. All of the
SMCs provide resources to help scientists prepare for interactions with
media, including tip sheets and a
video series (see the “Further information” box).
The US group Research!America has
also been involved in helping scientists
communicate more effectively with
media, holding workshops such as that
in October 2013 at George Washington
University, in Washington, DC (www.
researchamerica.org/rmworkshop).
Assisting scientists to interact more
comfortably with media is also the focus
of the AIBS Community Programs
Division and Public Policy Office.
AIBS facilitates media relations workshops for member organizations, helping scientists understand the demands
and challenges of communicating with
reporters and become more comfortable with articulating their research in a
publicly understandable way. Over the
last few years of providing workshops,
division director Robert Gropp says
scientists are becoming increasingly
comfortable talking to reporters. Many
“recognize that it’s a valuable part of the
job,” says Gropp.
As analyses of scientists’ and journalists’ adaptation to a shifting communications landscape continue to
emerge, a greater understanding of
each other’s challenges, time lines, and
operational paradigms could go some
way towards improving mutual understanding. A delineation of two separate
236 BioScience • March 2015 / Vol. 65 No. 3
Robert Gropp, director of AIBS’s Community Programs Division, leads
media workshops to help biologists feel more comfortable talking to reporters.
Photograph: Julie Palakovich Carr, AIBS.
sides is becoming less clear as scientist
bloggers invade a new hybrid zone.
Tools are now available for strengthening the shape-shifting bridges that
exist, and ongoing research suggests
that the journalist–scientist “gap” is
not the chasm once perceived.
Lesley Evans Ogden is a science writer–producer
based in Vancouver, British Columbia. A former
field ecologist, Lesley parachuted out of the ivory
tower, stopping for inspiration along the way at
the Banff Science Communications Program and
Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop. Find her on
the Web at www.lesleyevansogden.com and on
Twitter @ljevanso.
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