Science Journalism

An Introduction

Martin Angler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317369813
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Science Journalism: An Introduction gives wide-ranging guidance on producing journalistic content about different areas of scientific research. It provides a step-by-step guide to mastering the practical skills necessary for covering scientific stories and explaining the business behind the industry.

Martin W. Angler, an experienced science and technology journalist, covers the main stages involved in getting an article written and published; from choosing an idea, structuring your pitch, researching and interviewing, to writing effectively for magazines, newspapers and online publications. There are chapters dedicated to investigative reporting, handling scientific data and explaining scientific practice and research findings to a non-specialist audience. Coverage in the chapters is supported by reading lists, review questions and practical exercises. The book also includes extensive interviews with established science journalists, scholars and scientists that provide tips on building a career in science journalism, address what makes a good reporter and discuss the current issues they face professionally. The book concludes by laying out the numerous available routes into science journalism, such as relevant writing programs, fellowships, awards and successful online science magazines.

For students of journalism and professional journalists at all levels, this book offers an invaluable overview of contemporary science journalism with an emphasis on professional journalistic practice and success in the digital age.

1
Introduction

What you will learn in this chapter:

• An attempt at a definition
• A short history of science journalism
• Infotainment versus critical science journalism
• Science journalism’s main tasks
• How to become a science journalist
• Science and society
• Risk and risk perception
• Science journalism under fire
• What makes a good science journalist? An interview with Tim Radford

Introduction

Welcome to Science Journalism: An Introduction ! I invite you to join me as I cover the whole science journalistic process from finding ideas, to pitching them to your colleagues and editors, to writing for print and online media. The book also includes dedicated chapters on storytelling techniques, statistics, investigative journalism in a scientific context, digital science journalism and how you can build a career in this competitive field.

You can read this book in one of two ways. If you are an aspiring science writer without much experience, I recommend you read the book from start to finish. If you are a seasoned science writer, you should look for the gems in this book. The interviews with veteran science writers, science journalism educators, award-winning science bloggers, statisticians and scientists ensure you are not fed one author’s opinion; rather, you will get to know the tools of the trade via the first-hand accounts of these experts.

At the end of each chapter you will find a short summary, a set of review questions, exercises to cement your newly acquired know-how and a reading list.

In this chapter, I first try to answer what is science journalism? Is it complete reporting on science? Is it sensationalist, entertaining writing that merely touches science marginally? Isn’t science involved in most stories nowadays, at least up to certain degree? In investigating these questions, the section that follows the definition will provide a short overview of how science journalism evolved and how historical science writing differs from today’s.

The section on infotainment versus critical science journalism briefly addresses one of the most debated issues of science journalism: its quality. It is certainly true that the availability of online tools has contributed to there being numerous science-related articles and television and radio contributions that have questionable journalistic and educational value; at the same time, it is that very availability of online tools that has rendered the production of news as easy as it possibly gets, making this era the golden age of journalism. Despite the reports that newspapers, magazines and television channels are cutting their science staff (which in some contexts is true), this is a great time to be a science journalist. The readers love well-presented science.

In this chapter, you will also find thoughts on what your tasks as a future science journalist will be and learn about a naïve approach to becoming a science journalist. As you will see, persistence, common sense and a good nose for what people like to read (starting with yourself) will go a long way. (You will find much more about the traits of good science journalists in Chapter 12, Building a Career in Science Journalism.)

This chapter contains a dedicated section on the role of science and science journalists in society in which I try to answer questions such as: Are we pure educators? Are we entertainers? Are we, as science journalists, at fault if we praise a new treatment and people follow our advice and perhaps die because they gave preference to the treatment we championed? There is an infinite pool of such questions, and reading through the book will hopefully not only provide some answers but also raise more of these questions. Along these lines, you will find a section in this chapter dedicated to risk – how we communicate it and how our audience perceives it. This section focuses on our responsibilities and offers thoughts on how we can convey risks without becoming scaremongers.

I will then address current issues in science journalism such as accuracy and sensationalism. In doing so, I draw on a controversy in which science journalism has come under fire. What follows is a discussion with seasoned, award-winning science journalist Tim Radford, whose career spans more than three decades.

An attempt at a definition

What is science journalism? Ask ten different science journalists and scholars and you will receive ten different answers, but here is an attempt: Science journalism is a journalistic genre that primarily deals with scientific achievements and breakthroughs, the scientific process itself, scientists’ quests and difficulties in solving complex problems. If done properly, science journalism questions the methods scientists employ as well as their results and how the media and the public interpret them; it also investigates and unfolds possible conflicts of interest researchers may have. As with every journalistic genre, science journalism demands an in-depth knowledge of the system you operate in, which includes knowledge about science policies, country-specific laws and the scientific disciplines you want to cover. You will need to acquire knowledge that will help you identify flaws in the research and spot from afar when scientists try to misuse you as a surrogate public relations (PR) spokesperson. Without a critical mindset, journalists often produce mediocre and shallow contributions that champion science rather than critically scrutinise it. Such pieces – known as gee whiz science journalism – do not put anything into question but rather serve as another public relations communication channel. That said, such shallow science articles do have their merits on the business side: If done well, gee whiz articles draw attention and build an audience. As you will see throughout the book, this works particularly well online.

Every scientific discipline – including the environment, medicine, biology, physics or mathematics – is worth covering. The seeming exception is technology journalism, but the lines between the two genres can be blurry as most technological advancements depend on scientific discoveries and are closely tied to science. According to Badenschier and Wormer (2012), the most successful topics in science journalism worldwide are health and biology, whereas at the New York Times, health, medicine and behavioural sciences are the prevailing topics. Moreover, a 2008 survey among leading nationwide German newspapers found that in 2006–2007, 29 per cent of the examined articles covered medicine, 15 per cent covered the environment and 14 per cent covered biology (Badenschier and Wormer 2012). These newspapers also claimed that when they need to decide whether to cover and publish the politics beat or the science beat, they generally give preference to the politics beat.

As of late, science journalism also occupies itself with hitherto largely neglected topics on the sociological modus operandi of science (meta-topics, if you will) such as sexual harassment in science. Previously covered topics, such as science policy, have increasing presence as well. Award-winning science journalist Ed Yong said that such topics should receive more coverage, and he would appreciate seeing more of such content in the near future (Yong 2016).

Journalist and author Ellen Ruppel Shell, co-director of the graduate program in science journalism at Boston University, takes this view:

The idea that one can just walk into science journalism without having previous experience or knowledge of science has become much more difficult to support in recent decades. I know it’s a long-held debate in the field. Some people claim that, if you are a good journalist, you can just write about science. But not only is the science difficult, the sociology, history and politics of science is difficult. It helps enormously to have an awareness of this.

(Ruppel Shell 2016)

The Guardian’s former science editor, Tim Radford, said that ultimately science journalism is like most other journalistic genres and depends mostly on whether you can find stories that are relevant to your audience:

When called upon to actually debate these issues with editors of science magazines, I just say we are not science writers, we are journalists, and I make the point we are writing for people about things that matter to them. That’s what political writers do, and in fact, that’s what sports writers do. We are just journalists who have a specialisation for the time being. Indeed, much of my writing career was not in science. It was in the arts: I was a film critic, and I edited the books pages of the Guardian for a while, and certainly I looked after the political comment pages for what seems like an exceptionally long and tedious time. The reason for writing about science is that it’s calling with good stories. That’s a journalist’s test: Is it a good story? I’m not quite sure that we could agree on the definition of a good story, but most of us agree that we know one when we see one.

(Radford 2016)

Seasoned science journalist Quentin Cooper, who formerly hosted the radio show Material World on BBC Radio 4, largely confirms Radford’s opinion that science need not be its own journalistic genre and further claims that as a science journalist, you would address everybody, not just science enthusiasts:

It is important to get the audience who are not looking for science programmes. I don’t want to make science programmes for people who just think they want science programmes. I want to make science programmes and write science pieces for everyone. In the end, it is about getting people to engage with the science rather than getting people to appreciate that they are engaging with science. I think sometimes, we get those priorities wrong: We want people to know that they have had their daily dose of science, like they have eaten their vegetables. I don’t want it to be like that. I just want people to naturally absorb it without explicitly thinking that what they just read was a physics or a biology story.

(Cooper 2016)

Consider these deliberations a starting point. By the time you finish this book, you will hopefully have a different view of what science journalism is and what it is not. The diversity and number of opinions expressed is meant to be a help to you in that process. That said, how you define science journalism is closely related to the phases it has traversed. As you will see in the next section, there have been cycles of cheerful and critical science journalism; knowing about the history of science is a must if you want to understand how the practices it employs today have evolved over time.

A short history of science journalism

To understand today’s science journalism, it is important to understand how it has evolved. As Nelkin (1987) affirms, in the 1900s, scientists in Europe and the US started traveling around to promote their research. At that time, newspapers started picking up these scientists’ talks and publishing them. Science journalism of that era could generally be subdivided into two categories:

Most science journalism in the nineteenth century consisted either of directly practical information about new farming techniques, the latest home remedies, and the like, or wildly sensational stories. It was the heyday of science hoaxes. In 1835 the press reported that astronomer Sir John Herschel had observed batlike human beings on the moon.

(Nelkin 1987:17)

Unsurprisingly, this was not science journalism’s breakthrough. Science was often portrayed as a mystical phenomenon. Among the readers, awe and fear of science balanced each other. This mindset changed with World War I, as Germany built bombs with the help of chemistry. All of a sudden, the public discovered that science could have powerful effects on both society and economy, leaving it with a fear that Germany could have an edge on the US in chemistry (Nelkin 1987). With the public’s interest the press coverage increased, conveying the notion that “science was a way to get things done” (Nelkin 1987:17).

Science meant progress, but the chasm between early science journalists and the public widened. In 1921, media entrepreneur and publisher Edward Willis Scripps was the first to offer a commercial large-scale science news service, Science Service. It reached seven million readers, which was 20 per cent of the US readers (Nelkin 1987). Nelkin (1987) cites Science Service’s editor, Edwin Slosson, who demanded that science journalism orient itself to topics that are popular among the public and focus on exceptional events. In addition, he claimed that science should be communicated in short paragraphs that depict scientific advances using superlatives.

The science writers of the 1920s and 1930s adopted Science Service’s style and understood themselves as missionaries with the goal of persuading the public about science’s benefits. One of these writers, Pulitzer Prize winner Gobind Lal (Nelkin 1987), “was the first journalist to use the term ‘science writer’ with his byline” (Brennan and Clarage 1999:559). Notably, Lal was also one of the founders of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), and in 1940, he became the NASW’s president (Brennan and Clarage 1999).

The laudatory style of the science writers following World War II can sometimes still be felt in today’s science journalism. In the 1960s, journalists started covering a new topic: science policy. The way journalists reported about science was generally optimistic in that post-Sputnik era (Nelkin 1987). In the 1970s, editors like John Lear and David Pearlman, in pursuit of the US ideal of the media’s objectivity, demanded that science journalists be as critical as their political counterparts (Nelkind 1987). In the 1980s, however, science journalism in the US returned to its cheerleading roots anew (Nelkin 1987).

Ellen Ruppel Shell confirms this progression of science coverage in the media:

We had this feeling in the late 1950s that the Russians were getting ahead of us and we needed to get on top of everything, and that included science education. All of a sudden, there was a push to get science journalists on staff at various newspapers. Journalists were pulled off of other beats and put on the science beat. Many of these journalists did not have science backgrounds, for example, Walter Sullivan from the New York Times. He had a degree in history and also studied music. But at the Times, his enthusiasm for science was boundless. In the 1980s, there was some caution, and the introduction of the idea that science journalists are also journalists and that they should think critically. That was the heyday of science journalism: There were a lot of science magazines, and publishers created special science sections in the newspapers. There was tremendous enthusiasm for new technologies. In the 1990s and 2000s, the idea that science journalists should be more critical, more thoughtful and more analytic came to fore. There was also a swelling interest in science na...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Finding science stories
• 3 Pitching
• 4 Interviewing scientists
• 5 Writing about science for magazines
• 6 Writing about science for newspapers
• 7 Writing about science online
• 8 Storytelling for science journalists
• 9 Facts and figures
• 10 Investigative science journalism
• 11 Science journalism in the digital age
• 12 Building a career in science journalism
• Appendix: an interview with a famous scientist
• Index