At Inside Science, our role as science writers and editors is to disseminate news about science to as large and wide an audience as we can reach in the general public. Ananyo Bhattacharya, Nature’s chief online editor, wrote the following article for the Guardian newpaper. It's circulating widely, and we thought it’s definitely worth sharing. We would love to hear your comments about it:
While I don’t agree fully with all of Bhattacharya’s points—for example, Inside Science News Service places great emphasis on obtaining outside perspectives and mentioning the significant caveats associated with a research finding--I think this piece nicely highlights differences that exist between scientists and science journalists due to their different roles.
I’m sure there is an equally good piece out there on how journalists don’t understand scientists! It’s a good reminder of how we as science journalists are necessarily different from research scientists in order to be effective in carrying out our roles in communicating information to the larger world.
Your thoughts?
Interesting post.
ReplyDeleteI'm currently listening the Guardian's Alokh Jha speak about how important the importance of transparency -- especially when it comes to science journalism, titled Journalists don’t know best – creating a “mutualised” newspaper website.
Brief description below, but I found particularly interesting that Jha makes a point of mentioning "... I will also present our open news list which we set up in October 2011. This lays out publicly the selection of stories we plan to cover in advance (something that in the past many news editors would have regarded as virtually suicidal) and encourages feedback from readers."
Here's the entire description:
2:00-2:15pm - Journalists don’t know best – creating a “mutualised” newspaper website - Alokh Jha
At the Guardian we are experimenting with several ways of embracing the more open and transparent way of doing journalism through “mutualisation” – the process of encouraging collaboration between journalist and reader. The approach recognises that organisations and individuals all now have the capability to be online publishers. Institutions, NGOs, governments, scientists, bloggers and many others can all contribute to stories in ways that were not possible with print. I will outline a few of these experiments including our efforts to cover science stories using live blogs and story trackers. These follow news events in real time over hours or days using a combination of traditional reporting plus curated (and linked) content from the wider web. I will also present our open news list which we set up in October 2011. This lays out publicly the selection of stories we plan to cover in advance (something that in the past many news editors would have regarded as virtually suicidal) and encourages feedback from readers.
#scio12
Very cool! Thanks for sharing. Just as the Internet opened up new possibilities for scientists to communicate--the Web itself was invented for particle physicists to share data--it's great to see experimentation in science journalism online--something we hope to do as well.
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