Scores of similar contests abound, not only in Europe, but in the United States as well. Both the Society of Environmental Journalists and the National Association of Science Writers have webpages that list a variety of opportunities (awards, fellowships, etc.), and it’s hard to tell which are ethically compromising and which aren’t—indeed, there is a bewildering number of shades of grey.

There is the Kyoto Prize Journalism Fellowship, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University and the Kyoto Symposium Organization. It includes an all-expenses-paid trip to Japan to cover the award ceremony (which honors contributions to science and arts) and “subsequent lecture and workshops,” but the application states that:

Upon return from Kyoto or while on site, the selected fellow is expected to create a publicly-accessible product such as an article, story, essay, blog, video, or recap on the Kyoto Prize Award Ceremony, the work of an individual Kyoto Prize laureate or the fellowship experience. All content produced should be submitted to Point Loma Nazarene University and the Kyoto Symposium Organization upon completion for the Fellowship Archives and for public purposes.

As with the European physics prize described above, that should be an obvious deal-breaker. But what about the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Journalism Fellowship, which provides journalists with an all-expenses-paid trip to its facility in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado to learn about climate change, severe weather, and energy technologies. Like the astronomy prize described above, there’s no reporting requirement, but even though it’s an educational fellowship rather than an award contest, one could see how the issue that arose with ESO—selecting past interns or people who’ve written favorably about the organization—could happen there as well. The same could be said about science journalism fellowships at the Marine Biological Laboratory or the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, both of which bring participants to their facilities on Cape Cod.

But these are highly respected programs through which many well-regarded and principled journalists have passed, and unlike the ESO trip described above, they’re geared toward science training and education rather than witnessing or observing science in action. Still, it’s reassuring when sponsors make that explicit. The National Tropical Botanical Garden Environmental Journalism Fellowship, which provides an all-inclusive trip to Hawaii, states on its website, for instance, that “the focus of the fellowship is immersion and not advocacy… the goal of the program is not to provide source material for current news stories.”

Many programs, such as USC Annenberg’s California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowship and the National Science Foundation’s US Antarctic Program, ask journalists to submit proposals for reporting projects based on the trips and training that the program will finance. It’s a valuable way to support journalism in a time of tight budgets, but again, it’s nice when benefactors like the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships For Mental Health Journalism explicitly state that “the fellowship encourages total journalistic independence and freedom and only requires that the fellows report accurately.”

It’s great that there are so many travel opportunities available to journalists right now, but when somebody else is footing the bill it’s important that they know what they’re getting into. Training, education, and grant support for projects are fine, as long as there are no strings attached, but there are also a lot of junkets out there masquerading as prizes or fellowships that entangle journalists in conflicts of interest. These should be avoided at all costs, even if it means another day in the office.

• 1
• 2