With a mission to provide the press and the public with high-quality scientific information and sources, the Science Media Centers in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan have become influential, but controversial players in the world of journalism. While some reporters find them helpful, others believe they are biased toward government and industry scientists.
This three-part series will examine the role that the original center plays in the UK, the performance of the centers during the Fukushima nuclear crisis, and the proposal to launch a Science Media Center in the US. For each installment, two writers were asked to submit opening statements replying to the question in the headline. They exchanged those statements and wrote short replies.
In Part 2, Curtis Brainard, editor of The Observatory and a member of the US SMC exploratory committee, and Ron Winslow, a science reporter at The Wall Street Journal and president of the National Association of Science Wrtiers, respond to the question: “Can a SMC work in the US?” Part 1 is available here and Part 2 is available here.
Curtis Brainard, opening statement:
After years of worry about the dearth of science coverage in American media, a variety of new websites, blogs and podcasts have sprung up to fill the void left by newspapers, magazines, and broadcast news.
It is unclear whether the newcomers are reaching the broad readerships and audiences to which traditional newsrooms cater, however, and there is still a need to support more, accurate and high quality coverage of science in the press, regardless of the medium. In that spirit, I agreed last year to join the exploratory committee for establishing a Science Media Center in the United States.
I’d heard from many journalists that the existing centers were helpful, but I’d also heard the concern that they function as PR outlets friendly to government and industry scientists. Indeed, no sooner had the idea for an American center emerged than reporter Colin Macilwain wrote an op-ed for the journal Nature detailing why he thinks the SMC model wouldn’t make a good fit in the US.
The center would have trouble coping with the size and diversity of the American media landscape, Macilwain argued, and with politically and socially divisive issues like climate change and stem cells. Moreover, American journalists would never go for things like the packaged “rapid reaction” quotes from scientists that other centers often provide during breaking news situations.
These are valid concerns, but ones that the exploratory committee fully intends to account for, and, as my fellow committee member, Julia Moore, wrote in a reply to Macilwain:
If established, a US centre would embrace a uniquely American model of operation to serve the country’s journalists and public understanding of science. It would adapt to its cultural landscape, just as those of Canada or Japan have.
The question is, how? As Macilwain noted, size matters, and a US SMC would need to focus its efforts where it’s most needed, which seems to be traditional print and broadcast newsrooms with little to no scientific expertise on staff. That means a lot of local papers and TV and radio stations. It will also have to support those outlets, like wire services, which are providing more and more science content for both traditional and online reports. So the center will make greater use of telecommunications and digital and social media to serve its constituents.
Beyond geography, the most important consideration is the concern about PR practices. As Fiona Fox, the director of the British center, noted in the opening installment of this series, the UK SMC, “not set up to help journalists, but to support more scientists to engage effectively with journalists.”
The US committee generally agrees that to work, an American center would need to flip this idea on its head and be geared toward supporting journalists to engage more effectively with scientists. That means fewer or no pooled quotes based on what the SMC thinks is the big science news of the week, and more capacity to respond to journalists’ requests for help with the stories they’ve determined to be important.
There IS a need in the US for something like an SMC, at the very least to help the major source of news for most Americans, local TV news, do much better with science coverage...more coveraget, and better informed. I was a TV environment and science reporter in the 80s and 90s and have watched that frequency and quality suffer badly. TV stations would gobble this up. In fact, there would have to be great caution. They gobbled up way too gullibly the feeds of medical and health news often supplied by corporations or local hospitals. But for the medium through which more people get news than any other, an SMC could play a vital role improving science journalism. (to be continued in Helsinki!)
#1 Posted by David Ropeik, CJR on Fri 21 Jun 2013 at 04:43 PM
David makes a worthwhile point - local broadcast is the way many people get their news and in the mobile era, short video packages will increasingly dominate as a medium of delivering news. Short downloadable video commentary from a transparent, foundation-backed independent source of scientific perspective (say a minute of b-roll and 2-3 comments from an expert) would likely be an effective way to reach the public (if you can get it across to local news outlets that it is available). Those outlets will never hire science or environmental reporters, there is no advertising money for it, so this kind of resource would be better than nothing and reach many people who are often tuned out from more comprehensive sources of news.
More broadly however, I share Ron's questions about efforts to "improve" science journalism or educate the public. Any such enterprise will possess an agenda, however well-intentioned, and/or represent a diversion of effort away from real journalism. What is the goal here? How do you measure outcomes? Would we be better off with funding more research into science communication instead? Or education in news literacy?
#2 Posted by Dan Vergano, CJR on Sun 23 Jun 2013 at 02:10 PM
The "diversity of the American media" argument seems off point; US media may be large, but there's little diversity. And the suggestion that US reporters would not use canned quotes struck me as downright humorous.
#3 Posted by Tom T., CJR on Mon 24 Jun 2013 at 11:17 AM
"Far from adding another layer of PR to reporters’ work routines, the idea is to help them cut through the large volume of communications they already receive."
Curtis, it seems you're giving with this sentence, the same argument as your co-author: a lot of excellent resources are already doing exactly that ("help them cut through the volume"). So, rather than creating a new structure, why the SMC defenders do not help the structures already doing a good job?
#4 Posted by Francis Lacombe, CJR on Mon 24 Jun 2013 at 11:57 PM