That’s still the core. Then we have forty-five seminars a year of own, which happen twice a week, where we bring in people. For example, this year, alternative energy is crucially important, so we’re going to have to have several seminars on the new energy technologies. And of course at Harvard and MIT there are all these folks doing it—solar, nuclear, wind, geothermal. We have to keep journalists up to speed on all of that. But we do a full range of seminars—from exo-planets, to stem cells, to new nuclear plants—and try to cover all the topics, but the topics change. A few years ago, we had no nanotechnology—that’s here now. And the cognitive sciences have exploded because of the imaging techniques that are possible, so there are more seminars on cognitive science than there were ten years ago. We’re basically trying to shape ourselves to the science. That is to say, the more new stuff in an area, the more we’re going to go find it. It’s what you’d expect of reporters—they want to find out what’s the newest stuff and how does it work.
CB: And you try to bring in international fellows so that this is all global in scope?
PH:Yes. In the early days, it was American reporters, but gradually it developed to be more international or for the past seven or eight years, it’s been about 50/50—half American fellows, half from abroad. And we’d like to keep it there. It’s such a great thing to have people from different countries sitting in the same room talking about journalism. Standards really are international, and we have the same problems with them as everybody else. We need to have a world community of science journalists and the existence of the World Federation of Science Journalists really helps.
Journalism is really flourishing in the rest of the world even though it’s crashing here. They’re building up more newspapers, more readers, more literacy, and more money. We’ll be at the world federation’s meeting in June 2009, where we’ll have at least one presentation. We’ll bring in bloggers from Africa, China, India and Latin America and hear about what’s going on in their areas. For example, in China blogging is taking off very fast and is a pretty serious form of science communication. That may be very important for them because of the structure of journalism in China—there are certain topics you can’t easily do or get away with, but with blogs you may be able to. In Africa, there are many fewer people with computers, so the question is, are we going to use cell phones more than computers to convey science information? Each region has its own issues.
CB: And you were at the Unity conference in Chicago last month, shooting for a similar kind of diversity with American minorities, right?
PH: Exactly. I was there to recruit African Americans, Hispanic, Asian and Native Americans. So we had a booth there and collected about a hundred names from people who were interested in the program. A lot of them were students, so they’re young, really, but we talk to them early and try to make sure that we’re open, that folks in the minority communities know we’re here.
CB: So, as the new director, you must be pretty busy?
PH: Yes. Constantly. I have to read more. I had areas of my own carved out that I cared about and worked on—global health, you know, and I can offer some of that to the fellows. But I’m definitely starting to read more and more and more. You have to be soaking it up, you have to start listening, you have to wander around campus and talk to people. It’s an education for me, or reeducation—there’s just a massive amount of stuff out there. And my job is really reporting, except that what I’m doing is finding the topics and finding the speakers, but not actually writing about them. It’s a big challenge, but I must say, I really like doing this.
I'm heartened to learn about the robustness of the program and the breadth and depth of quality in the talent pool.
However, I nosed around the website and did my usual searching for reportage which includes professional nursing and nurses and came up with zero.
Neither MIT nor Harvard field nursing programs, and unless reporters are actively seeking out expert nurses, they aren't overly likely to bump into them on those campuses. They would be able to find them at Boston College, Univ. of Massachusetts at Boston and Amherst, and farther afield, at the Univ. of Connecticut, Yale, Columbia and NYU.
However, it is critical that health and science reporters learn about the profession of nursing, its fundamental practice precepts, and its ethics and extant issues.
As a case in point, no reporter has yet to investigate the use of nurses as agents of abuse and torture on immigrant detainees and prisoners. However, nurses practice primarily as employees and obedience to employer directives and the mandate to be "good nurses" causes many nurses to act against the interests of patients when their means of livelihood is threatened.
Moreover, it's nursing care which directly affects patients' morbidity, mortality and degree of suffering in the most immediate sense.
Reporters are allowing nurses to fly under the radar in investigating abuse and torture, and everyone loses.
But so far, it doesn't appear that including nursing in health reportage is even on the curriculum for journalists. I hope that changes.
Home of the Brave is where I have more to say.
Posted by Annie on Mon 18 Aug 2008 at 12:17 PM
Annie, Thanks for the comment. We're not limited to MIT and Harvard for our speakers. We get them from all over the country, and we are planning one on nursing. I think you're right, and would love to hear more from you about who's the best to talk on these issues.
Posted by Phil Hilts on Mon 18 Aug 2008 at 01:48 PM
Thanks, Phil, for your interest. Email me at aek2013 at columbia dot edu at your convenience to explore further.
A good source primer for nursing demographics and position papers/policy statements is the American Association of Colleges of Nursing website.
The other essential reference is the website of the National Institute of Nursing Research (one of the NIH institutes).
The Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements may be found on the American Nurses Association website, but it's buried and still proprietary - a problem itself, in my view.
Posted by Annie on Mon 18 Aug 2008 at 04:40 PM
View from the sticks:
MIT's Open Courseware course list has only 1 hit for the word "journalism" - " Documentary Photography and Photo Journalism".
Plenty of courses on writing, but the focus seems to be technical writing, not journalism.
Also - a writing class is suboptimal if there's nobody to give feedback on the assignments a far-flung visitor might otherwise be tempted to complete.
So, for Open Courseware, would it perhaps make sense to have "Mechanical Turk" type teaching fellows for each course? We could remunerate them with beads and trinkets from our native lands, also perhaps with grants from Craig Newmark.
(yes, i realize the Fellowships are about science for journalists and not journalism for scientists, so as a critique this is rather off base. But it is mostly sincere nonetheless.)
Posted by Anna on Wed 20 Aug 2008 at 01:03 AM
I don't think that journalism for scientists is off base; one increasingly finds scientists as the authors of op-eds in areas of expertise. This cross-fertilization has the potential to improve the situation in which journalists are reluctant to 'shout out' the actual state of climate change understanding, and instead revert to dueling quotes. Not sufficient to supply essential context.
Posted by Stan Wiggins on Thu 28 Aug 2008 at 03:29 PM