Science Journalism - Open School of Journalism

JD130
Areas of Journalism
Journalism
Science Journalism
Thomas Hayden
Open School
of Journalism
Open School
of Journalism
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Areas of Journalism
Science Journalism
Thomas Hayden
Content
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1
The origins of science journalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.1 What is science journalism and where can it be found? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.2 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2
The scope and range of science journalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.1 The range of science journalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.2 The scope of science journalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.3 Where to find other science journalists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3
Science journalism as a beat apart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
4
Finding science stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
4.1 Following science news . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
4.2 Finding your own stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
4.3 From an idea to a story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
4.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
5
Reporting science stories 1: Conducting interviews . . . . . . . 32
6
Reporting science stories 2: Journal articles and
scientific conferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
6.1 Journal articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
6.2 Conferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
6.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
7
Writing science stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
7.1 Inverted pyramid or newspaper structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
7.2 Feature or magazine structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
7.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
8
Digital and social media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
8.1 Digital media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
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8.2 Social media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
8.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
9
Dealing with complexity, uncertainty, and controversy . . . . 58
9.1 Panning for gold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
9.2 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Solutions for exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
About the author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
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Introduction
Science journalism is one of the most exciting beats in journalism today.
We live in a time of great scientific advances on all fronts, from the intricate
workings of the human body, to the abiding mysteries of deep space and
cosmic origins, to the dynamic and rapidly changing Earth environment,
with many other fields in between. It is the job of science journalists to follow and understand this research, and convey it to the public in ways that
are accessible, accurate, and engaging, and that make the relevance—or lack
thereof—of advances clear to readers, viewers, and listeners.
This work provides unique challenges to the science journalist. To be effective, a science journalist must be able to read the primary scientific literature—journal articles that are aimed at an audience with years of advanced
training, and often filled with arcane concepts, complex mathematics, and
virtually impenetrable terminology. But he or she must also be able to use
that starting point to produce news articles that welcome the lay reader—
that make even the most challenging technical material understandable to
the readers of newspapers and listeners of radio broadcasts, while remaining true to the source material.
Science journalism, in this respect at least, therefore requires more technical sophistication than traditional reporting on the government or world
affairs. Especially at general interest outlets, science journalists must work
harder than those who cover crime, for example, to convince editors to
give their stories prominent placement in publications and on newscasts.
And bizarrely, for subject matter that touches on everything from human
health and the state of the environment to the health of the economy and
the very future of humankind, science journalists must work harder than
those covering the sports beat to make the relevance of their stories clear to
the public.
However, the rewards, too, are many. Science journalists get a front-row
view of the great discoveries of our day. They spend hours talking with scientists about cutting-edge work, and are afforded the particular satisfaction
of capturing a complex process or subtle phenomenon with just the right
combination of precise description and poetic analogy. They are always
learning and never bored because, unlike the economy, or politics, or history itself, science never repeats itself but keeps marching forward.
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But we also live in a time of great cynicism and distrust of authority, including of science and the evidence and insights it provides. Even settled
science can be made ‘controversial‘ if enough people, or sufficiently powerful interests, decide to turn their backs on objective reality and seek instead to twist science to their financial benefit, ideological aims, or identity
politics. The science journalist who covers immunology must also contend
with the arguments of those who refuse childhood vaccination. An Earth
sciences reporter must understand not just the complexities of the global
atmosphere and how it is studied, but also the network of disinformation
that has grown up to seed doubts and slow regulations that might hurt vested commercial interests. Even writers who want nothing more than to share
their admiration of the subtleties of biological evolution must sometimes
cope with accusations of blasphemy for doing so.
Even within science, there are important stories that have nothing to do
with pushing back the boundaries of knowledge. For all its intellectual sophistication, science is also a human endeavor. It is peopled with geniuses
and worker bees; with saints and with charlatans. Its funding and promotion are subject to the same forces that buffet every enterprise—politics and
competition, good luck and bad, vanity, nepotism, misplaced ideals, and
the everyday chaos of modern life.
Fortunately there is a well-developed set of tools, approaches, and understandings that science journalists can use to find fascinating stories, while
making sure they aren’t led astray or left so confused they simply can’t
get those stories into words on the page. This course is designed to introduce you to those tools and approaches. It is a starting point, useful both
to working journalists new to the science beat and to scientists and science
students who are eager to engage with the public through journalism. Like
any exciting journey, the endpoint is up to you.
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General learning outcomes
__
__
After you have completed this study guide, you will be able to:
Understand the history of science journalism, and what distinguishes this
beat within the broader world of journalism.
Appreciate the scope and range of science journalism, including the differ-
__
ent types of outlets, audiences, and stories that make up the ecosystem of
__
ideas, complete with a news peg, relevant sources, technical context, and a
__
on journal articles, scientific conferences, social and political developments,
science journalism.
Identify potential science stories and refine them into clearly defined story
sense of their importance to your audience.
Report accurately and efficiently on science stories, including those based
and breaking news events.
Craft clear, coherent, engaging articles based on your reporting. These include news articles based on current events and journal articles, in-depth
__
feature articles that capture longer-term developments, and profiles of
prominent people in science.
Construct a strategy for your science journalism career, including pitching
stories to editors, blogging and self-publishing to build experience and rep-
__
__
__
utation, and using social media to engage with colleagues, sources, and
your audience.
Manage the complexity and uncertainty that underlie much of the source
material for science journalism.
Avoid the pitfalls of reporting on controversial and contested areas of science, including climate change, biotechnology, vaccinations, and evolution.
Envision the future of science journalism, including the emergence of new
platforms, reporting and storytelling technologies, and business models.
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Chapter 1:
The origins of science journalism
Learning outcomes
__
__
After you have worked through this chapter, you will be able to:
__
Distinguish between journalism, marketing and public relations, and opinion writing.
Understand that science journalism is both a specific beat within the broader context of journalism, as well as a specific practice within the broader
field of science writing.
Appreciate that like all journalism, science journalism must be objective,
verifiable, and independent from the people and institutions it covers. It
best succeeds when it makes important, complex, sometimes contested
information clear and broadly accessible to its target audience.
1.1 What is science journalism and
where can it be found?
Science journalism today can be found almost everywhere one looks—in
the pages of newspapers, magazines, and online publications, certainly. But
also in myriad blogs, scores of radio and television programs, and liberally
shared across just about every imaginable social media platform. For those
of us who have worked as science journalists for many years, though, the
most common question we hear when introduced to strangers is “er, what
exactly is science journalism?”
That simple question is strangely hard to answer. The short version is a
tautology: science journalism is journalism about science. But the deeper
answer is a little harder to grasp with real precision. That’s partly just a matter of overlapping terminology: In English, many science journalists refer to
themselves as ‘science writers,’ rather than science journalists or reporters.
The term comes from old newsrooms, where the reporters covering baseball, say, were called ‘sports writers,’ and so on. But it’s unfortunate when it
comes to science journalism since science writer could just as easily mean
a scientist who blogs about her own research, or a university press agent
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Chapter 2:
The scope and range of science
journalism
Learning outcomes
__
__
__
After you have worked through this chapter, you will be able to:
Connect your interest in science journalism to the many career pathways
working science journalists have followed.
Identify the main types of stories in science journalism, and where they
typically appear.
More fully grasp the domain of science journalism, and the range of subject
matter it can encompass.
If “what is science journalism” is the most common question science journalists hear, “how did you get started” is probably the second most frequently asked. Perhaps it’s not surprising—we have never been particularly
prominent, we are rarely famous or even known to the public, and we often
come to the field through improbable and uncertain career paths. Indeed,
my stock response when asked about how I became a science journalist is
simply, “by accident.”
I’m not alone. A quick survey of the science writer “origin stories” collected
by the British science journalist Ed Yong at his blog, Not Exactly Rocket
Science, shows that many science journalists followed circuitous paths to
the field (Yong, 2010b). Many are former scientists who turned to journalism later in life—that’s my story—or writers and journalists who later discovered a passion for covering science. Some started early, in university
or before. But many science journalists take up the calling after advanced
study or even successful careers in science, or medicine, or other, more
remote fields.
Many would-be science journalists seek specialized training in science
journalism, whether through university degrees, focused courses such as
this one, or in short-term workshops and seminars. Most complete at least
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Chapter 4:
Finding science stories
Learning outcomes
__
__
__
After you have worked through this chapter you will be able to:
Follow science news effectively, and develop a sense of what science stories are most effective in different outlets and media.
Identify a set of strategies to keep up with science news and to discover the
stories you want to pursue.
Refine your interests and areas of curiosity into well-defined, executable
story ideas.
4.1 Following science news
Potential stories are everywhere in science, from the latest edition of major
academic journals, to emerging insights that impact the great issues of our
day, to a new ‘citizen science’ project being launched in your local town,
involving school groups and volunteers in counting birds or reporting signs
of spring and fall. Indeed, the challenge for science journalists is not a lack
of possible stories, but the need to filter through a universe of them for the
stories that best match your interests, your target publication or publications, and the time and resources you have available to execute them.
The first step to developing a reliable filter or search pattern for the science
stories you want to report is following science news on a regular basis and
paying close attention to the science journalism that others are doing. If
you don’t keep up with the news, you won’t be able to tell the difference
between a potential story that is truly new, and something that’s just new to
you because you weren’t paying attention. And if you aren’t familiar with
the various science news outlets, you won’t know what sorts of stories they
cover, the style they use, and whether they’ve already run the story you’re
pitching. Reading other science journalists, too, is one of the best ways to
set your goals for the kind of coverage you’d like to provide.
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Chapter 5
Reporting science stories 1:
Conducting interviews
Learning outcomes
__
__
After you have worked through this chapter, you will be able to:
__
Identify sources for your science stories, to ensure they are accurate, relevant, and accessible for your readers.
Prepare for interviews effectively and efficiently, making sure that you get
the information and quotations you need, without wasting your time or the
time of your sources.
Conduct interviews with scientists and other sources, and start to shape
those interviews into clear, engaging, accurate science stories.
I’ve already mentioned that variety is one of the great joys of science journalism. I well remember being a young journalist at a large, general interest
magazine, and marveling at the tedium endured by colleagues on the political beat, following candidates around from event to event and listening
to the same speech sometimes three and four times in a day. Meanwhile I
was covering the early days of animal cloning one week, and new theories
of planetary formation the next. My political colleagues, meanwhile, assumed that the science journalists must be unnaturally brilliant, to move
so quickly from arcane topic A to arcane topic B. But no, the reality is more
mundane than that. Science journalists do have to be mentally nimble, and
able to take on new information quickly. But we have a ‘secret’ technique
for doing that: calling up experts and asking them.
Science journalists can only get so far with reading and following the journals and news reports. You’ll soon learn that in most cases, reporting—conducting interviews—is the most efficient and effective way to refine your
ideas into concrete stories, gather and vet the information you need, and
collect quotes, explanations, context, and anecdotes that can bring your
stories to life. (There are important exceptions when it comes to investigative and data-driven science reporting. Those special cases are largely
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Chapter 6:
Reporting science stories 2:
Journal articles and
scientific conferences
Learning outcomes
__
__
__
After you have worked through this chapter, you will be able to:
Develop a detailed plan for turning science journal papers into science
news articles.
Prepare yourself to effectively cover scientific meetings and conferences.
Start building a science journalism practice based on efficient, effective,
time-tested strategies.
Now that we’ve discussed the fundamentals of reporting for science stories,
let’s take a closer look at two very important special cases of science reporting. Once you’ve mastered writing science news articles based on journal
articles, and reporting on science news from scientific conferences, you’ll
be ready to consider yourself a true science journalist.
6.1 Journal articles
As we saw in Chapter 2, writing news stories based on new journal articles is the most fundamental form of science journalism. While relatively
brief and sometimes formulaic, these ‘paper of the week’ stories can be both
interesting and satisfying. Completing them successfully hinges on your
ability to read and understand journal articles quickly and effectively—and
to come away from reading them not only with information, but also with
news, story ideas, a list of sources to interview, and questions to ask them.
As a general rule, a short, journal article-based news story should have a
minimum of three sources—one or more of the authors of the paper, and at
least one reputable expert in the field who wasn’t involved in the research.
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Chapter 7:
Writing science stories
Learning outcomes
__
__
__
After you have worked through this chapter, you will be able to:
Know the different story structures typically found in science journalism.
Write science news stories in inverted pyramid (or newspaper) structure,
including a crisp news lead that lays out the core point of the article.
Write a science feature story using feature (or magazine) structure, including an evocative or compelling feature lead, a crisp billboard that lays out
the core point and relevance of the article, and a concluding ending or kicker
that completes the story.
In Chapter 6, we took a close look at science journal articles as a source
of science news. The structure of journal articles is quite consistent from
journal to journal and field to field. These reports follow a set structure for
a simple reason: the structure is an effective method of organizing information for the goals and intended audience. Journalism articles lack the
section subheadings, but that doesn’t mean they too don’t have standard
structures. Sure, they allow for more variety than the rigid structures used
in journals. But learning a couple of standard journalism story structures
will help you organize your science stories quickly and effectively.
7.1 Inverted pyramid or newspaper structure
The most common story structure used in newspapers is called the inverted
pyramid structure—so called because it is ‘wide’ at the top, and ‘narrow’
at the bottom. That is to say, newspaper news articles typically start by delivering the main news or big idea of the story immediately, and then add
increasingly minor elaboration and context as the article progresses toward
its end. This story structure makes editing stories to fit into a specific allotted amount of space, or number of ‘column inches,’ in a print newspaper
very easy: editors need only to cut paragraphs from the bottom of the story
to make it fit, confident that by cutting from the bottom they are removing
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Chapter 8
Digital and social media
Learning outcomes
__
__
__
After you have worked through this chapter, you will be able to:
Understand the role of digital media platforms in contemporary journalism.
Construct a plan for acquiring or improving multimedia skills such as shooting and editing videos to accompany your reporting.
Implement a social media strategy that will help you build your own profile
while becoming better connected to researchers and other science journalists—while avoiding some of the most common social media mistakes.
As a science-journalist-in-training, it behooves you to master the skills of
digital and social media. Understanding how to use these mediums will
greatly extend both your marketability as a journalist, and the range of science stories that you are equipped to tell. These are essential skills for all
working journalists today, no matter their beats. Science is no exception.
8.1 Digital media
For many years, the share of people who obtain news from traditional
sources, such as television, the radio or newspaper, has been declining,
while those who access digital news is rising. In the State of the News Media 2013 survey published by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, for instance, 50 percent of US consumers said that
they accessed news from one or more digital forms on an average per day, a
higher proportion than those who accessed news via both print newspapers
and radio. Some 19 percent of those surveyed got news from social media
and 16 percent from e-mail (Pew Research Center, 2013).
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Figure 2:
The percentage of
American survey
respondents who reported receiving news
from each platform
on the preceding day,
from 1991 to 2012.
Note the overall
decline in television,
radio, and newspaper audiences, and
the growth of online
and digital audiences
from about 2006.
For journalists, this means going where the audience is—online. One in-
(Source: Pew
creasingly popular format that is available online is video. The Pew Cen-
Research Center:
ter’s State of the News Media 2014 survey reported that the audience for
http://www.
news video is growing enormously: almost two-thirds of US adults now
stateofthemedia.
watch videos online, and 36 percent watch news videos. This is a consider-
org/2013/digital-as-
able increase from the online video audience even just a few years ago (Pew
mobile-grows-rapidly-
Research Center, 2014).
the-pressures-onnews-intensify/#the-
It is therefore advisable for science journalists to develop skills in video.
second-screen-
Luckily, the tools for shooting and editing video are becoming more accessi-
phenomenon)
ble than ever before. Many smart phones, for instance, are capable of shooting video that can be suitable for some news purposes. And many personal
computers now come preloaded with software that allows anyone to edit
video suitable for uploading to video sites such as YouTube. If one is serious about shooting quality videos, it is advisable to purchase equipment for
the purpose, but these need not be prohibitively expensive or technically
complex. A consumer camcorder, for instance, is capable of shooting very
high-quality video suitable for publication online.
There are numerous online sources for instruction on shooting and editing
video, such as lynda.com. Journalism training programs such as the Knight
Center for Digital Media have also posted online tutorials that explain details such as what equipment is essential for reporters, how to plan a video
shoot and how to edit and produce the footage from a shoot.
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Chapter 9:
Dealing with complexity, uncertainty,
and controversy
Learning outcomes
__
__
__
After you have worked through this chapter, you will be able to:
Understand the difference between incremental and breakthrough science
and how to make choices about what science to report on.
Identify aspects of studies that can serve as warning signs about the
soundness of the research.
Understand how to portray complex information in a way that accurately
represents the scientific process.
The scientific enterprise is vast. The volume of scientific research studies
published every day exceeds the capacity of even the world’s leading media
outlets to cover them. There are more than 1 million research articles published every year, in tens of thousands of scientific journals. (Björk, Roos,
et al., 2009) The prospect of sifting through this vast body of knowledge to
select the key developments in science—the true breakthroughs that are
worth communicating to the public—can seem daunting.
At the same time, scientific information is inherently complex, uncertain,
and continuously subject to revision and even revolution. In some domains,
including climate science, evolution, biotechnology, and the role of vaccinations and other public health efforts, the waters are further muddied by
campaigns of disinformation. But even in legitimate science, many newly
published papers make only marginal additions to the body of scientific
understanding. Some make claims that seem very exciting, but do not live
up to scrutiny.
Science journalists, then, face a dual challenge. They must accurately
convey the iterative process of the scientific method, by which scientists
propose ideas, test them, and use data from their experiments to refine or
discard their ideas. At the same time journalists must avoid undermining
E005 / Title of this Course
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About the author
Thomas Hayden teaches science journalism
at Stanford University, in California. He has
been an oceanographer, a staffer at Newsweek
and a senior editor at US News & World Report, and a freelance science journalist whose
cover stories have appeared in Wired, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and many
other publications. He is coauthor of On Call
in Hell, a national bestseller about battlefield
medicine, and Sex and War, about the biological and social evolution of warfare. He is
coeditor of and a contributor to the definitive
Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish, and Prosper in the Digital Age. Open School
of Journalism
Journalism
JD130
Areas of Journalism
Science Journalism
Thomas Hayden
Open School
of Journalism