MYScience meets RELATE

Last Friday MYScience, the sister project of EJC’s REsearch LAbs for TEaching journalists (RELATE), held its closing conference in Bolzano, Italy. It was a day of celebration and reflection: awards were presented and experts invited to debate the state-of-the-art in science reporting, from the latest platforms to codes of ethics. Present were Nobel laureate Peter Grünberg, Hungarian science reporter Istvan Palugyai, and Alison Fay Binney, founder of the New Science Journalism (NSJ) project. This is not however a conference review, rather a look at the social and practical background of these EU projects, designed to ease students into the science journalism market…

“Science is just another type of content… it’s complicated, hard to explain and very specialised, so very few people are interested,” says Polish TV presenter Radek Brzózka. He’s right on some counts – apart from the first and last. Science is a massive field and some aspects stand out in their own right.

Twenty years ago technology and environment were niche fields, but today our news is full of hi-tech consumer goods, climate change, and social media like Facebook. Every day writers look into the various links between innovation and globalisation: it’s supply and demand, and the demand is such that one of the world’s highest paid journalists covers technology.

Further, our economies are driven by innovation and R&D, as companies and countries seek to edge ahead of the competition. This is big news on Bloomberg and FT; but even bigger news on CNN and BBC are the global events that affect us all: from environmental catastrophes to health epidemics – and the science used to put them right. Green dispersants for the Gulf of Mexico, vaccines for cancer, cyber dissidents in Iran – boring, irrelevant? I think not.

Translating research

People talk of bridging the ‘gap in understanding between science and society’, but really it’s two massive gaps: between researcher and reporter, and then between journalist and audience. And in Europe there are always linguistic barriers too.

The problem is that while most readers speak the language of sports and politics, hi-tech research often needs more explaining. Scientists are by definition pushing the limits of human understanding: that’s their job so their work needs translation into everyday language.

So yes, the field may be specialised but the writing should never be arcane. It’s the reporter’s job to explain their subject not in boring technicalities but in a way that’s compelling and relevant to the general public.
Article Page 1 of 3.   1 2 3 Next »