The Value of Science Journalism

Last week, AU Prof. David Johnson said that some of journalism's inherent values are that it both saves time and narrativizes otherwise dense issues. Media outlets are typically used by people--the general public--who wish to learn the basics of an issue, who want to be well-informed enough to hold a debate or sound intelligent in a public forum. They print the issues, but in the ways that appeal to the public or are easily understood by the public.

In this sense, journalism exists to sell itself. And this is the main constraint under which science journalism in particular must operate.

To obtain a drastic result, one must enact drastic changes. It's true that science journalism is limited because of the limitations of its audience. The problem begins in youth, in the lack of effective science education that public schools offer. If a more educated public is needed, then students must be taught how to analyze and understand scientific data and information from an early age. For instance, I attended a magnet high school that focused on technology and science, and every student was required to independently engineer his or her own investigative scientific research project: propose a question and follow it through using the scientific method. If the issues themselves weren't interesting enough, we were encouraged to pursue the topics further through the media of competitions and fairs that offered scholarship money as prizes.

If every public school in America required its students to pursue such an endeavor--both through personal conduction of scientific research and learning about their classmates' projects--these students might grow to become more appreciative and informed of science as a discipline. They might understand the work of scientists better, no matter what field they eventually enter into. And in an ideal world, science journalists would not have to "dummy down" their coverage of scientific discoveries because they would be dealing with a public that has experience and on some level, can understand.

Of course, such a project would require much dedication and funding. But I would defend the value of such time and money: making science relatable from an early age can reduce the intimidation factor it tends to present in later life for many people.

Another way of making issues more understandable is the concept of "framing," which was discussed in the readings and in class this week. "Framing," at least to my understanding, makes all science journalism sound like something that must be constructed, that journalists must force the issues to fit into some special wording that appeals to the public. Most science issues, in my opinion, are issues in the first place because they are already important to the public in some capacity, even if it's difficult to explain how. If scientific topics were not relevant, they would not be receiving grants and funding to be pursued at all. That is the purpose of science: to learn about the world and to apply that knowledge to better people's lives. I would tend to think that most people are interested in the betterment of their own lives, and in this sense, they both have a duty to be and will be interested in what science journalists have to say.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science gives out annual awards for excellence in science journalism. In 2010, Richard Harris of NPR won a Kavli Science Journalism award for a series that challenged initial estimates of the damage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Deepwater Horizon was and arguably still is a hot-button issue; one can simply talk to a Gulf Coast resident or business owner to be assured of that. Without the work of Harris and his colleagues, and those who read his work and took action, the scale of the catastrophe might not have been realized for some time.

In this instance, understanding the science of the matter isn't the most important part of the issue. People will read an article about the Gulf Coast because, to understand how much money they will be making in the year or what will happen to their family tomorrow, they need to learn about the science behind an oil spill. Science is important because it affects us; it has become personal; in fact, it has always been personal. It isn't a matter of being intelligent; it's a matter of being informed. It's a matter of understanding the complex interplay of science, economics, history, culture, and politics to live one's daily life at a higher quality.

Therefore, I don't think that science journalists need to convince the public that science is important. Whether they actively realize it or not, this is a fact that they already know. The challenge is in forcing people to apply that knowledge to greater understanding and political and social action.

Just like any other issue given attention in the media, I believe that science is a field whose value must be engrained in the population from the beginning: both in terms of its significance on its own but also its policy and day-to-day implications. In this way, journalists will eventually stop having to "sell" science in the media; like journalism itself, stories on science will be printed because they are important enough to sell themselves.

Journalism: the ever-evolving field

I've wanted to become a journalist since I was nine years old. It started when I met a reporter from Gannett News Service, who planted the idea in my head. It made sense; even then, I loved to write and meet interesting people. Nearly ten years later, I still can't imagine myself pursuing anything else but a career in print journalism.

When I told this to Prof. David Johnson, he succinctly told me that print is dead. 

This isn't anything I haven't heard before. Almost everyone I've told my plans to, including print journalists themselves, has expressed skepticism. And for good reason.

Print is on the decline. Hundreds of newspapers across America have begun to fold, and not just small local papers.  The Rocky Mountain News. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Papers that serve hundreds of thousands of people have gone completely online or no longer exist.

Today, I had lunch with two reporters from Gannett (one of whom was the reporter I met ten years ago). I asked them what they thought of The New York Times charging for web access. They told me that they think that people need to pay for their news. How that will happen in an online world, they aren't sure. 

"Maybe we could charge people three cents a story," one suggested. "I don't know. I can't figure out the exact technology of it."

I mulled over that conversation for a while afterward. Two points jumped out at me. Firstly, even as a potential journalist who would like to earn a salary, I'm not sure if people should be obliged to pay for their news. Does truth really have a price tag? In the words of Gay Talese, "The truth is hard, first of all, to get. And harder still to communicate. And more hard to make money on!" I suppose therein lie the current difficulties of journalism.

The journalists I met today were disparaging of blogs. I disagree with that. One would have to be narrow-minded to overlook the importance of citizen journalism in many instances, especially recently. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya. And in the Nip article "Citizen journalism in China: The case of the Wenchuan earthquake," the author describes how citizens were the first people on the scene after a 2008 earthquake, providing a rare critique of a Communist regime.

Would that have been possible if one had to pay for their words? Probably not. Where the free press does not exist, citizens must tell their own stories. That, I believe, is why a blog or a Twitter cannot charge, while the NYT can.

Still, I believe that one must be more skeptical of blogs and personal Twitters than of major media outlets. Johnson made the point that the NYT places a corrections box every day in its print edition. Citizen journalists rarely correct themselves so thoroughly; they are not upheld to the same standards of ethics as a media organization of long-standing repute. Johnson provided the example of the blog "A Gay Girl in Damascus," which was in actuality written by a German man. He claimed that we should have known this fraud immediately because "there aren't any lesbians in Syria!" While amusing, his warning rings true.

The need to make money and the need to report truth are two factors that will have to be reconciled in the future. Whether from advertisers, or from paid online subscriptions, news outlets need money to survive, while personal blogs do not. While somewhat disheartening, the NYT’s decision is entirely understandable.


I think that both newspapers and blogs have their place. Both should be trusted, but newspapers should always be trusted more. While no source can ever be truly objective and factually perfect, newspapers will always be more so than personal blogs. That is one of the reasons that I believe that the field of journalism will always have a future and that professional journalists will always be employed. In a way, the journalists I met with were right in being disparaging of blogs. Media outlets simply have more resources; they have the potential to reach more people and to be more a powerful and trusted force.

The second point that jumped out at me during my lunch today was that the reporter claimed to be unable to understand the technology changing his job field. This seems to me a gaping hole in his knowledge bank.

A fact from the Pew study that saddened me was that 51% of people get their news from social media like Facebook. To me, that devalues journalism: that people want to see what's on their newsfeed before they see what's happening in the world.

But upon further reflection, I realized what a tool social media can be. Not only in terms of citizen journalism, in which it has created revolutions, but on our own shores. One of America’s weaknesses is that it has a very uneducated voter population. Perhaps social media can play an important role in changing that weakness.

But I hesitate to suggest that online news is sweeping up the nation. According to the Pew study, only 2% of people receive their news exclusively online. And the research suggested that those who do receive their news online are primarily privileged: high incomes and education levels, and Caucasian. And unsurprisingly, young.

And because of that, I hesitate to not suggest that online news is sweeping the nation. Young people are obviously the future. The generation of people who simply enjoy reading a physical paper is passing by. More importantly, printed papers cost too much.

Perhaps I will never write for a newspaper that is physically printed and distributed. This doesn't bother me. When I say I want to enter print journalism, I mean that I want to write. I'll write for a website, for an iPad, for whatever technology is the next big hit by the time I graduate college. I don't want to enter this field to hear the sound of my own voice; I want others to use my voice to find out what they need to know.

Because I believe that journalists, foremost, are interpreters. They are the first responders to an event and their version of the story is what the public will read. As a Gannett reporter told me at lunch, "I don’t know if what I do will be remembered. But people have a right to know what I write, and in that sense, what I do is necessary."

I don't worry about my future as a journalist. I know the field will be very different in five years than it is today, and that I may need to adapt my skill set to meet its needs, but I also know that it will never be dead. I don't think new technologies need to be adapted to meet the needs of journalism; rather, journalism needs to adapt itself to different types of media. Whether on a piece of paper, television, radio, blog, or iPad, someone will always need to report the news, and I intend to do just that.

Challenges of Mobiles for Development (M4D)

Donner's article "Blurring Lives and Livelihoods" raises many important and valid points about the advantages and complex functions of mobiles for development (M4D).  One of the most important points of Donner's article is that its non-economic and non-developmental functions should not be ignored; in other words, that the mobile's social function is just as significant as its capabilities in the business world. As the title of the article might imply, mobiles render the separation between daily lives and the workplace increasingly ambiguous.

Though supported by little empirical evidence, this point makes logical sense: to suggest that one use of a phone is the only use that merits any attention is to take an overly simplistic view of a large issue. However, Donner's argument could extend a little further. While the article confronts the ways in which researchers and analysts could improve the implementation of  M4Ds, it never asks the question of the limitations of the concept of M4D in general. It is a simple concept that many would like to believe: give mobile devices to the struggling poor in third-world countries and their economies will subsequently expand. But it is unlikely that a problem of this scale can be solved with so simple a solution.

Something that struck me as odd while I was preparing this blog entry was the lack of available information on M4Ds; while I found many case studies dealing with M4Ds, I also found that they don't have their own Wikipedia page nor do they appear at all frequently in the media. With such a lack of exposure, if one can't easily find information about M4Ds by using Google or opening a newspaper, I was led to wonder about the potential of their success on a global scale.

If the general public doesn't know about M4Ds or consider them to be important, then those organizations who can give grants and funding to the program might not either; if their donors and sponsors are not inclined to give to a cause, then that cause may very well not receive funding.

Heather Thorne, the director of ICT innovation at the Grameen Foundation's Technology Center, suggests lack of grants and funding as one of four main obstacles that M4Ds face, but for a different reason. Most grants only give funding for about a year, which is an insufficient amount of time to properly assess the impact of M4Ds in society, according to Thorne.

The other three limitations that she lists are the lack of intermediaries involved with M4Ds (that technology is not as understandable without an intermediary speaking in easily comprehensible, direct language); the lack of a social performance measurement (people will not invest in a program without empirically proven success, so some measurement must be instated); and the inherent difficulties in implementing a long-term program.  These are all noteworthy points that are explored with little to no detail in the article.

While "Blurring Lives and Livelihoods" did raise interesting issues about the considerations that M4D researchers should be dealing with, I felt that its analysis was limited; in order to truly understand the issue, one must be slightly more broad-minded.