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 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 highest paid journalists in the world 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.

Part of the problem is squaring the fast-moving world of journalism (where deadlines rule the day) with the slow-paced world of science (where experiments take weeks to prepare and years to achieve). In this respect, our projects can bridge the divide. By ‘embedding’ the participants in labs for several days, RELATE and MYScience give not only privileged access but more time than reporters would ever get to probe and understand the research.

Radek is on the right track when he says memory works on the emotional level. We may not remember hard facts initially, but we do remember their emotional effects. Life’s complicated, so we’re right to ask: will this make my life easier or harder? This is the first job of a journalist: find the hook by showing the relevance.

Given time, we learn to understand as well as care. The environmental and human rights movements, with their complex technical and legal foundations, are examples of how much reporters can do in terms of public opinion. Without the media, there would be no Greenpeace or Amnesty International. For the latter, MYScience’s diversity project shares similar goals.

Driven by youth

Over a glass of red wine, Radek hits the nail on the head. He reminds us that the web’s greatest entrepreneurs were all in their 20s when they struck gold: the founders of Facebook, Youtube, Google; and before them a college dropout named Bill Gates launched the home computing revolution.

So who better to steer the future of science journalism than up-and-coming reporters? This is the main idea behind MYScience and RELATE: embedding students into labs, giving them the chance to shadow and interview scientists while they work. (Of course while they are there, they only get one side of the story; but RELATErs are asked to weigh up both sides of the issue, the pros and cons, impacts and benefits.)

Take, for example, research into a cancer vaccine by Melody Schwartz at the EPFL in Lausanne. Judging by the participants’ blogs, this was a complex subject—but also fascinating and worthwhile.

Zsofia Lenart (Hungary) notes how: “Even without any medical or scientific background the stories were really fascinating and comprehensible”.  Seema Jilani (UK/USA) says: “It was interesting to note that the researchers themselves also found that it was difficult for them to communicate intricate scientific ideas in laymen’s terms… But interestingly, as the week progressed, we both improved our communication with each other, which, I suppose was the purpose of RELATE to begin with.” And for Julia-Anna Photopolous (Greece): “Even with a scientific background, this area of research is new and complex to me as well. I am so mesmerized by this exciting world of ‘lymphatics’ and want to be able to fully grasp every aspect of it and disseminate it to the general public.”

Embedding best practice

So far RELATE has sent 50 young journalists to labs across Europe. In Ankara, Barcelona and Florence, they looked into nanophotonics; in Brussels, aeronautics; in Istanbul, food and energy research; in Lausanne, nano-vaccines and bio-robotics; in Paris, sensory neurobiology; and in Rome inter alia climate change modelling and hi-tech ways to protect monuments.

Our work is slowly making waves. In January 2010, RELATE was showcased in a British government report: ‘Science and the Media: Securing the Future’, compiled by experts from the BBC, LSE, Oxford University and New Scientist magazine. Equally important, RELATErs have published their work in Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Romania, Turkey, and Israel (in a print magazine). Still more from Britain, Croatia and Finland have published their work via the New Science Journalism project. One French/American participant was even published in the Economist. So RELATE is already springboard for some into science journalism.

...What is RELATE?

REsearch LAbs for TEaching journalists (RELATE) is a project funded by the European Commission under the Science in Society research area of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

In 2009-10, 80 young journalists are visiting labs across Europe, interviewing researchers, then publishing their findings. They are ‘embedded’ on week-long study tours, giving them the inside track on all kinds of research.

Project partners include the European Journalism Centre (The Netherlands), Minerva Consulting and Communication (Belgium), and three European research bodies: ENEA (Italy), EPFL (Switzerland) and TÜBITAK (Turkey). In 2010, the project welcomed new labs, including ICFO (Barcelona), INRA (Paris) and LENS (Florence).

In addition, please see our interviews with Dr Markus Lehmkuhl of the Freie Universität Berlin, Diederik S. Wiersma of the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS), Alison Fay Binney of the New Science Journalism project, as well as Seema Jilani and Professor Mark Brake of the Science Communication Research Unit at Glamorgan University (UK).

 

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