How science journalism's role is changing
Science journalism is in a major transition, driven by a changing relationship between science and society and by digital dissemination: journalists are expected to add to their traditional role of translating science for lay people those of curating and generating knowledge, under pressure from public demands for dialogue, from new competitors and from the economics of digital news. Medical writers who write for non-experts may face the same pressures.
Why science journalism is in transition
Science journalism is undergoing a major transition, as other branches of journalism are, because of changes in the relationship between science and society and dissemination through digital and connective technologies. Science journalists are increasingly expected to broaden their cultural, technical and relational skills and to show greater professional flexibility, because they may face a growing demand for democratic participation that shows itself in social controversy over scientific and technological issues, and because, like all journalists, they have to respond to changes in how information is produced and distributed in the digital era. Medical writers should consider what has happened in science journalism in recent years, because where the two meet, in producing material for a non-expert audience, in particular patients, they may face similar demands for change.
The mass media have disseminated science since the birth of newspapers in the 17th century, but editorial figures specialised in reporting scientific facts emerged only about a century ago. For a long time science journalism was meant to reconfigure technical information in words and images so that people without the expertise or the specialised terminology could follow it, leaving the research context and the social implications of knowledge unexplored, at least until the 1960s, when environmentalists, pacifists and animal rights activists began circulating in the press images of science less reassuring than before. The limitations of traditional news reporting identified as a consequence spawned a debate about the crisis of science journalism that is still relevant, and disseminators of scientific information are often criticised for excessive closeness to their sources, a lack of critical outlook and failure to contextualise information.
Those criticisms are also signals of a transformation in the relationship between science and society. More than 20 years before 2017, sociologists spoke of new forms of knowledge production that required a new contract between researchers and citizens: where science was traditionally expected to produce reliable knowledge and communicate its discoveries, the new contract must ensure that scientific knowledge is socially robust and that society sees its production as transparent and participative. Such changes are a challenge for the communication of science.
From a deficit model to dialogue
Practices of science journalism in which scientists know what the public does not and the media translate the complex into the simple reflect the assumptions of the deficit model of science communication. The alternatives to that longstanding unidirectional and paternalistic approach rest on sociological and ethnographic research that began in the 1990s to examine the distinct audiences for science for the first time, and found that non-experts' ability to comprehend, discuss, evaluate and generate knowledge had been underestimated. That research coincided with calls from institutional bodies for more dialogic communication between researchers and citizens; an influential report by the UK House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology at the beginning of the 21st century reviewed dialogue-promoting activities and recommended that increased openness from scientific institutions should play an integral role in scientific decision-making. Through initiatives of this kind, involvement, bidirectionality and interaction gradually became keywords of science communication, expressing an increasing demand for public participation in the governance of science and technology.
Where lay knowledge is valued more highly and public priorities are seen as relevant to science, more dialogic communication practices bring difficulties of their own. Requests from non-experts to take part in decisions about science and technology are a current issue, but it is hard to say whether practices meant to strengthen participation and public engagement are rhetorical devices that do not reflect true empowerment, and not everyone may favour giving non-experts opportunities to shape and transform research. The answer to these challenges cannot be a diminished, restricted interaction between scientists and citizens, which is now intrinsically unfeasible, but a reinforced public forum for debate. The dialogue between researchers and citizens will function only if new science mediators emerge who can handle multidirectional and more dynamic interaction with participatory audiences, which requires communicators and journalists to fine-tune, or in many cases acquire, new relational skills and possibly to generate content in an even more specialised manner than they do now.
Patient associations and health rights movements play a leading role. The growing role of patient advocacy groups created a momentum that has significantly affected communication strategies and that, according to various commentators, reflects the dominance in recent decades of a more sceptical attitude towards doctors, scientists and other experts. Patients' mistrust combines with the medicalisation of scientific news: news relevant to biomedicine not only dominates public communication of science but, although it has not always been dominant, has become the prototype of science in collective perception.
The digital shift and the competition it brought
Digital platforms and social networks have introduced innovations that call into question the legitimacy and usefulness of much traditional journalism, and science writing is no exception. Scientific blogs, written by researchers or science enthusiasts often willing to produce quality content without adequate compensation, and the growing tendency of universities and research centres to communicate directly with their audiences, bypassing journalists, compete strongly with the work of professional science writers. Science journalists, like other journalists, also face the need to learn multimedia and digital skills, tighter deadlines and a 24-hour news cycle. Professional science writers work under more stressful conditions than before, have fewer opportunities to get inside a newsroom because science and technology sections are often the first to be cut, and must acquire technical expertise not required in the past.
In 2010 Otis Brawley, then chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, held that the decline of the professional medical and science writer is a threat to public health as important as the latest scare story in the headlines, perhaps more so.
One of the most obvious recent changes in the public communication of science is the rise of public relations activities, including active suggestions of communicative content and materials, as an increasingly meaningful part of research institutions' communication initiatives. That means more professional opportunities for science writers, and at the same time marks a shift from a logic of journalism towards a logic of corporate communication.
New models of practice and training
New models of science journalism education are being studied in response to these trends. The future of journalism education in general is also under discussion, and possible scenarios include digital-first journalism schools that promote collaboration between practitioners and scholars to define new curricula.
The American researcher Tom Patterson, who outlined the features of knowledge-based journalism in 2015, holds that the decline in news quality requires journalists to relate to knowledge in a new way: to employ knowledge and practices traditionally linked to the academic world, and to science in particular, to produce journalistic content. Journalists then become producers of new knowledge rather than simple mediators. Other research suggests that journalists should acquire skills such as audience analysis, reading and interpreting data and statistics, and comprehension of metrics, and more broadly that there are many opportunities, especially with the rise of the web, to create models of journalism informed by the scientific method. Discussion focused on science communication holds that future science communicators need multidisciplinary skills to penetrate the social, political and economic dimensions of the knowledge-based society, and some researchers believe that the challenges of independent science journalism lie more than ever in interpretation and contextualisation, or information about information.
What the science journalist becomes
Few studies show how far these changes are reflected in present-day production. Research mapping online science journalism in elite US and UK media concluded that, compared with over 10 years earlier, science journalists play a plurality of roles, including curator, convener, public intellectual and civic educator alongside the traditional roles of reporter, conduit, watchdog and agenda-setter, and that online science writers, compared with traditional ones, built more collaborative relationships with their audiences and sources and showed a more critical attitude towards scientific communities, industry and political organisations.
Traditional and emerging science journalism differ in their main roles, competencies and missions.
| Type of journalism | Main roles | Main competencies | Main mission |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional science journalism | Translator of scientific information for lay persons | Writing, knowledge of scientific disciplines, storytelling | To popularise science to stimulate comprehension of scientific advances for the sake of economic and social progress |
| Emerging and future science journalism | Curator and generator of new knowledge | Multimedia and digital production, numeracy, multidisciplinarity, understanding of social media | To penetrate the social, political and economic dimensions of the knowledge-based society |
Science journalists will have to integrate their traditional skills as translators of science with those of organisers and curators of the knowledge generated by different communities, and they could increasingly become generators of new knowledge themselves. The picture of the future science journalist that emerges from research and discussion is of someone more specialised and closer to scientists' ways of thinking and working, yet more oriented to social media and more interactive; more precarious and more independent of newsrooms, but freer to propose themselves as opinion leaders; more concerned with democratising science, but also more integrated in the promotional logistics of research institutions; equipped with the translator's traditional tools, but driven towards a multidisciplinary approach and the technical and productive skills of the online world. That picture reflects an ecosystem inhabited by an increasing number of techno-scientific hybrids. A new professional identity for those once called science writers is probably still a long way off, but professionals who want to keep a significant role in public discourse on science cannot rely only, or almost only, on the translator's tools, and will have to carry out increasingly varied and less linear tasks.