The Evolving Newsroom

The daily news business gives us an odd, distorted view of the world doesn’t it? In New Zealand, for example, you could be forgiven for thinking there’s little in the way of technological development going on, given that the main daily newspapers devote a pathetic one page a week to the subject, if that.

A little more attention is sometimes paid online, but even then the category of Technology appears to apply only to computers and gadgets and games. Technology in industry barely gets a look-in, and when it does it’s often not included under the Technology tab.

The attention paid to science in the daily news agenda is no better. In fact, Science doesn’t even warrant its own Category and is instead often squeezed into an inside page with the ‘boring but significant’ news stories or second-string Features.

This, at a time when science and technology are widely discussed as being critical to the future prosperity of New Zealand and indeed to the problem-solving requirements of the wider world – think food production, disease control, disaster management, ‘clean’ technologies, transport.

As the PM’s recently appointed Chief Science Advisor Sir Peter Gluckman said in a speech at the Victoria University of Wellington Institute of Policy Studies (linked to here):

The world is changing at an exponential rate. Knowledge and technology are a major part of that change, and whether New Zealand remains of relevance to the rest of the world may depend significantly on transformational strategies, which will in turn depend on how we use the Research, Science & Technology (RS&T) sector.

Sir Peter has done a bit of media lately, appearing on National Radio, Q&A with Paul Holmes and Media7 with Russell Brown. And his appointment and speeches have had a bit of coverage. But I wonder whether the subject of his speeches – research, science and technology – will get many column inches between now and his next media tour.

He also noted in that Victoria speech:

There are related issues, such as the role of the media. If evidence is to be given more weight in policy formation, then it confronts the political reality that no political process can move faster than with public acceptance. And we have seen issues here — the folate in bread situation being merely one example; climate change another. The quality and capacity of our media to represent science and evidence is patchy at best. Peter Griffin is doing a great job with the Science Media Centre, but the media is still hell‐bent on reporting science as a series of breakthroughs — which it is not — and failing to adequately illustrate somewhat complex issues, and wanting to create controversy with a moral equivalency approach that leaves the public confused and the politician unable to act. Climate change represents a giant challenge here, and I suspect clean water will soon be as well.

This is a familiar theme to Ben Goldacre, author of the book Bad Science and the blog of the same name. His book is one I will be encouraging journalism students to read, if only for an overview of the ‘scientific method‘ and how easy it is to get things horribly and embarrassingly wrong in science reporting.

Goldacre recently participated in a debate with Lord Drayson, the UK’s Minister for Science and Innovation, about science reporting in the UK. I won’t summarise the debate here, you can see it for yourself. But a couple of early comments made by Lord Drayson, who took on the task of defending science reporting, stood out for me.

We really do have an admirable and improving standard of science reporting in this country… when it’s written by dedicated science correspondents. To me a science journalist means someone who spends the majority of their time engaged in the reporting of science, who writes primarily about science and therefore someone who really knows about the subject. I don’t include general science reporters who sometimes cover science in a general context.

Never more so than now, really good science communication is vital to the health and happiness and success of this country. Because we know from public attitude surveys, from talking to people, that people’s trusting science depends upon the quality of science journalism. And that trust affects their disposition to accepting new technologies, to accepting change.

This is only a brief post and I haven’t studied science reporting in New Zealand in any depth so I can’t comment authoritatively on how good, bad or indifferent it is overall. I can only comment on the paucity of coverage I’ve personally noticed in daily news. And I can make a public note that I stopped reading ‘cancer breakthrough’ and other health stories years ago after working for a health information service and seeing with my own eyes a media outlet’s poorly patronised in-house ‘survey’ of its own client doctors being reported – and re-reported – as a ‘study’ with ‘findings’.

But it seems to me that, at a time when newspapers in particular and daily news providers in general are rapidly losing relevance in an increasingly connected and information-rich world, keeping on top of relevant topics might be a start. Time to bring back specialist reporters. Or watch and weep as specialist reporters figure out how to do their job without you.