The Internet Changes Everything

...Or does it?

It changes many things, to be sure. Hyperlinks append the encyclopedia to end all encyclopedias to every article. Flash and php enable “interactive content” much more advanced than simple page-flipping. Many of the games and demos suggested today are excellent examples. The Internet also provides an unparalleled way to track how readers experience pages, articles and demos, through what they choose to click and what they post in blogs.

And yet, in the wake of the symposium today, I found myself mulling what Tom Sigfried said: “All that stuff is very nice, but is it journalism?”

...or, could it be journalism? More directly: are the technologies of the web going to remain supplemental material, or are they going to change the very core substance of journalism in the future?

I doubt it.

Alfred Hermida’s admonition that journalists need to “have a multimedia mindset” should be heeded, but also taken with a grain of salt. Every story can’t be deconstructed into bits.

Narrative is primary. People understand the world in terms of stories; that’s what they’re looking for in news. The implicit question people ask when they pick up a newspaper or magazine (or go online in search of news) is “what’s going on?”—and the answer to that can’t always come in choose-your-own adventure form. Breaking a feature article into blurb bios, a game, and a flash animation of the relevant science destroys something valuable. The narrative, the story, is lost.

I heard various grim statistics today about how few people will follow a link to the latter half of a story (less than 20%). Still, though, if a publication cuts all such stories, it shouldn’t be surprised by a 20% drop in readership.

People do have the patience for longer stories, even if they don’t read them much online. As I said today, I think this is largely the result of the discomfort of reading from current computer screens. I refuse to believe that the attention span for all readers has dropped to 300 words in the last ten years. I think that advances in display technology will prove that.

Just as MTV didn’t kill the feature film’s popularity, I can’t believe that the internet will reduce journalism to blurbs. People will still want someone to connect the dots for them, to tell them a story.

High Tech Fights Old Dignity

by Andrew McGregor

How to maintain integrity on the internet? An entity that was created by mathematicians and commercialized by pornographers is the hopeful nesting ground for the future of science writers.

The writers themselves do not see a problem in continuing what they were doing from their former print days when they chose not to lie and tell the news and things like this.  However, people instinctively do not trust what they read online versus traditional, authoritative sources and the public spends even less time reading online articles than print.

So, the preceding comprise at least two daggers pointed at the proverbial body of science writing.  The task of shoving the thoughtfulness and eloquence of the past into multi-media and diffuse cells does not look to be an easy one.

Fortunately though, there is a hope that all the online technological trend-hopping can just be avoided and that e-paper can fundamentally give people the searchability of the internet without the visual inconvenience of staring at a computer screen.

Acrimony is the only agreement, but there is hope that a future technology will allow the writers to do what they know how to very well and provide their readers with the meaningful content they so very much crave.

Will the twain meet under a new tech sky?

Radio, Online

The general sentiment at this conference is that young people are no longer reading newspapers and listening to the radio.  They are glued to their computers, getting their news from who knows where- blogs, podcasts, YouTube among them.

The question is; how do you share your journalistic wares in this new medium?

“We can’t just say, ‘isn’t it terrible they’re not reading newspapers?’” declared Alfred Hermida this morning.  “We have to find ways to reach them”

“We’re experimenting,” said Vicky Valentine from NPR, “Everyone is still trying to figure out the web, and what really works.” She presented one of their experiments, an interactive site focusing on language.

The site used video and audio clips to explain different experiments on aspects of language.  One of the criticisms of this site, said Valentine, was that not all of the people who were interviewed for the site had video clips to share. 

Another interactive site that Valentine presented focused on the impact of the war in Iraq. 

One of the questions Valentine raised was how long the online clips should be.  How long are people’s attention spans when they’re online?  Is 2 minutes too much, too little?

You tell me, she says, showing us another interactive site, this one a slide show with audio about child brides in Ethiopia.  This one is great, she says, partly because it was so cheap to produce. Yet the vivid pictures accompanying the radio story add a whole new perspective to the story.

An embargo on science?

Will science coverage suffer if the embargo system is abandoned? If science reporters no longer have the advantage of several days to research their articles and talk to sources, will they start churning out crap?

This topic was touched on several times today.  Over lunch, Alexandra Witze from Nature was kind enough to explain the basics of the embargo system to us (me, Laura and Mark).

In the embargo system, everyone gets a list of journal articles, PDFs and supporting information in advance, on the condition that they will not publish anything until the agreed-upon date.  Each news organization then decides what to write about, and the stories are all published the same day, coinciding with the publication of the journal article. These tip sheets from the major journals, said Witze, are the “bread and butter” of science journalists.

Nowadays, journals are beginning to publish some articles online ahead of their print edition.  Don Kennedy of Science said that this trend was likely to continue, and that the media might soon be receiving science information in “driblets,” rather than the nice packages they are accustomed to.  This could put science journalists in the position of scrambling to put a story together, perhaps even leaving out important pieces of the puzzle. 

Scientists, after all, are not easy creatures to catch hold of. They are rarely in their offices, more likely to be found lurking in the back of a committee meeting, lecturing to undergrads, or perhaps even looking over their graduate students’ shoulders.  I can only imagine working on a deadline, trying to get ahold of an expert to provide you with some context or an explanation on a difficult topic.

It’s not necessarily about being first, though.  Alfred Hermida pointed out that even if a story has already been reported, a thoughtful analysis will always add value.  The addition of expert voices and context will be a welcome explanation to those readers whose interest was aroused by the initial short news stories on a newly released paper. 

Perhaps, in an ideal world, science journalists could specialize further, and really get to know what they are talking about in a specific field.  Trying to know everything about science is like trying to know every word in a dictionary.  If a writer already has a good understanding of the context in their field, they can put a new finding into perspective more easily.

Web Cred

In the first session of the afternoon, Larry Gonick brought up the idea of credibility, and how web sites get it. People tend to trust people around them, and the people that those people trust. He suggested that participation by journalists (or scientists) in popular sites like MySpace or Facebook could lend credibility to scientific arguments in circles where such ideas are not usually be debated.

This is a very appealing idea. One imagines the causally curious public being convinced by eloquent arguments from distinguished PhDs or lauded science writers. The multitudes then share these arguments with their friends and start grass-roots movements to enact policies that will stop global warming, fund more science, and save the world.

But such forums are a double-edged sword for scientists and serious writers. Arguing on MySpace would pit them against all manner of rabble. If they resorted to the kind of forceful, direct language that would win arguments in a lay audience, they’d lose professional credibility. If they stuck with exactly accurate, qualified, and respectful terms, they wouldn’t convince a public accustomed to political pundits’ ad hominem attacks.

Still, it’s at least amusing to imagine real professionals dropping their scientific / journalistic gloves and bare-knuckling it in the trenches ("You moron! Do you even know where milk comes from?!?")

And more seriously, MySpace and similar sites may provide a real opportunity to speak to an audience that doesn’t read the New York Times science section.

Serendipitous science

Serendipity in science is nothing new.  When it comes to media, however, more and more people are getting their information by happenstance.  The second session of the conference turned to the internet’s role in communicating science.

A search for “Spears,” as in Britney, may turn up a recent scientific observation that chimps use spears as hunting tools.  People who may never intend to read about science may be tricked into it, purely by chance. 

John Horrigan’s Pew report provided a basis for the discussion.  The report said that newspaper readership has steadily declined, while more and more people get their information from the internet.  While we all probably could have guessed that, the trends in the data were overwhelming.  The convenience and availability of the internet has led to a surge in its role as a news medium.  Science journalism has been swept up in this shifting tide.

Where does this leave traditional science coverage?  Is it moving away from a readership who faithfully sought out science coverage in traditional outlets?  (Did a readership like that ever exist in the first place?) Are we now hoping to catch the eye of someone who was reading about a shark attack?  Alfred Hermida mentioned that people are drawn in (sometimes serendipitously) at the story level, not by the topic.  Some participants mentioned that even LA Times headlines are happenstantial scientific readings.  No one picks up the newspaper just to read science, and it happens to be that one of the stories is science-related.  Is there a difference here, and if so, is it important? 

Although some attendants thought that the internet may lead to faster and sloppier coverage, some saw an opportunity.  KC Cole said that she thinks that the internet, with its rapid pace and limitless content, can offer an improvement in science communication.  The public’s appetite for news is changing, and their happy discoveries reflect this shift.

Why scientists can’t tell stories

Adam Franks from the University of Rochester teased out a key issue in his talk - the role of scientists as gatekeepers.

What he means he how scientists themselves communicate, or rather, fail to communicate, the meaning of their work. Why is this? Partly, said Franks is that there is a sense among scientists that appearance of seeking too much media attention is bad. This is despite the fact that grants tend to have an outreach component. In other words, how is the scientist going to tell the world about their work?

But then the other issue that comes up is that scientists don’t understand narrative.  They tend to adopt an expository approach in writing. The aim is to expose information.  In contrast, journalism is about telling stories through narrative writing. 

This divide illustrates one of the big challenge scientists and journalists face in communicating about science. 

Internet Presents Problems and Opportunities for Science Journalism

by Andrew McGregor

When I was teaching English in Beijing I faced a problem of how to explain the concept of a nerd to a Chinese student.

“It’s someone who studies a lot and is good at math and science, but they do it too much.”
“Like Bill Gates?”
“Yeah.”
“And it is bad to be a nerd?”
“Yes, kind of.”
“Why?”

Without the cultural context of life in America it was very difficult to explain the concept of what a nerd is.

The internet is dragging science journalists into the future with demographically violent trembles affecting the entire field.  The internet allows unparalleled access to science news and information, but this access comes at the price of analysis and context so crucial to science journalism.

Internet search functions are predicated on connectivity and the popularity of websites: the googleization of information.  Within this process there is no human arbiter to provide the appropriate scientific context and meaning.  One can use the internet to access studies from labs across the planet on esoteric components of quantum mechanics.  However, without an appropriate scientific context it is unlikely that the findings will be adequately conveyed or understood.

Essentially, the internet is facilitating unprecedented access to information but this is coming at a direct cost of science writers being able to explain what it means.

Internet use also means that science writing will have great opportunities like the exploration of online programs that can allow a user to be a climatologists and run tests on what adding carbon dioxide will do to the atmosphere and things of this nature.

It is uncertain what science journalism will look like as the internet continues to change the way media is consumed.  What is clear is that science journalists will have to play a dual role of protecting the intellectual credibility of their craft while employing the nascent technologies that may lead to its degradation.