Scientists and Journalists May Find Common Ground Online

by Andrew McGregor

The primary source material for science writers, the scientists themselves, are quite often a problem during reporting.

The reasons scientists are doing what they do have nothing in common with why journalists want to write about them.  The scientists may just like using math to look for the face of God or enjoy studying chimpanzees when a PhD opportunity was roaming nearby.

Scientists also have a fear of being misquoted or misunderstood.  This is a valid concern as so much energy in the scientific career is exerted to learn one small thing very well that it is often difficult to translate this knowledge in terms that the average journalist can understand.  Issues such as these are exacerbated by the fact that journalism relies upon standardized narratives in order to convey information such as a personality profile of a celebrity or human interest story of the kind-hearted woman with forty cats ilk.

Conduct such as the preceding is antithetical to much of the scientific culture where even papers published by one author still use the word “we”.  The scientific community deems personal glorification to be vulgar and places the scientist who seeks such a thing in a suspicious light.

This deadlock of mutual misunderstanding may have a solution in the blogosphere because many scientific discoveries are reported according to what the journalists already know or conflict of interest situations may emerge where the scientists have a vested interest in seeing their findings reported.  The blogosphere can provide instant feedback into the claims of scientific discovery as there is more of a back and forth relationship than in other forms of journalism.

The blogosphere also lends itself to multi-media interpretations of scientific discoveries as scientists themselves can blog or provide visual representations of their work.

There is optimism in the room that through this technologically facilitated go-between scientists and journalists can learn to communicate...even if they can never really speak the same language.