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CHALLENGES IN COMMUNICATING SCIENCE TO CANADIANS ::
How Print Reporters and Editors Construct their Science Stories
Where do science stories come from?
The problem of “pipeline” journalism
By Stephen J. A. Ward
May 10, 2008
Quality reporting requires active, independent journalists who have the resources to seek out important stories beneath the daily press releases, the clatter of spin doctors and the media topic du jour. Reporters in all areas of journalism produce accurate and informed reports by having a diversity of sources for story ideas.
Wherever reporters are overly dependant upon certain sources for story ideas, the journalism becomes narrow, shallow or predictable. Journalists, in these conditions, are open to manipulation in their news choices and in their perspectives on stories.
If this view is true, there is reason for Canadians to be concerned about the news they receive from their science journalists.
A survey of Canadian print reporters who regularly cover science shows that their story ideas come from a limited range of sources.
In the survey, when journalists were asked about the main sources for their stories, they named research articles, such as information supplied by science journals under the “embargo system,” news agencies and stories in other news media.
Other sources for story ideas were researchers. Some journalists said they either have researchers that they talk to occasionally, or they contact scientists they don’t know and ask whether there is any news. Many journalists rely for story ideas on press releases and web sites, friends and family, and agencies such as cancer societies.
Reliance on research articles, often supplied through the embargoed system, appears to be a system designed to promote good science journalism. The embargo system works like this: Journals provide reporters with their leading studies a few days before they are to be published in the journal. Journalists agree not to report on the studies until after they appear in the journal. The delay in publication gives journalists time to write their reports, interview the study authors, and gather reaction from experts that were not part of the study.
However, there is a downside to becoming too closely tied to the journals and the embargo system. The process by which these sources provide stories, combined with conditions in today’s newsrooms, may encourage passivity among reporters.
In busy under-resourced newsrooms, journalists may become slaves to the journals as a convenient “pipeline” of science news. Instead of spending time outside the newsroom reporting on other science stories, or reporting on local research, journalists write stories from largely non-local sources – news wires and journals located in other cities and other countries. Moreover, in an era where the reliability of research is increasingly contested, journalists need to ask whether dependence on such sources can be taken for granted.
“Sometimes it’s hard to find that new stuff,” said one journalist. “It’s out there, but a lot of the times I feel that me and the people who do this sort of thing are slaves to the journals. We only know what they let us know.”
The survey’s findings on story sources appeared to conflict with the answers provided to another question – what reporters found newsworthy and what topics they tended to report on. Here the reporters placed some stress on “whatever is local.”
“We will do a story on something that might seem very complex if it is local, if someone local gets some recognition on his research,” said one journalist.
It may be possible to reduce the tension between these two answers by understanding the journalists to be saying that they like to “localize” wire stories or they prefer to do local stories where possible, since they are more newsworthy.
But the lack of an active, independent science journalism is evident from comments by the interviewed journalists. “Ideas usually come from a press release from one of the universities,” a journalist said. “Don’t have time to call universities once a week so it really helps if someone [...] gives us a heads up.”
Another journalist added: “Occasionally there’s a piece of unpublished research released through a university or you’ll go to a conference and speak with a researcher ... but that is less common.”
Journalists also said it can be difficult to keep in touch with researchers at Canadian universities. Getting Canadian scientists to talk to the media is difficult, while American scientists are apparently more willing to be interviewed.
As one journalist put it: “If you want to find out what’s happening at the Canadian space agency, phone NASA.”
“Where do most of your science story ideas come from?”
Respondents could list as many as they wished.
Summary of responses
| Research articles |
15 |
Newspapers |
10 |
News alerts e.g. Eurekalert |
8 |
Talking to researchers |
8 |
Press Releases |
7 |
Embargo system |
5 |
Friends and family |
5 |
Health agencies e.g. Cancer Institutes etc. |
5 |
Conferences |
3 |
Talking to PR people |
3 |
Internet searches |
2 |
Spawn from current events |
2 |
University Web sites |
2 |
Contacts suggest ideas |
1 |
Curiosity |
1 |
Lobby groups or NGOs |
1 |
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STEPHEN J.A. WARD
Dr. Stephen Ward is the principal investigator for
a GE3LS research project into the public communication
of controversial science. Dr. Ward’s project is part of
unprecedented $10.2 million, four-year gene therapy program
– the Pleiades Promoter
Project.
Dr. Ward is Director and Associate Professor of Journalism Ethics
at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of British
Columbia. He is the award-winning author of The Invention
of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond,
published in February 2005 by McGill-Queen’s University
Press of Montreal. The book won the 2005-2006 Harold Adams Innis
Prize from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social
Sciences for the best English-language scholarly book in the
social sciences.
Dr. Ward holds a PhD
in Philosophy from the University of Waterloo and has 15 years
of journalism experience, including 10 years as a foreign
correspondent and bureau chief for Canadian Press. Based in
London, he covered such major events as the Gulf War, the
Bosnian conflict and the troubles in Northern Ireland. Before
joining the journalism school, Ward was a research fellow
at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and
Public Policy, part of the Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University. His research interests include the philosophy
of journalism, media ethics and the impact of new media on
journalism.
In February 2006, he was appointed chair
of the ethics advisory committee of the Canadian Association
of Journalists. He is also the director of www.journalismethics.ca,
Canada’s first comprehensive web site devoted to the
study and promotion of journalism ethics from a global perspective.
Dr. Ward is the editor of Global Journalism Ethics, an international
Internet ethics forum at www.worldpressinstitute.org
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