The first Science Journalist Network workshop focusing on RRI and journalism was held in Helsinki, Finland on the 2nd of May 2016. Public engagement is a key to RRI. But is it the responsibility of science journalists?
The debate was lively and engaged and brought up many interesting issues. Those of you who were not in Helsinki as part of the NUCLEUS workshop can sit comfortably at home and watch the whole workshop which was being streamed lived and can be watched here.
If you still wonder what RRI has to do with science journalism, you can watch the video below where Gorm Palmgren and Berit Viuf explain a bit about the project.
NUCLEUS is a four year-long EU project. You can read more here.
You are more than welcome to participate in debates, if you have information or questions concerning journalism and RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation).
The EU project NUCLEUS is attempting to implement RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation) in research institutions around the world. It is still a question though, whether science journalists have a responsibility when it comes to RRI, and – if we do – how we can ensure RRI in our research and reporting. By Berit Viuf and Gorm Palmgren
Journalists can roughly fill two roles in connection to RRI: the watchdog of research and the bridge builder to the public. The watchdog stands outside and report on how well scientists are doing RRI, while the bridge builder works within the system, and makes sure that the public understands what goes on inside the lab, so ordinary people can participate in the debate of how relevant a certain line of research is for society.
As EUSJA’s representatives in the NUCLEUS project, we wanted to know some of the dilemmas that journalists face working in a new media landscape. Before we can work on guidelines that can help journalists navigate in science and RRI, we need to narrow down the most common challenges for science reporting.
In Manchester, UK, at the 3rd European Conference for Science Journalists, we led a workshop to discuss this with fellow science journalists, with the intention that everybody should have a chance to exchange experiences. Based on what we have chosen to call a “Conversation Menu”, we let the participants discuss at their tables before presenting one dilemma to a panel. In the panel was a freelance science journalist (Elisabetta Curzel, Italy), a science editor at BBC Radio (Deborah Cohen, England) and a scientist at EuroScience (Jean-Pierre Alix, France). The panel then commented and gave advice on how to deal with the dilemmas.
These are some of the topics that came up:
How do we manage as science journalists, when there is an editorial pressure for always being entertaining and fascinating, but sometimes there is also a serious and dark side to science?
It seems unlikely to pitch stories to an editor about how science failed to deliver in some way. Yet that is happening all the time. How do we deal with that as science writers?
There is too much talk about the watchdog role, and not so much of the importance of the scientific process and the society in science journalism. When you are very critical about science, you lose the positive aspects for society.
We are faced with a lot of problems in the media industry: crises, double standards, bias, too little time and money. So, journalists often make use of press releases and struggle to be objective. How can we do good science journalism when we depend so much on communication officers?
Science journalism often exaggerates and personalises messages to the audience and distorts the accuracy of the science. It has a big impact on the news, and it seems like nobody in the newsroom cares about how reliable a science story is. Don’t journalists have a responsibility of any sort?
The main purpose at this stage of the NUCLEUS Science journalist network was to put into words the frustrations journalists can feel when reality obstructs their ambitions. But it was also interesting to hear the responses from three different stakeholders in the science media industry.
The biggest frustration seemed to be that the pressure on the industry makes it difficult to tell the stories that journalists would really like to report about. As a result, reports easily become pretty, superficial and dependent on press releases. The panel seemed to agree on many of the problems raised, but also had some important input:
“It is that balance of telling the audience about science. We do try to help people understand that science is a process. So part of what we do is to explain that. Another part is being a watchdog. Essentially we want to explain what scientists are doing, what makes them tick, because people in general don’t see a human face to science,” Deborah Cohen explained.
“You can tell everything, because it really all depends on the story. Also when science fails to deliver. If I just say that Cinderella stayed home, there is no story. But if I tell the background for why she stayed home, it becomes very interesting,” Elisabetta Curzel elaborated.
“We need journalists to translate science to a broad audience. If we just take information that was built in a scientific context and uses special wording and send it to the public, it will not work. The public do not have the level and vocabulary necessary to understand. So we need dissemination, and that dissemination needs to target different cultures in society. Good journalism should know how words are received in different cultures,” Jean-Pierre Alix stated.
The European Union has several projects that explore RRI. One of them, NUCLEUS, is not only exploring the concept itself, but also investigating how it can come into practice.By Berit Viuf
“We want to see change. We have been discussing this for so long and we need some achievement. Now, for the first time, we want to put the theories into a framework to see what will work and what will not work. It is a research project along with the implementation.”
The words belong to Professor Alexander Gerber, Chair of Science Communication at Rhine-Waal University in Germany and Head of Research for the inscico Institute for Science and
Innovation Communication. Gerber is also the project lead of the EU Horizon 2020 project NUCLEUS.
NUCLEUS deals with Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI); in short, a new paradigm of responsibility, moving from an individualist or isolated notion to become a collective approach. RRI is a process where social actors work together during the whole research and innovation process. The social actors are researchers, citizens, policy makers, businesses, third sector organizations, etc. This could align research and innovation with values, needs and expectations of society.
RRI has been discussed for a long time. But few have worked with methods that can put it into action. NUCLEUS aims to create methods that can take the concept from theory into reality.
RRI for dummies
The idea of RRI can be hard to grasp when talked about in academic terms. But really, it is not that difficult.
Professor Alex Gerber, Chair of Science Communication at Rhein Waal University and project leader of NUCLEUS. Photo courtesy of Rhine Waal University
Imagine coming home and your spouse has bought a new car. It might be an improvement from your old car, but since you had no involvement in the decision process, it is very likely that you will disagree with the choice. You might even disagree although it is rationally the best choice, simply because you were not asked when making the decision.
Science has seen numerous examples of this. For instance, in the childhood of genetic engineering, researchers of GMOs focused on what they saw as benefits of the new technology. However, they neglected to take into account how civil society would react to manipulation of genes, and it turned out that laymen did find such a pervasive new technique highly questionable. It gave the people an impression of a very arrogant scientific environment run by commercial interests, rather than idealism for a better world.
“Am I responsible if I just tell you about my research? Or should I involve you during the process?” Gerber asks.
The disapproval of GMOs basically put public research of genetically engineered crops to an end in the EU. Maybe it was the right thing to do. Maybe not. It is hard to tell, because the potential benefits and risks were not discussed in an open democratic manner. Instead it became two adversaries yelling at each other. The scientists were accused of being cold, manipulative and money-driven, and the NGOs (representing civil society) were called emotional, naïve and irrational. The result: rejection by consumers.
“Innovation must be seen within society as a whole. Is innovation always a good thing? Will it contribute to new jobs or a better environment? Are the advantages big enough to make it the right thing to do for society? These things need to be discussed. Because if they don’t, people might reject good ideas – just because they were not involved,” Gerber says.
With technologies like hydrogen-bombs, GM food, human-animal chimeras, nano-devices, stem cells and CRISPR there is plenty of room for discussion.
The name NUCLEUS is inspired by biological cells. Every cell has a nucleus that takes the dominant role in governing the internal processes in the cell. In the same way that cells are interlinked with other cells around them to form an organism, society is build up by “cells” as well: universities, NGO’s, media, businesses and policy institutions are all interlinked.
NUCLEUS aims to investigate the link between these ‘cells’ and look at best cases as well as obstacles to engage the different stakeholders and ensure RRI processes.
The next step is to develop tools and practical guidelines that can be of use to higher education institutions and science-funding agencies.
“Probably we will only find a few things that work in this project. And some things might work in England, but not in Poland. But we will start a process and it is also important to learn what does not work. The important part is to develop methods that can be tested and further developed also after the project finishes,” Gerber explains.
