Science is not what sells newspapers
Posted by Science Oxford on June 8, 2011 | comments
The Science Communication Conference 2011 keynote speaker, Tim Radford, ex-editor at the Guardian, explained how news reporting has changed over the years and why newspapers still have a place in an online world. Review by Blanka Sengerová.
People don’t buy newspapers for science, the science stories are incidental and people just come across them as they leaf through the paper… So says Tim Radford, a journalist of decades’ standing, who worked his way through being the arts, literary and eventually science editor of the Guardian. Tim Radford addressed the delegates at the Science Communication Conference in London on 25th May, taking them on a tour de force of his career as a journalist, including both the historical perspective of investigative journalism in the 1960s and the current state of play, with the online world high on the agenda (fittingly, since the theme of this year’s conference was that of ‘online’).
Radford described himself as both up-to-date and out-of-touch; whilst meticulously aware of the world around him, he admitted to never having blogged and never received an ‘invite’ in his e-mail inbox. In his early days as a reporter, working for the New Zealand Herald, there was no such thing as a press officer. If you wanted a story about the crime in a town, you went to the police station and talked to your local officer. Even when he moved to the UK and worked as a journalist here, it was not possible to ring up or e-mail when you wanted a story – you got on your feet, with paper and pencil in hand and a tuppence for the phonebox to ring in at the newsdesk to deliver your story.
In those days, the newspapers, above all, had to make money by selling many copies. The science stories weren’t the ones to sell the paper and the science correspondent (if, of course, there was one) was seen as rather a bore. The 1960s, in Radford’s view, were heaven to be a journalist. There were the Beatles, Gagarin’s first trip to space, the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile crisis, the Moon landings, the Kennedy assassination, Martin Luther King, the Prague spring and subsequent Soviet invasion… Yet perhaps some stories, in the field of science of all places (!), were missing out on well-deserved coverage? Whilst cosmology used to be a bit of a bad joke until then, the coherent Big Bang theory proposed where the Earth (and the whole Universe) came from, suddenly giving the field a much more credible position. Elsewhere, the theory of plate tectonics was becoming widely accepted, when geophysicists noticed how South America and South Africa fitted together like a puzzle. Slowly, journalists started noticing how thrilling stories about science actually were, with the Guardian starting up a weekly science supplement, informing interested readers about things such as the sex-life of the palolo worm (did you know that it continues feeding at the bottom of the sea whilst releasing its reproductive bits to the surface?).
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: this wasn’t about the mass mediatisation of science as this still remained an elitist pursuit – Margaret Thatcher was quoted as saying that science is a bit like the opera; if people want to engage with science, they should pay for it. So even though science was a new and exciting topic for conversation, Radford argued that the writers did not care about the science per se, but cared more about getting stories in the paper and avoiding them getting the spike on the editor’s desk (which was a real sharp metal spike where unused copy would be deposed, with reporters often coming to reclaim the draft, perhaps with the hope of recycling a story elsewhere). Unlike today, when many science editors and science journalist have at least a first degree in science, if not a PhD or Masters, in those days Radford was not too worried about having no science background. Science and journalism, he said, are not so different in starting from the position of constructive ignorance.
Discussing the online aspect of journalism, which has become prevalent in the last ten to fifteen years, Radford expressed some concern. In the old days when you bought a newspaper, you would inevitably see headlines elsewhere in the paper that would catch your attention and make you read the stories. To this end, science stories had to be novel or interesting to make the reader’s eye stop at them (going back to Radford’s previous assertion that it wasn’t about science per se but about getting a story in the paper). But nonetheless, readers learnt about science by osmosis. These days, this is not necessarily true as with online news sites readers pick articles, easily bypassing many others. As the use of online for obtaining information is most prevalent amongst those aged 16-24 , Radford was concerned that since young people don’t read newspapers, they will not be told things they don’t explicitly ask to be told.
Why is it so important and why should we care that young people are told about things they don’t have an immediate interest in? Imagine a scenario where the government, in money saving mode, starts cutting research budgets. If unaware of the importance of scientific research, the general population may be unconcerned and think that this is an easy one to save money on. Yet science is important and the general public will step up to defend it, even in today’s fast-moving, gripping, vivid and entertaining world. As long as they know about it!
To conclude on a piece of advice, Radford argued that in a democracy, people (including scientists) have an obligation to tell others what they do. On the contrary, there is no obligation to listen, so scientists inevitably have to make themselves be heard, getting us back to why public engagement and science communication is such a key part of a scientist’s remit.
Storify diaries of the two days worth of conference proceedings:
Day 1
Day 2
26
Jul
Tim Radford is quite correct sadly. The unfortunate part of this is that most science institutions now have exciting and very readable monthly or bi-monthly magazines full of interesting stories. I read E&T from the IET, Aerospace International from the RAeS, Physics World from the IoP and occasionally my wife’s The Biologist from the Society of Biology. But the editors of the major UK newspapers don’t read these and, being usually humanities or classics graduates, have little knowledge or interest in Science. So the newspapers fail to represent and report a wide swathe of information that should be in the public domain. It is a form of censorship.
07
Aug
And of course it isn’t just readers who follow stories in the online world, it’s advertising too. Will newspapers still be willing to cross-subsidise their less popular sections if advertisers want to be associated only with the most popular stories? In the past, advertisers paid to be associated with the brand, and having ‘intellectual’ sections gave the brand a certain prestige, even if most readers skimmed over them. The prestige value of extensive coverage of science (or the arts, for that matter) drops considerably when readers navigate to individual stories from Google.