The process of covering the news can sometimes complicate effective reporting, but better communication among scientists and journalists can help strengthen science reporting by the mass media, says a leading New York Times science writer.

Science writer Andrew C. Revkin told a workshop for journalists and scientists that pressures to be "first," time and space constraints, and other factors can add to the difficulties in reporting comprehensively on science news. But improved communication between scientists and journalists, increased transparency, and a mutual recognition of each other's internal work cultures can lead to better science reporting, he told a group of 20 invited journalists and climate scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners.

Revkin and climate scientist Stephen H. Schneider, Stanford University, were keynote speakers at a workshop in March sponsored by the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, publisher of this newsletter. The workshop, held at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, is the second in a series sponsored by the National Science Foundation's Paleoclimate Program, in the Division of Atmospheric Sciences (see related story).

For two days, scientists and journalists discussed the complexities of climate change news coverage and how they can communicate better to improve coverage by the media. Some of the inevitable constraints of journalism, Revkin said, include competition for space and position within a newspaper, news filters such as relevancy and the tendency to provide he-said, she-said perspectives on controversial issues, and daily risk-taking that is common to the business of reporting the news.

Journalists and scientists operate in similar ways—both are competitive, they want to get there first, and both move on an ongoing "trajectory" toward truth, said Revkin. These similarities between science and journalism also can lead to communications problems, he said.

Using examples from his own reporting, he emphasized the importance of transparency when talking with the press. He explained how he had expected "shields and robocop armor to go up" when he traveled recently to Alaska to interview a State of Alaska scientist researching whether the Alaska tundra could withstand an extended travel season to support more energy production. Funded by Department of Energy, the results of the scientist's research could lead to modifying rules that determine how many days a year oil convoys can move across the delicate tundra.

What Revkin at first imagined might be a "great gotcha story" changed as the forthright and enthusiastic scientist openly discussed his research and what the outcomes might be.

Striving to accurately portray truth is not only a matter of reporting facts and figures correctly, although getting things right is the reporter's first responsibility, Revkin emphasized. A balanced he-said, she-said story may be correct, he said, but it is often in the gray area that the real meaning and value of a story reside. The formula of objective, balanced reporting does not always describe the truth, nor does it adequately represent distortion and spin, he cautioned.

Revkin pointed to his own reporting in covering glacial melting on Mt. Kilimanjaro and how Kilimanjaro has become an icon for the climate debate. The crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 provided valuable lessons for scientists and journalists in covering science-based "spin" and on reporters' needs to avoid becoming vested in a particular story line or "trajectory", he said. He joined with other reporters participating in the workshop in advising that scientists need not suppress the "passion" they feel for their work, saying that doing so can help foster counterproductive stereotypes of scientists as being remote and aloof from the public and society.