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Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, is the lead speaker at the fifth in a series of national science journalism workshops being sponsored by the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, publisher of Environment Writer, November 7-9 at the University of California, Berkeley.

Rosenstiel, a former media critic for the Los Angeles Times and former congressional correspondent for Newsweek, will join with two dozen print and broadcast journalists and climate and marine scientists in the workshop, being held in cooperation with Berkeley's Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. For the past two years, Rosenstiel has been editor and principal author of the Project's Annual Report on the State of the News Media. Rosenstiel's comments will focus on how current trends in the mainstream media are affecting coverage of complex and sometimes controversial science issues and other "hard news." He is expected to offer some antidotes to help strengthen science reporting.

Another prominent author scheduled to address the workshop is Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, whose writing on "framing" of public policy issues has made him something of a cult figure among political liberals, progressives, and Democratic Party loyalists. Lakoff's 2004 Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, a New York Times bestseller, is billed as "the definitive handbook for understanding how conservatives think, what their moral values really are, and how to articulate the progressive moral revision to reframe -- and reclaim -- political discourse." Lakoff will be challenged to explain to the attending scientists and journalists whether and how his theories apply to science issues such as global climate change.

The workshop series, funded by the National Science Foundation's Paleoclimate Program, in the Division of Atmospheric Science, is intended to lead to a major new report on science communications and the mass media, to be written after the conclusion of the sixth workshop in the series, tentatively scheduled for spring 2006 at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.

Among media to be represented at the Berkeley meeting are WNET/Nature, the San Jose Mercury News, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the Houston Chronicle, Nature Magazine, Wisconsin Public Radio, the Sacramento Bee, along with independent radio producers and freelance journalists. Participating scientists are attending from Berkeley; the Scripps Institution of Oceanography; the University of California, Irvine; Duke University; Ohio State University; Stanford University; Oklahoma University; the University of Washington; and the Pacific Institute.

Details on discussions at the Berkeley workshop will be reported in a future issue of Environment Writer. Detailed reports from each of the first five workshops are available at http://www.environmentwriter.org/resources/articles/all_sci_journ_info.htm.