The changing face of "mainstream" journalism in light of unprecedented competitive pressures significantly shaped discussions at a recent Columbia University workshop involving top climate scientists and journalists. The June 1-3, 2005, workshop at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is the fourth of six national forums being conducted with support from the National Science Foundation's Division of Atmospheric Sciences, Paleoclimate Program.

Continuing consolidation of media ownership, competition from Internet and Web resources, and tightening of newsroom staffs and budgets in the face of readership and advertising declines -– these were among points emphasized early in the workshop by two leading journalism academics. Those trends were later strongly re-enforced by a recently retired top broadcast network executive and by working journalists covering climate change and other environmental and science issues.

While not entirely "new" and perhaps just the beginning of a long-term evolution, the changing face of the mass media has had a significant impact on the workshop series: Changing the focus from one emphasizing science communications and the mass media to one at least equally intent on all means of providing timely and responsible science information to the broad public -- through the mass media and otherwise.

• several leading university journalism programs, including that of workshop host Columbia University, have announced new efforts specifically aimed at strengthening reporting on complex issues including science;
• a newly established web log or "blog" provides a "rapid-response" communications outlet by which some climate scientists hope to rebut what they see as common myths, misunderstandings, and flat-out errors;
• the newly seated president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Rick Rodriguez of the Sacramento Bee, is planning an international field trip with editors with a focus on improving understanding and coverage of climate change;
• some journalists may see in their news organizations' websites expanded opportunities for fulfilling an "educational" mission that may go beyond the media's traditional view of its news and information mission; and
• 'new technologies make it easier and less expensive to use color and graphics in conveying information better shared graphically than solely by "black ink and words on white paper."

What some see as the "plight" of contemporary mass media in a period of profound institutional change was illustrated in the remarks of University of North Carolina journalism professor Philip Meyer, author of several leading journalism books. Pointing out that daily newspapers and prime-time broadcast news programs no longer have a monopoly or a "captive audience," Meyer said that emerging information technologies over the past two decades have "changed the nature of journalism, and we are slow to recognize this."

One clear result, Meyer said, is that "large numbers of messages now are moving to smaller numbers of people." With newsprint an expensive and highly visible variable cost at a time when competition for advertising dollars has grown, pressures for cost-cutting in newsrooms have increased, he said.

Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, told the workshop that in light of continuing pressures forcing major institutional changes in journalism, his program and others must revamp their approaches to journalism education. He spoke of the need to train a new generation of "diaspora journalists" who in the face of ongoing change can mold high-quality journalism over the long course of their careers. Lemann detailed new efforts by Columbia and other leading university journalism programs to increase training of journalism graduate students in substantive fields such as science.

Those academics' perspectives were reinforced by guest speaker Dick Wald, formerly president of NBC News and vice president of ABC News for editorial quality and now a professor at Columbia. Reiterating a point made by Meyer, Wald said "the massness of mass communication has diminished." As time passes in an information age increasingly characterized by digital information sources, Wald said he expects the mass media will occupy a smaller piece of the communications space: "everything stays, it just occupies less space on the spectrum," he said.

He said the mass media will adapt, albeit slowly and perhaps reluctantly, to the challenges they now face from the Internet and digital communications resources, but he added that "nothing new ever happens except out of desperation."

Wald's view of the current media environment: "Never has there been a time when so much was in disarray and up for grabs .... Like musical chairs, nobody is sure who will have a chair when the music stops."

With this overview of the changing state of journalism as a backdrop, workshop participants covered and refined ground explored during the three earlier workshops in the series and in important ways provided new insights and perspectives on improving science communications with and through, and in some cases without, the mass media.

The "Revolution" Under Way
in Journalism and Mass Communications

As at earlier workshops in the series, journalism and science participants voiced concerns over changes under way in the mass media and journalism. Both scientists and working reporters pointed to competitive and financial pressures they fear are undercutting coverage of complex scientific issues and other "hard news."

Pointing to declining circulations for most major newspapers, Professor and author Philip Meyer told the Lamont-Doherty workshop that newspapers no longer have the "captive audience" they once had. The evolution of computer technology "changes the nature of journalism, and we are still slow to recognize this." One key result is that "large numbers of messages are moving to smaller numbers of people." For newspapers struggling to compete against online information resources, newsprint is a highly visible and large cost, and therefore a ready target for cost-cutting.

Speaking about environmental coverage in particular, several reporters pointed to pressures in their newsrooms to shorten stories or reduce the number of stories covered. One local television reporter pointed to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a major factor leading to less media coverage of other issues, including environment and science. Participants pointed to a falloff in coverage of environmental issues at the three major networks and also at CNN, which had recently abolished its environment unit.

Scientist and science journalism educator Kim Kastens, of Lamont-Doherty, pointed out that many print journalists are "word-oriented" and that the earth sciences are a very visual field, with graphics a valuable communications and educational role. She noted that the electronic media make better and more extensive use of color and of graphics than traditional news media, and she said greater use of graphics can help not only to inform but also to educate audiences on climate and other earth science issues.

To former broadcast executive Dick Wald, now on the faculty at Columbia, the decline in media coverage of environmental issues reflects the "dormant" nature of environment as a public policy issue. He said the mainstream media are unlikely to give the issue substantially more play until and unless a major environmental disaster occurs or until a "charismatic" political leader emerges to champion the issue.

From their perspective, reporters at the Columbia workshop pointed to specific examples of how they try to compete for finite column inches and air time to report on environment and science within their news organizations. One reporter encouraged peers to focus "on arguments, rather than on advocates" and to seek not to balance opinions about an issue but rather to weigh the balance of evidence on that issue.

Journalists cautioned that scientists also that they cannot be perceived as wanting to "close off the debate" from other scientists who may reject the perceived conventional or mainstream understanding of an issue. On this point, some scientists in the workshops have insisted that scientific debate occurs daily and in infinite different settings but that the traditional television "talking heads" format of presenting opposing viewpoints is not always conducive to improving public understanding. This is a point likely to be explored further in a final report on this series of workshops.

Environmental reporter Chris Bowman, of the Sacramento Bee, spoke from the perspective of a journalist whose newspaper continues to devote substantial attention to environmental and natural resources coverage. Noting that his McClatchy-owned newspaper had won Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of widespread degradation of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, Bowman told the workshop that in his own reporting he had been able to assemble experts to serve in a technical capacity on issues related to industrial hygiene, microscopy, pathology, geology, and epidemiology. After numerous reports, Bowman said, his reporting "now has taken on legs," affirming both the influence and commitment of the newspaper in the community.

"The reporter has a privileged and important position," Bowman said. "Step into the shoes of various experts. In the process of doing that, you will discover links. Our job at its best is connecting the dots for people."

For independent journalist and author Daniel Grossman, a key to effective coverage is focusing on stories the public might otherwise miss rather than necessarily on reports of the latest breakthrough scientific findings.

"The process of science can be the most interesting part," Grossman said. "You cannot talk about current results when the scientists are up on the mountain doing the research, but you can talk about what they've learned before, and the questions they're trying to answer now."

Other journalists agreed with Grossman's interest in wanting to report more on the process of science, and not merely the peer-reviewed published report of findings. "When you wait for a peer-reviewed article," said WFAA-TV reporter Don Wall, "everybody gets the same story, and there is no chance for a journalist to do something unique and individual." (Journalists at a previous workshop in the series had referred somewhat derisively to the final peer-reviewed journal report as "the period at the end of the sentence," though scientists counter that even the peer-reviewed published article is just one more component of a lengthy fact-finding process still being played-out.)

Reporters agreed too that over-reliance on research institutions' press releases about their peer-reviewed publications can lead to a distorted picture for the public, in part because of a temptation for the press release to "hype" the importance of the research.

"Good broadcast journalists," said WQAD-TV News Anchor Matt Hammill, "are taught that the best soundbites should deliver emotion, not facts." He said he often senses a scientist's passion for his subject area in informal discussions, but once the TV camera lights go on, "too many scientists become like Bambi in the headlights."

"The neatest pure emotion from the science community," Hammill continued, "came when the Mars Rover landed. You saw scientists who probably hadn't smiled in decades jumping up and down with joy."

Is the public's admiration of those scientists any lesser for their having shown their passion for their field, Hammill asked rhetorically.

Additional advice during the workshop from the journalists to the scientific experts: Make the case to news managers for increased coverage based not solely on the news value of the subject but on the intrinsic importance of the issue and the importance of its implications generally. Reporters also encouraged scientists to seek out the most respected and influential scientists to help make their case before news media editors and editorial boards.

The scientists cautioned the journalists too that they should be leery of seemingly perfect correlations in which, for instance, a single factor may be used to explain a complex phenomenon. Several suggested that journalists need more training in how best to interpret data, and they advised that scientists routinely need to release all their underlying data and protocols when they publish their results, cautioning that peer review, while critical, is not in itself a guarantee that the results are "accurate." (Within journalism circles, where falling credibility with the public is a major concern, there is also some increased impetus for reporters to make available their own research and reporting protocols and, where possible, source documents.)

Given the quick pace of publication of peer-reviewed papers, and the even faster time scale of the mass media, scientists at Lamont-Doherty cautioned that science operates on a long time scale and that findings that don't hold up over time eventually are discarded. They said there is no "smoking gun," for instance, on climate change but, in the words of one scientist, "There is mounting evidence that when you put it all together, it's hard for people to come up with another explanation."

The scientists cautioned reporters not to appear to let one particular finding or study dispute an entire scientific theory, something no single report can do, they insisted. Some took pride in considering themselves (and also good journalists) to be responsible "skeptics"; they said they reserve the terms "contrarians" and "deniers" for those who they say are unwilling to acknowledge even the most widely accepted scientific findings, or those who may know the truth but are unwilling to accept it.

Equating the climate change issue with cigarettes and cancer causation, one scientist asked, "At what point does the global warming issue reach a level that you don't have to go out to find people with contrasting points of view" on widely accepted scientific points? Several journalists said they were concerned that neither they nor their scientific colleagues be perceived as wanting to "shut off debate," and they said it is unlikely that media will shy away from covering debates on a wide range of climate change science and policy uncertainties.

Raising the Bar For Journalists

The workshop discussions focused on how, at a time when public confidence in news media credibility is low and falling and when economic pressures are increasing, the needs for responsible and authoritative independent journalism are increasing.

"Journalists and educators can't wait for the bean counters to take action to improve the quality of the profession," Philip Meyer insisted. He suggested journalists be more open to a form of certification or credentialing -- not to be confused with licensing -- in which the media would better police their own important specialty beats, including "naming names" when it comes to "bad actors" in the field. He specifically encouraged the responsible news media to help the public identify journalism-pretenders and to distinguish them from those seeking to do responsible independent journalism.

Among points made at the Lamont-Doherty workshop, some of which echo suggestions that arose also at previous workshops in the series:

• The scientific community needs to work with top managers of media outlets to help them understand that much of their current scientific coverage is inadequate. In some cases, scientists might want to encourage editorial managers to support specialized training and skills for reporters covering science issues. Scientists must be willing to "go to the top" news managers with this effort, involving their own top scientists in the effort -- scientific spokespersons of equivalent status to the news managers. Scientists need to be specific with their concerns and suggestions in these discussions with news managers ... and also persistent.
• Working together -- while maintaining and respecting the essential constructive tensions between the media and other institutions -- the media and science communities can better use the tools of social science to help fill information gaps: What is the public's current understanding of concepts of climate and weather? Which sectors of the population are more likely to perceive climate change as a concern? Which less? What data are available on public perceptions of climate and how it is reported in the mass media? What are the media audiences' abilities and appetites for digesting and understanding science news, and are the media meeting those needs?
• How can specialized communications media -- those providing a greater depth of coverage on a specific or narrow range of subjects -- be most involved in informing their audiences on issues related to climate and weather? How can niche media -- for instance those dealing in particular with issues ranging from travel to gourmet food and housing -- best communicate these issues?
• Scientists at the workshop discussed how their own research organizations can establish and support in-house information services to responsibly communicate their own scientific messages to diverse external audiences. How can students' needs and perspectives be factored in to these efforts? Can graphics, images, and human interest angles be effectively included, and how best can the results be made accessible through various browser searches? How can these resources be made "media friendly" and accessible? There were discussions that funding agencies should encourage and support this kind of scientific outreach.
• The scientists and journalists discussed the value of what one called a "virtual dating service," matching journalists with a wide range of scientists working in specific fields. Attendees said such a resource should have extensive biographical information available on both the scientists and journalists using it.

This workshop report, combined with those from the previous workshops in this series, will be used in compiling a written report on science communications and the mass media after the completion of the final two workshops.