Science in the Wild: Episode 5

Participatory science journalism is interdependent with media literacy

Click here to listen to the interview on UR Business Network

In this episode, Gary and Nathan continue their conversation with Paige Brown, an established science blogger (“From The Lab Bench” blog at SciLogs.com) with scientific training and a doctoral student in mass communications at Louisiana State University.

Paige picks up where she left off in the last show by talking a bit more about her journalistic experiment for her article Nothing But The Truth. In that experiment, she wrote different versions of a press release that she made available online to public relations (or information) officers, science journalists, and scientists who, if interested, would fill out a survey that addressed the quality and newsworthiness of the press release. She talked about the unsolicited feedback she got from respondents about other aspects of the press release and the experiment. We discussed the implications of this feedback as a form of peer review, especially to the extent that it influenced Paige’s ongoing work.

Paige explained that individual communicators increasingly have multiple roles ranging from information officer and freelance journalist to blogger. We discussed the differences across these forms with respect to editorial review and peer review, gatekeeping and fact checking, and whether or not communicators are compensated for their work. This led into a discussion about the trustworthiness of stories, media, media outlets, and communicators themselves. Paige touched on the reflection and developing practices inside journalism in particular, and more generally with respect to the question of media literacy of the public, as traditional news outlets are given way to new forms and curtailing their own offerings.

Paige talked about evolving notions about the future of media in the field of mass communications, and she suggested some interesting considerations and developments. We talked about the special subset of the public, commenters in particular, who can provide high-quality feedback that is well thought out and that can help a writer improve her ongoing work. We discussed various needs, gaps, and potential solutions to incorporate this feedback as responsible peer review and collaborative inquiry. She cautioned that, while this innovation cannot remove the “social” from social media, comments do influence perception of the target article. There is attendant loss of control the original author has over the message delivered using social media. We may have to develop new forms of communication that perhaps look a bit more like formal collaboration in a broader community of interest, with quality control, that achieve a broader community of responsibility.

We concluded our discussion by addressing trans-media forms of dialogue between science communicators and the public. Twitter is emerging as an especially effective and accessible means of crowd-sourcing peer review or at least getting better intelligence on the meaning and impact of one’s original work. Paige concluded by emphasizing that a combination of online and offline communication (e.g., convening in shared physical spaces) will be important in mass communication with an impact, such as in social movements. For more of Paige’s blog posts, see From the Lab Bench.

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Key Terms and Concepts

• quality and newsworthiness
• editorial review
• media literacy of the public
• future of media
• community of responsibility