When Marine Science Makes Waves
Looking for answers in the sea of media trouble
Hi there! This is TITLE-ABS-KEY(“science journalism“), a newsletter about science journalism research, and we’re finally back from the break that could have been shorter but oh well. A reminder on what’s happening here: I read papers on science journalism and I have opinions. In the past, I had opinions, for instance, on misunderstanding what science journalism is, covering psychology research, and the awesomeness of science writing.
In this seventh edition of the newsletter, I’m slowly dipping my toes back into critiquing journalism research — by picking up an unusual paper about journalists and the sea.
Today’s paper: Pinto, Bruno, and Matias, Ana. "European journalists and the sea: Contexts, motivations, and difficulties." Public Understanding of Science (2022). DOI: 10.1177/09636625221137036.
Why this paper: I don’t need a particular reason to enjoy the sea.
Abstract: The media play an important role in informing us about new developments in our understanding of the sea and raising awareness about its sustainability. However, press coverage of marine issues seems to be modest, compared with the importance oceans have in our lives. In this study, we examine science journalists’ working contexts, motivations, and difficulties in writing about the sea in Europe. We conducted semi- structured interviews with 26 journalists who write for quality newspapers from 13 European countries. We found that the recent production of press news on marine issues is mainly conditioned by working contexts in newspapers, the personal and professional interests of journalists, and the available resources to write news. More studies are needed to compare our findings, including with other regions outside Europe.
Well, even though I still don’t need a reason to enjoy the sea, this abstract makes a lot of sense: relative to the importance of the oceans, their coverage in science outlets and mainstream media is disproportionate. The sea (oceans, international waters, marine biodiversity) is also a cool and compelling beat to cover, so I’m curious to see how my professional experience relates to the barriers to more coverage identified in the interviews. Weigh anchor! (not going to pretend I did not have to google some pirate slang here.)
Human activities are known to be threatening the integrity of coastal and marine environments. Examples of human-induced effects include overfishing, habitat destruction, impacts of climate change, the introduction of exotic species, and coastal erosion. However, many pressing threats are not well known by citizens, which can represent a significant barrier to positive social change. I contend that this smells just a tiny bit fishy, i.e. like the deficit model of science communication where it all comes down to people being insufficiently informed (if only it were that simple.) But I’m also all for reporting on the pressing issues and then perhaps letting scicommers, strategic communicators and everyone else who’s not a journalist figure out how to use that reporting for social change.
The paper goes on to describe the paucity of stories on marine science and marine issues, coupled with the decline of quality newspapers and the professional conditions of journalists. Will I live to see the time when everything is not coupled with the decline in our field?…
To understand why the sea is disproportionately undercovered, the authors set out to talk to European journalists, doing 26 semi-structured interviews with science and environment journalists from 13 European countries between February and May 2021. Now, I was not really working as a journalist back then except for a few stories, but I do remember my colleagues in that second pandemic spring. Some of them were the only ones on the science beat in their entire news org, so contacting them to ask why don’t you write more about the sea? after a year of relentless COVID-19 coverage would have been… interesting. But in any case, oceans can’t really wait until we get ourselves together on land, so I don’t hold this against the authors.
These were journalists from quality newspapers in paper and digital formats in each of the selected countries since these usually set the national news agenda, which was jarring to read but in a good way: quality newspapers setting the national news agenda is how journalists in Russia imagined the (distant) wonderful future, and here it is plainly a setting for a journalism study in Europe.
The main objectives of the interviews were to gather information about the working context of journalists, motivations, and difficulties in writing news about marine issues. Questions asked included the following: What are the greatest difficulties in writing news about marine issues? What motivates you to write about these issues? At the beginning of your career as a journalist, what was your learning/training in writing about science and environment? <…> Interviewees were asked to consider their activities beyond the period of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I noted that the average age of a journalist in their small sample, almost balanced by gender, was 47. When I started my career in Russia, journalism was a young people’s endeavor to such an enormous degree that it was genuinely baffling to see these numbers in foreign studies and reports about the media; you did not really see that many colleagues of that age around you, doing reporting rather than, say, TV presenting or management.
Interviewees’ descriptions of their working context pointed to three levels of resources for marine science and environmental journalism: the first level concerns more than sufficient resources for these activities, the second level concerns countries with sufficient resources, and the third level concerns countries with insufficient resources to cover these issues. Naturally, I was curious to know what “sufficient resources“ meant: this Level 2 implies a typical team of 3 to 5 people covering science and environment, with frequent science coverage but moderate reporting of marine issues as well as moderate diversity of themes.
(I swear when I was typing about a team of five people, I could hear my colleagues from the spring of 2021 sniff back a tear. But yes, in this study, Level 3, aka insufficient resources, is just one or two people. And also almost half of the respondents did tell the researchers they had been very busy with COVID since 2020, so my earlier comment is grounded in a sad reality.)
At the insufficient level, it was mentioned that the relevance of science and environment news still needs to be negotiated, thus such news may be absent in some daily prints. Well, now I’m sniffing back a tear — one tear for each time I had to sell science coverage to mainstream Russian media like it was a timeshare contract.
Apart from the resources being a factor, interviewees also reported different levels of national interests related to marine issues, which seems to be higher in countries with large coasts and/or islands. The paper does not go into detail on this, but I’d love to know whether this interest in coastal/island countries is more general in nature, i.e. if people are interested in the oceans beyond their own seas. Regardless of the level, almost everyone agreed that there is not enough attention to marine issues.
The paper then goes into the personal interests and motivations of the journalists covering science and environment. Almost half (10 people) said they felt personally connected to nature and/or the sea, and seven mentioned their experiences growing up and/or spending free time by the sea and even finding hobbies related to the marine environment. Overall, it was a standard mix of personal interest and the sense of mission and making a difference; it’s largely what I’ve seen throughout my career. And to me, this supports my long held belief that we need MOAR science and environment journalists — as in, physically much more people so that each and every wicked problem we’re facing finds someone at least slightly interested and willing to geek out.
The difficulties in reporting on marine issues included, in no discernible order in the paper:
getting information from the right scientists, and governmental organizations, and accessing appropriate data to tell a story;
the struggles of choosing appropriate themes and dealing with the complexity of some issues;
internal difficulties within the newsrooms, usually referring to a lack of resources such as time, money, and opportunities to report outside the office (emphasis mine; as someone who once had to write a long feature about the Black Sea entirely from my desk in Moscow, I cried a little when I saw this. This was supposed to be a light paper but it keeps hitting me in the feels!).
In this article, we identified three main factors that condition the activities of European journalists who write news about marine issues: their working contexts, their personal and professional motivations, and resources available to produce news. Basically, marine science coverage is a clear “nice to have” right now, provided you have the budgets, but enough journalists think it should be more prominent.
However, different working contexts alone do not explain the frequency of news about marine issues in contexts with fewer resources. In these cases, results showed that personal interest, professional duty, or a perceived national relation to marine issues influences the production of news. Again, basically when it comes to these increasingly pressing issues, we have to rely on enough journalists feeling so bad about ignoring this topic that they actively choose to carve out some space for it, in an environment that is indifferent at best. Doesn’t sound like a great model for science and environment journalism for the future.
The authors dutifully list the limitations (just one journalist per country in some cases, a focus on Europe, pandemic distraction, no editors’ and managers’ perspectives, scant info for comparisons). Despite these limitations, results showed consistent patterns across countries that the recent production of news on marine issues in Europe was mainly conditioned by available resources in newspapers and the personal and professional interests of journalists. Based on our findings, apart from the personal and professional interest of the journalists, all other identified factors are external: national context, newspaper context, and editorial choices, which implies that change is complex. Therefore, the possibility of a higher presence of marine news in the future seems to be dependent on the external pressure of society on the media, for example, from readers, politicians, scientists, youngsters, activists, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
I have to say this is an interesting final angle: change is complex because it’s usually not the lack of appreciation of the topic from the journalists — it’s the lack of resources. Journalists would love to report more but can’t. Therefore, the way forward is to… apparently pressure the media into paying more attention and finding these resources somewhere (in the science journalism context, this almost certainly means dropping some other poor orphaned topic – come on, I can see very similar papers with the same results written about a dozen other neglected issues from soil quality to antibiotic resistance.)
The sea is newsworthy, without question. And we need more stories and more journalists covering the sea; I just don’t know whether anyone can reasonably read “pressure of society on the media” to mean new journalist jobs and funding.
That’s it! If you enjoyed this issue, let me know. If you also have opinions or would like to suggest a paper for me to read in one of the next issues, you can leave a comment or just respond to the email.
Cheers! 👩🔬