Good Science Journalism
- a duty to inform and educate
Paul Iredale
Reuters Foundation Course Director
Good journalists the world over have a duty to inform and to educate. Science and environmental reporting are ways of explaining events and deserve a thought as part of any substantial story a journalist writes.
There was a time when the Environment Correspondent and the Science Editor sat in little cubby-holes a floor away from the newsroom, alongside the Business Correspondent and the Obituaries Editor. No more.
Writing about the environment and about how science affects people is as basic to the trade as writing about money or politics. These are issues that should be part of the main news agenda, not hived off to a supplement full of advertising, the one that is particularly good for lighting fires.
There is an old journalistic adage about not writing about things you don't understand.
The complexities of science and the environment are certainly challenging, and the adage can become an excuse to steer clear. But this is often to miss important aspects of the story, and to fail to give a comprehensive explanation of what is happening.
Nowhere is this more important than in the developing world. Information and education allow people to make choices, and they can use these choices to improve their lives. Journalists need to be able to explain the impact of events and decisions on the environment. They need to understand how science affects us. From the genetic developments that improve harvests to the environmental depredations that exaggerate the effects of natural disasters, these issues are never far from the stories that are the staples of journalism.
With these concerns in mind, the Reuters Foundation, the education and humanitarian trust financed by the global news organisation Reuters, holds regular workshops on writing environmental news for journalists from the developing world.
The workshops involve real stories and give journalists the opportunity to practice their skills and experiment, studying feedback and trying to improve their style. Exercises give them the chance to dominate complex subjects, so that they can better explain them to their readers.
At a recent workshop at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, participants from seven African countries had the chance to practice their reporting skills and to explore the many angles that environmental stories can generate. They investigated the competing claims of industrial expansion and wildlife tourism, and agreed that the workshop had allowed them to develop their writing.
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