{"id":212709,"date":"2016-02-24T19:04:45","date_gmt":"2016-02-24T22:04:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=212709"},"modified":"2016-02-24T19:04:45","modified_gmt":"2016-02-24T22:04:45","slug":"changing-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/changing-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Changing times"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"088-090_jornalismosNelson Provazi<\/span>In February 2012, the Spanish newspaper P\u00fablico<\/em> suspended publication of its print edition, maintaining only its online presence.\u00a0 One of the 126 people let go was Science Editor, Patr\u00edcia Fern\u00e1ndez de Lis who went about shaping an alternative she had long been contemplating.\u00a0 Seeing that science news attracted many readers, she put together a team, got some sponsors and established the website Materia<\/em> launched in July 2012, which carried firsthand news about science and technology.\u00a0 Within a year, there were 1.5 million unique visitors to the site, and content republication agreements had been reached with nearly 200 Spanish-language newspapers.\u00a0 In September 2014, El Pa\u00eds<\/em>, Spain\u2019s most widely circulated newspaper, began to republish news from Materia<\/em> on an exclusive basis,<\/em> and Lis took on the job of Editor in Chief for Science and Technology content at the paper she had worked for before going to P\u00fablico<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The trajectory of Materia<\/em> exemplifies the Internet\u2019s impact on news, not just with regard to science,\u00a0 but to other fields as well.\u00a0 Now, through the not so new online media \u2013 websites, blogs and social networks \u2013 news is being published almost instantaneously, written by journalists as well as by scientists and others with an interest in science.\u00a0 Hans Peters, a science journalism professor at the Free University of Berlin, noted in an article in the magazine Metode Science Studies Journal<\/em> that the online world has left behind the classic model of mass communication, whereby a piece of information is transmitted by a single sender, in this case, the researcher, through journalists to the public, which is no longer entirely passive.\u00a0 The Internet allows readers to disseminate, comment or correct news promptly after reading it.<\/p>\n

Spaces once devoted to journalists are losing out as part of the global crisis facing traditional journalism \u2013 dozens of publications in Brazil, Latin America, the United States and Europe have eliminated their print versions and with them, their science sections, as result of readers\u2019 migration to online publications.\u00a0 Other spaces have emerged however.\u00a0 Science journals such as Science<\/em>, Nature<\/em>, and Lancet<\/em> now have their own blogs and devote more space to reports in journalistic format that cite several sources of information and offer a general overview of the topic.\u00a0 In 2015, the weekly Nature<\/em> began publishing a daily newsletter with links to reports published in other magazines and newspapers.<\/p>\n

Research institutions in turn are placing increased value on direct communication with the public, using their own sites and social networks, dispensing with the involvement of journalists from non-institutional newspapers, journals and websites.\u00a0 In the United States more so than in Brazil, universities, funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation and research centers such as NASA, are distributing news, videos, images and teaching material to the academic and non-academic public.\u00a0 In April and May of 2015, British scientists at the Royal Society, the British science academy, discussed their strategies for communicating science news through journals that publish articles (rather than reports) and presentations directed as much towards the general public as towards scientists.<\/p>\n

The expansion of online media suggests that now anyone can write about science\u2014in Brazil, the total number of science blogs ranges from 105, according to a survey conducted by the Federal University of Minas Gerais, to 210, the number obtained from Google data, blogging sites, and journalist registrations online\u2014and promote an expanded role for journalists.\u00a0 In giving shape to Materia<\/em>, Patr\u00edcia Lis had to do something she had never done before: use her professional reputation to attract sponsors, negotiate online content republication agreements and manage resources in order to maintain the site and publish five daily reports, as it does today.\u00a0 In looking back at her experience, she told Pesquisa <\/em>FAPESP that \u201cputting together the right team, with people she trusted to produce high quality information\u201d was the key to achieving credibility and visibility.<\/p>\n

To promote or to monitor?<\/strong>
\nIn 2013, the 8th<\/sup> World Conference of Science Journalists, organized by the World Federation of Science Journalists (WFSJ), held in Helsinki, Finland, accentuated the need for journalists to remain flexible, master the tools for producing online content and work more closely with other science communicators to create new models of science journalism (see Pesquisa FAPESP<\/em> Issue n\u00ba 211<\/a>).\u00a0 At the June 2015 conference held in South Korea, one of the discussions involved the role of science journalists: should they promote scientific research or monitor the work of scientists?\u00a0 As if in a courtroom, each group defended a point of view and audience participants changed sides as they became convinced one way or the other.\u00a0 No consensus was reached, but the conclusion that garnered the most supporters was that \u201cwhat scientists present cannot be accepted without questioning,\u201d says Bernardo Esteves, a science reporter from the journal Piau\u00ed<\/em> who took part in the debate.<\/p>\n

\u201cResearchers generally see journalists as their spokespeople, but we need to make more room for healthy disagreement and a more critical appreciation of study findings,\u201d notes Esteves.\u00a0 It is the same view as that of journalist Susan Watts, science editor on a BBC television program in the United Kingdom, dismissed in November 2013 when her job was eliminated.\u00a0 \u201cWe need science journalism in order to weigh the virtues and vices of science,\u201d she wrote in an April 2014 issue of the journal Nature<\/em>.\u00a0 She says news reports should offer a critical and well-informed view about what society wants from science, without getting carried inordinately away by the wonder of the discoveries.<\/p>\n

Peters, from the Free University of Berlin, admits that even though scientists and the readers themselves are now producing and reproducing news, it is unlikely that journalism will die, since its primary mission of objective reporting cannot easily be performed by other forms of public communication. \u00a0<\/strong>He says that self-publishing science, through blogs written by scientists and institutions, is no substitute for the credibility of journalism as an outside observer of science.<\/p>\n

Scientific articles<\/em>
\nPETERS, H.P. The two cultures: scientists and journalists, not an outdated relationship<\/a>.\u00a0 Metode Science Studies Journal.<\/strong> V. 4, p. 163-9, 2014.
\nWATTs, S. Society needs more than wonder to respect science<\/a>.\u00a0 Nature<\/strong>. V. 208, p. 151, 10 April 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Glut of online news is reorganizing the spaces and roles of science journalism","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[220],"coauthors":[5968],"class_list":["post-212709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities","tag-communication"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212709\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212709"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=212709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}