- T

http://mostemailednews.com

But there’s another side to this and it’s one that’s worrying for the future. Yes, it is the job of the journalist to find the experts, but it is also the job of the journalist to present that information in an easy to read manner because quite often (and scientists can be the worst at this) they are awful at presenting their point of view/facts.

I always thought one of the great things about newspapers being online would be that you would have your story – written for the mainstream (even stories in specialist areas like Media Guardian and so on are relatively accessible by the mainstream reader) and then links to further indepth reading, but so few publications even now have grasped that opportunity.

I think you’re always going to need generalists who reach across areas just as papers should have specialists. The big question is who is going to pay their salaries as people go more and more niche/blinkered in their reading?

My impression is that – at least in Austria where I live – journalists with real expertise on a topic are the most successful in a difficult market.

Thank you for the excellent post!

This is where Jeff Jarvis is correct in saying journalists are only good at finding experts. But the way he phrases it implies that all the journalist needs is a list of people. If you have plenty of time, then you can just go down the list, call them all and derive the points of consensus and dispute in any story. And you are going to waste a lot of time on interviews that go nowhere. With a bit of knowledge about the subject and who people are, you probably already have a good idea of who to call and why.

The danger arises when you have acquired enough specialist knowledge to pick up blind spots – areas of assumed consensus that might be wrong because things have changed in the background. I’ve seen this happen in technology reporting where the journalist is an specialist with an engineering background. Sometimes they arrive with a body of knowledge from their previous job and they assume every engineering company does things the same way.

The danger for the generalist is that, on that long list of interviewees, you arrive at a false consensus because half the people who granted an interview talked nonsense and you weren’t able to filter that out. But, the generalist’s advantage is a better view of what a general reader wants to know. A specialist can spend so long in the detail they miss important stories.

Would a geneticist naturally do a better job of reporting on the mapping of the human genome? Some of the assumptions made by geneticists before it was completed were not borne out by the results and the science has changed a lot in the wake of the project. And it was a project that called on a lot of disciplines, from computer science through molecular biology. Just because geneticists were the most interested community does not necessarily make them best placed to report on the project. Nor the worst.

There is a strong argument, however, for much better education among journalists on statistics, particularly where it comes to ideas such as significance and how to interpret P and r values. It’s a skill that cuts across all the sciences, so there’s no need to claim expertise in one .