Well, it finally happened. After nearly a year of planning,
conversations, blog posts, and twitter exchanges
the #sci4hels – Rose Eveleth,
Kathleen Raven, Lena Groeger and myself organized by Bora Zivkovic gave our
presentation to the
World Conference of Science Journalists. WCSJ2013 was held
in Helsinki, Finland June 24-27 and included more than 800
journalists from 77 different countries.
For me, the highlight of the conference was certainly the
opportunity to meet, listen to, and learn from so many different journalists
with such different interests and areas of concern.
 |
| Sunset over Helsinki, photo by me |
I kicked off the conference
with a workshop from the
European School of Oncology, in which there were very
few Americans but several reporters from African countries. It was interesting to hear about the most prominent issues for them regarding
cancer coverage, particularly access to information and the shift from covering
infectious disease to covering a disease that is not transmissible.
Once the full conference program kicked off, it was a blur
of ideas and activity moving from session to session and bouncing between
ideas. I livetweeted every session I attended, which for me is a great way to
synthesize information and take notes but it did leave me buzzing at times like
all of the information I absorbed was rattling around in my brain. Most of my
tweets were under the hashtag
#wcsj2013 but there were also session specific
hashtags and of course we tweeted with
#sci4hels.
One of the most interesting sessions for me was on the topic
of blurred lines between PR/communication and journalism. The speakers for the
session were
Anne Sasso and
Kai Kupferschmidt who each took a hard line in favor of
or against journalists doing work that isn’t journalistic in nature ie: getting
paid for writing that represents an organization. After they each spoke their
peace (and both have written great wrap-up posts
here and
here) everyone in the room was asked questions, what would you do type
scenarios. Everyone was asked to move around the room based on whether they
would or would not take the assignments in question.
To me, it seemed that everyone in the room highly valued
journalistic ethics, but when it got down to the nitty gritty the lines were in
fact much more blurred than people might have wanted to admit between what they
would and would not do when the money is right. While most of us are not in the
position to be worrying about accepting champagne and free trips in a private
jet, it is still highly likely that we’ll all have to decide in the course of
our career where we draw the ethical line. What about writing for a university?
Other non-profits? Is it okay if you never cover them in a journalistic
fashion? What if a major story breaks at the organization, can you use your
connections to cover it better than other reporters? Is it right to do so?
It was a very
spirited session and as someone who works for a non-profit I found it
interesting to hear how a job like mine is viewed by other journalists. It
really ran the gamut from people thinking I’ve already wrecked my career and
compromised my ethics and impartiality, to people supporting the path I’ve
taken and encouraging me to continue to do what I’m doing with all the
transparency and honestly that is already a part of the writing I do here on
the blog and elsewhere.
 |
| Prepping for our panel, photo by Bora Zivkovic |
Our #sci4hels panel was on Wednesday of the conference and
pulled in a fairly good crowd (at least, we weren’t talking to ourselves which
was my great fear.) After introductions from Rose, I kicked things off talking
about the sense of community that has taken root with the newest generation of
science writers. I don’t think you could talk about community and not bring up
the fantastic Robert Krulwich
graduation speech to UC Berkley in 2011 where he
introduced the concept of
horizontal loyalty.
To me, a major difference in being a new journalist trying
to break into the field today compared to the past is that you have to have so
many different skills, or at least be able to pull off projects in many
different mediums. One way to do this is to be able to partner and collaborate
with other people who have a passion for things like video, audio, or graphics
(to name a few of the things that are not my cup of tea.) This collaboration,
the idea of making things together rather than trying to stand alone works well
with the rise of journalist “tribes” or “packs” groups of journalists who meet
regularly to swap stories, share ideas and support one another.
As more and more people go the freelance route and don’t
have regular contact with their colleagues the tribe seems to be growing in
prevalence and importance. I also spoke about the work that has gone into
getting
Sciobeantown up and running and what it means to be a part of the
ScienceOnline community, which is an incredible network of people interested in
science communication, not just journalism, which is something I love about the
group.
After I gave my brief introduction to these topics, Lena
spoke about code and using data and graphics to help tell stories. Kathleen
presented on social media, particularly Twitter. After that, we opened things
up to questions. I thought it was a fairly productive question and answer
session, so thank you to everyone who came and participated (you can catch up
with the types of questions we were asked at the hashtag #sci4hels.) I did not
tweet at all during our panel, and believe me, it was a challenge for me to
unplug, but it was also fun to check in after it was all over and see the
stream of tweets coming in. It was great to see so many people interested in
what we had to say.
Upon returning from Finland post-conference we found
ourselves and our panel to be the topic of a column by Nicolas Luco in
El Mercurio, a publication in Chile.
This column focused on Kathleen and I having blonde hair, and how young
the four of us are more than on the content of what we said about journalism
and our careers. Even the take-away point Luco gathered from what I'd said, that good journalism is good journalism regardless of what multimedia you augment it with, was spoken by a "blonde no more than 25." I don’t have to tell you that this was disappointing and
frustrating. But I’m not going to dedicate any more space to the issue, I have
no need when Janet Stemwedel did such a fantastic job of describing our
communication with Luco and why it was problematic in a post on her
Scientific American blog Doing Good Science.
 |
| Sci4hels post-panel, photo by Arjan Raven |
Overall, my experience at the World Conference of Science
Journalists was a largely positive one. I enjoyed meeting different people, and
had a blast with the #sci4hels and other science writing friends (and new
friends!) I learned quite a bit, both about the profession and about myself and
my career as we handled both praise and criticism. It is hard for me to believe
that it really is over after such a build up and great experience, but it is.
So thank you again to everyone who supported our panel, to the great friends
new and old who made Helsinki such a fun trip, and of course to Rose, Lena,
Kathleen and Bora for being great colleagues. Here’s to WCSJ2015!
