[ASC-list] Erosion of science specialists in media

[Peter Pockley]

Dear ASC-ers,

An issue running through the ASC Annual Conference in February was 
the threat to science communication in the broad from further erosion 
of key measures of specialist science reporting and commentary in the 
media. This may not directly affect the majority of ASC members and 
conference delegates. Of the 270-odd delegates around only a dozen of 
us, or ~5%, were specialist science reporters. Most could only stay 
for a day to appear on a panel, more's the pity as a good number of 
the others are employed to gain space or air time in our outlets and 
both parties would have benefited from more one-on-one contact.

At the conference the Australian Science Media Centre announced its 
national count of us as being about two dozen. Raising this as 
an  issue is not merely a case of self-interest, though those of us 
on the inside certainly have a stake in protecting and developing the 
sector. Christopher Warren, Federal Secretary of the Media, 
Entertainment and Arts Alliance, and Michael Gawenda, former Editor 
of "The Age" and now at University of Melbourne, spoke strongly at 
the conference on the core values to the media and society generally 
of growing the number of long-term specialists, not only in science. 
It was significant that their cases came from influential observers 
who are not in-house, so to speak.

Such statistics may only come to life and relevance to the great 
majority of ASC members on learning of personal experiences from the 
coal face. These have been usefully supplemented by Robyn Williams 
and Wilson da Silva in the latest issue of "The Walkley Magazine" of 
the MEAA, Issue 60, February-March 2010, just out.  Thanks to the 
Editor of The Walkley, I have URLs for these two articles and commend 
them to ASCers to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.

<http://www.walkleys.com/features/617/>http://www.walkleys.com/features/617/ 
(Robyn Williams, "Facing extinction")

http://www.walkleys.com/features/616/ (Wilson da Silva, "My science 
experiment")

As you assess the "national strategy for science communication" for 
making comments, you might note that the ABC has been nominated as a 
"strategic partner" and compare it Robyn's dismal case study. You 
must be left wondering how this nomination and (unspecified) 
expectations came about and their prospects in practice.

My own not-so-sanguine assessment of the "national strategy" will 
appear in the public prints later on. (I happen to have been the sole 
reporter present for questioning Science Minister Kim Carr at his 
"media conference" after he launched the "strategy", which was not a 
convincing demonstration to national politics of the importance of 
our field of work, as expressed ultimately by budget planners.)

Cheers all!

---------------------------
Peter Pockley, DPhil
Science writer & broadcaster

25 Avenue Road, Glebe, Sydney
New South Wales 2037, Australia
Phone: +61 (0) 2 9660 6363; Fax +61 (0) 2 9660 6239
Email: scicomm at bigpond.net.au

Outgoing emails are first checked for viruses by AVG.
Please use phone or fax for anything urgent, and for alerting me to 
an important email.  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://www.lists.sublimeip.com/pipermail/asc-list/attachments/20100308/e8a2b572/attachment.htm>