Media Fellow Journeys to the “Other Side”

Abstract

On the heels of defending my Ph.D. in soil ecology, I headed off to northern Colorado last September for the next step in my scientific journey: working at a radio station. AGU was sponsoring me as a mass media fellow, a scientist‐reporter temporarily working at a news media outlet. In graduate school I had pursued some science writing training, but I had never been employed as a journalist. I hoped the experience would help me understand why it can be hard for scientists and journalists to communicate with each other and what the barriers are to providing accurate and comprehensive coverage of science in the media. That's the kind of understanding that the fellowship program, run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was meant to promote. It helps scientists learn from experience about how science reporting is done, and in an age when science desks have been eliminated by most major news outlets, it puts an eye on science back in the newsroom.