The use of Internet in newsgathering among European science journalists

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reliance on US science” (Holliman 2000). European science journalists
completely agree with this author. Is the Internet helping to publicize more
European science? Respondents split – 37.8 say “yes”, 41.1 percent say “no”. Is
the Internet helping to publicize more American science? 71.1 percent have no
doubts that it is. As one of the interviewees has put it:

I am less and less dependent from Belgium information. I was much
more dependent of what was said and produced in Belgium. Now I
am much more focused on internacional science, I should say.
[Interview 4]

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6.6. Directions for further research

As it usually happens with all research projects, this first survey of European
science journalists and subsequent interviews raise some questions that need to be
examined by further research.
First of all, there is the characterization of European science journalists, not taken
as a whole by the available literature. As we have seen in chapter 2, very few
studies were done in past about these professionals, their working methods, their
sources and their attitudes. Most of the published articles and books are about
American science journalists and were written years before the Internet assaulted
newsrooms. Our research can be seen as a small contribution to fill this gap but,
unfortunately, it is already outdated: the European Union that we had intended to
photograph has suddenly grown out of the picture.
Not only the situation of science journalism in the new countries of the European
Union needs to be clarified. It is necessary to know more about the evolution of
science journalism in Europe. What is happening with these professionals? Is the
situation of Ireland – where most science journalism in daily national media is
done by free-lance journalists – spreading to other countries? Are media devoting
more resources to science journalism or, on the contrary, are they cutting on their
budgets for this beat? And what about radio? And television? And on-line media?
Who are the science journalists working in these media in Europe? Unfortunately,
there are no answers for all these questions.
There is a need for a cross-national study on science journalism professionals in
Europe. To understand where is the European Union heading in what concerns
communicating science through the media. To understand why AlphaGalileo, the
European rival of Eurekalert!, is so seldom visited by European science
journalists, as we have seen in this project. To understand if the growth of
American science in European news media is inevitable or just a consequence of

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the lack of strong science communication policies from university and research
institutes in this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Mass-communication researchers should also investigate if the trends identified in
this project are an exclusive of science journalism, of specialized journalism or of
journalism as a whole. Are journalists becoming too close to their sources, as a
consequence of time and competition pressures? Is the embargo control of science
news spreading to other areas of specialized journalism? Are journalists producing
more one-source news than they were just a few years ago?
The expansion of Internet in newsrooms also raises some questions that need to be
clarified by further research. Most of the studies inside newsrooms – researchers
doing field observation, that is – were done many years before this technology
became indispensable. As we have seen in this project, science journalists now
spend an average 3.5 hours on the Internet every working day, searching for
information and reading e-mail. They are using the same sources, visiting the
same sites, querying the same search engines. They are stuck to their chairs and
they are not leaving newsrooms to search for new stories. Are journalists
becoming more and more dependent of information subsidies arriving at their
desks by e-mail and through the Internet? Are journalists in other areas also
concentrating in a small number of sources with a strong presence on the Web? Is
this an exclusive of print media or is this phenomenon contaminating radio and
television news?
Although this survey of European science journalists involved professionals from
news agencies, the number of respondents working for this type of media was not
enough to allow a separate analysis of their performance. Nevertheless, research
has shown that what is reported by news agencies is more frequently used by
other media (Kiernan 2002, for instance). How do journalists in news agencies
work? Has Internet affected their routines and production? In what ways? Once
again, a cross-national study could help to elucidate some of these questions.

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Finally, there is a need to understand more about the contents. Although it seems
that by using the same sources and reading the same journals, science journalists
are producing very similar stories, independently of the place they are working in,
the fact is that this assertion needs to be confirmed by extensive cross-language
content analysis. The diversity of science news seems to be endangered by the
practices of science journalists, fuelled by the recent use of Internet, but it is
necessary to look further to reach more sound conclusions.
Of course science journalists will say that the Internet is making science news
more diverse, as they did in this survey (at least some of them), but it is necessary
to probe deeper into content analysis to understand if science news from La
Stampa, The Guardian and El País are now more similar than they were just a few
years ago. From what we have seen in this project about the newsgathering
routines of science journalists we can hypothesize they are.

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7. Conclusion

The Internet is profoundly changing the daily routines of European science
journalists working for the main daily newspapers and news agencies in this
continent. From the data collected during this project, it is fair to say that the
Internet is even changing science journalism itself, as European science
journalists are depending more and more from information subsidies originating
in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and declare spending most of their time
inside newsrooms navigating on the Web looking for the latest reports.
Before the Internet, journalists working for national outlets were already spending
a lot of time inside newsrooms, mainly because deadlines became more crowded
as a result of competition with TV, and urban traffic got worse and worse. At that
time, most of the reporting was being done by phone (Glaser 2003). With the
arrival of the Internet, newsgathering without leaving the newsroom became
easier: Science journalists were in the frontline of adoption of this new technology
and were captivated by its potential. Now, as we have seen in the interviews
conducted for this project, they feel ‘stuck’ to their newsrooms, they are working
under increased pressure and they keep writing about what other science
journalists write about.
In science journalism, the adoption of the Internet as a reporting tool seems to
have happened faster than in other beats (Trumbo, Sprecker et al. 2001).
Scientists, the main sources of science journalists, were already using the Web
when it became publicly available, and journalists saw this new technology as an
excellent way to contact them, get more information, and reach previously
unavailable documents. The scarce literature on the subject – published when this
project was already on its way – concludes that these technologies were having a
tremendous impact on the practices of science journalists (Dumlao and Duke
2003).

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This impact is now more visible than five years ago. We now know that European
science journalists working for the main print outlets in the continent search for
information on-line and check and send e-mail continuously during the day. We
know that these journalists are spending an average of 3.5 hours on the Internet
while at work and that 62.5 percent of the younger science journalists (25-34
years old) say that they are on the Web for more than four hours per day.
From the results of this project, we also know that European science journalists
are using the same search engine and visiting the same sites to get the same
information subsidies. At the end of the day, they all are following each other,
hunting in packs, and mostly writing about the same issues. They also seem to
know the consequences of their dependency from the Internet: they are staying
inside their newsrooms more than they used to (and they regret it), they are
focusing more on breaking news coming from scientific journals, they are helping
to publicize more American science.
The heavy use of the Web on the part of European science journalists is probably
the most interesting result of our survey and of the subsequent interviews.
Especially because these journalists are using the Web to get information from a
very specific group of websites – the ones that emerged as a sort of indispensable
science communication lighthouses. Some are public relations sites – with the
latest press releases from peer-reviewed scientific journals and institutions
(Eurekalert, AlphaGalileo, NASA, Science, Nature) – others are big media (BBC
News, New Scientist), now playing in a global scale. As Kiernan wrote:

When it comes to breaking news about scientific research,
newspapers try to make sure that they cover the stories other
newspapers cover. The goal is not to be different, but to be the same.
(Kiernan 2003)

Because of this concentration of science journalists in a few websites, we can
hypothesize that science journalism is now less diverse than it was a few years
ago. Extensive content analysis has to be conducted to confirm this assertion, but
it is only fair to presume that the main daily newspapers and news agencies in the

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European Union are writing about the same issues, because we know they are
following the same stories and contacting the same sources no matter in which
country they are in.
The State of News Media 2006, a recent report published in the United States by
the Project for Excellence in Journalism, based on the analysis of the news
produced in one single day in the United States, comes to a very similar
conclusion to this thesis: ‘The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering
fewer stories’ (Project for Excellence in Journalism 2006). The authors say this
repetition of stories happens across all beats:

While the news is always on, there is a constant flow of new events.
The level of repetition in the 24-hour news cycle is one of the most
striking features one finds in examining one day of news. Google
News, for instance, offers consumers access to some 14,000 stories
from its front page, yet on this day they were actually accounts of the
same 24 news events. (Project for Excellence in Journalism 2006)

This new paradox of journalism, that is, the loss of infodiversity in news, needs to
be studied more deeply. Small pieces of evidence, coming from different places,
are all contributing to solidify the idea that journalists are writing more and more
about the same stories. And this situation is probably one of the most important
consequences of the introduction of the Internet in newsrooms.
Once thought to be an opportunity to pay attention to multiple voices across the
world, the Web is helping to homogenize news in different countries. Twenty five
years ago, it would be difficult for a Spanish journalist to know what the main
science news stories in The New York Times that day were. Now, she can know it
immediately, and her superiors too. The pressures to follow big media that are
considered to be an example for the industry are now bigger, especially in
countries with a lower GNI per capita, as we have seen in this project.
The use of the Internet for newsgathering is also linked to the age of journalists.
Younger science journalists show a heavier use of this technology in their daily

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routines. At the same time, older journalists are the ones who show more diversity
in their science sources. As a consequence of this situation, one can expect that
infodiversity in science news will diminish in the future, when most of these
experienced journalists retire, and give way to a new generation of professionals
who always worked with the Internet and see it as an essential daily tool.
In a study of local television health journalists in the United States, Andrea
Tanner concludes that journalists are learning of story ideas through a ‘passive
news discovery process in which reporters find story ideas without ever leaving
the newsroom’ (Tanner 2004). Our research shows that European science
journalists are following this pattern and accepting it as normal.
The results of this project are even more interesting if we take into account the
surveyed population: highly educated, very experienced professionals, working in
larger than average science sections at very important news organizations in the
European Union. These media, whose journalists were surveyed and interviewed
for this project, are widely read inside their respective countries (some even
abroad) and are certainly influencing what gets reported in other media.
This situation means that the communication of science by the media inside the
European Union is dominated by articles about the research published in peerreviewed
journals, most of them about American science. At the same time, many
of these newspapers and news agencies are seldom talking about what European
researchers are doing on a daily basis, or about the science being done inside the
laboratories. A recent report by the European Commission – White Paper on a
European Communication Policy – says that ‘media coverage of European issues
remains limited’ (Commission of the European Communities, 2006, p.9). In what
concerns science news, this observation perfectly coincides with the conclusions
of this research.
In what concerns science news, it is also clear that, because they are always being
informed about results from peer-reviewed journals, readers are receiving a
distorted image of science, as some authors have pointed out years ago (Goodell

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1977, for instance). If science journalists are staying inside their newsrooms and
are not visiting laboratories and conferences as often as they used to, readers can
only make contact with the final product of science: the published scientific
article. The whole practice of science is being forgotten and journalists become
passive transmitters of information coming from organized sources.
This research project also shows that the science establishment is now strongly
influencing (most of the times) what gets published by the media about science.
Some years ago, with the help of the Internet, science publications and science
institutions joined together around public relations sites, such as Eurekalert and
AlphaGalileo, and were successful in becoming the most important sources for
science journalists all around the world. The Ingelfinger rule and the embargo
policies, presented as a way to help journalists write about a complicated subject
with no time pressures, were crucial to this outcome. European science journalists
accept this embargo and think it should be maintained, because they see it as a
useful (unique?) way of getting information on their main subject.
From this point of view, we can say that publishing companies were successful in
setting the agenda for science. Every week, in every country, science stories
coming from scientific journals appear at exactly the same time, often citing the
same sources. This strong cooperation between science journals and journalists
helps both players: Journalists get the information they want and have the time to
prepare an article about it, journals get the publicity that comes from having a
story on several media at the same time, on the same day.
The Internet has amplified this cooperation by bringing journalists closer to
scientists. As this project has shown, European science journalists now see the
majority of their relations with sources as ‘cooperative’. Among the most trusted
sources of science journalists on the Web are science journals and university
websites, the ones that produce the information subsidies that journalists use on a
daily basis.

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Manheim (1991) observed an increasing role of public relations efforts in society
that aims to influence what gets reported in the media. The public understanding
of science movement has encouraged scientists to use public relations techniques
to communicate with the population, in order to push the science agenda. The
collaboration between science journalists and their sources has given more control
to scientists.

Collaborating with journalists and adapting to journalistic
conventions may give scientists more, rather than less, control over
the emphasis and tone of the resulting story. (Gregory and Miller
1998, p.131)

Cooperation between science journalists extends to journalists working in other
media. Although several authors have already pointed out that there is usually
cooperation between science journalists from different newspapers, it would be
interesting to know if this cooperation has increased with the arrival of the
Internet. There is no doubt about the cooperative nature of the Web itself, and it
may be hypothesized that the more the journalists use this tool the more
cooperative they become with both sources and competitors.
From the data collected during the survey and the interviews, it became clear that,
although science journalists still do some of their reporting outside the
newsrooms, they now spend much time inside. Eric Meyer, associate professor of
Journalism at the University of Illinois, has a good description of what the Internet
represents inside newsrooms:

The Internet is the perfect chain-paper journalistic gimmick. In the
wrong hands, it’s cheap, fast and predictable. Instead of enabling
greatness, it enables journalistic lethargy. But that’s human nature.
(Glaser 2003)

“Cheap” and “fast” were certainly two of the characteristics that helped science
journalists, in Europe and all over the world, to adopt the Internet as one of their
most important tools for newsgathering. Some of the interviewees pointed them as