The use of Internet in newsgathering among European science journalists

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3. Methodology

As we have seen in the previous chapter, although there is a considerable
bibliography on the construction of science news, there have been few scientific
studies involving European science writers. Moreover, several aspects of the
constraints science reporters face while doing their job need to be clarified.
This thesis tries to overcome some of these problems by conducting a survey of
science journalists working on staff for news agencies and general print media in
14 countries of the European Union. The results of this survey are presented in
chapter 4. Afterwards, and according to the results of the survey, some of the
findings are elucidated with in-depth interviews of some of the respondents.
Results for these interviews are presented in chapter 5.
The quantitative methodology, as the first approach to this problem, gives us a
general picture of how science news is constructed within the European Union. To
achieve this result by a qualitative methodology – as participant observation or
extensive interviewing of the subjects – would be much more time-consuming
and, certainly, much more expensive.
There is also a reason to choose this specific universe of science journalists.
Previous research has shown that newspapers and news agencies are assumed to
be reliable sources and can influence the coverage of other media on a particular
issue (Gans 1979, p.91; Manning 2001, p.54). Television news, which is the main
source of news for the general public, are specially dependent on wire and
newspaper stories (Epstein 1974, p.37; Schlesinger 1978, p.93). Science stories
picked by the Associated Press were more easily selected to be reported by
regional newspapers (Kiernan 2002).
When choosing to ask science journalists working in newspapers, magazines and
news agencies in 14 countries of the European Union to fill a self-completion
questionnaire, we are aware that we are probably gathering in the same survey the

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most influential science writers in this continent. But this is exactly the reason
why this survey is important: because it can show what they think about the
constraints of their job, and give us a clear overview of the problems science
journalists face inside some of the major European newsrooms.
Not included in this survey are freelance science journalists – mainly because
their constraints are somewhat different from on staff journalists, but also because
they would enlarge the universe of respondents to unmanageable numbers within
a PhD project. We’ve also decided not to include science journalists working for
specialized magazines, because they work in a completely different environment,
where science is not competing with other issues for space. Their audiences are
different, their pace of work too.
Of course, there are disadvantages in using a self-completion questionnaire, the
most important of which is the difficulty in probing some of the given answers
and the collection of additional data, as researchers have pointed out (Bryman
2001). In the case of this research project, the subsequent interviews help us
overcome some of the issues raised by the survey, specially the ones that
challenge the findings of previous research.
The survey serves the purpose of answering the main questions of this thesis:
Who are the European Union science journalists working in national print media
and news agencies? What are their attitudes and expectations? How is Internet
transforming science journalism in Europe? By understanding the relations
science journalists have with their sources, with their colleagues and competitors,
and with their audiences, we will be able to better comprehend how science news
is being built in Europe. Because it is important to know how Internet has
changed the newsgathering routines of these professionals, a separate section of
the survey is dedicated to this issue.
Research has suggested that Web surveys appear to be attaining lower response
rates than equivalent mail surveys, especially because users are becoming
impatient with high-burden Web interactions (Crawford, Couper et al. 2001). At

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the same time, literature has also shown that science journalists use the Internet
more often than journalists working in other areas (Trumbo, Sprecker et al. 2001),
and so it seemed sensible to carefully set up the website for the survey and to
conduct it by e-mail and the Web. To do so, we tried to obtain the e-mail
addresses of all this population. At the same time, we also built a website to host
the survey and did all the programming and testing of the site, before sending the
notifications to the respondents. Although it might seem easier to conduct a
survey by e-mail or the Web when compared with normal mail, research has
shown that this is not always the case (Schonlau, Fricker Jr. et al. 2002).
Nevertheless, and taking into account the population that we intended to question,
we decided that a Web survey would be the best and easiest way to conduct this
project.

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3.1. The survey

The survey of European science journalists, whose results will be presented in
chapter 4, is divided in two main sections: the first tries to probe the constraints of
journalists inside European newsrooms – sources, colleagues, competitors and
audiences – and the second intends to investigate the way science journalists use
the Internet in their daily routine.
By judging attitudes and opinions of science journalists in all these issues, we
think we can establish a framework to analyse their daily constraints and
understand how Internet is influencing their newsgathering routines. Although the
main objectives of this survey are different from previous surveys conducted in
the US with both specialized and non-specialized journalists, we thought it might
be useful to include in the survey similar questions to the ones done by
McCleneghan (1994) and Middleberg and Ross (2000). The first of these studies
tried to understand the attitudes of science writers, according to three different
typologies: accuracy, scientific attribution and creative writing. The second is an
annual survey that records the journalists’ use of the Internet.
Simultaneously, it seemed wise to try to probe in this survey some of the issues
raised in the bibliography about the behaviours of science journalists, some of
which are established long ago and are rarely discussed. Among these questions
are their attitudes to breaking news versus feature articles, or their thoughts on the
need/no need of science education to write about science.
Having in mind all these issues, we prepared a survey that could give us
information on the sociology of European science journalists: general
characterization, attitudes, opinions and beliefs towards several aspects of their
job, patterns of the use of the Internet in their daily routines.
The order of the questions for this survey was also taken into consideration, as we
knew that the questionnaire would be answered by very busy professionals and we

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wanted to obtain the best response rate possible. The ordering of a questionnaire is
also important because it may bias respondents’ answers and researchers must be
careful with the language they use in order not to influence results. Having these
concerns in mind, we decided to start the survey with general questions that would
allow us to characterize the respondents, and tried to organize all the questionnaire
“in a logical sequence, proceeding from the general to the specific”, as several
authors suggest (for example, Wimmer and Dominick 2000, p. 173).
On the first part of the survey, after a first group of questions on identification, we
asked questions about the journalists’ relations with sources, colleagues,
competitors and audiences, by this order, finishing with a general question about
the perceived status of science journalism nowadays. On the second part of the
survey, dedicated to understanding how science journalists use the Internet, we
took a similar approach, starting with more general questions and then probing
deeper on the subject. The last question tries to evaluate the general attitude of
science journalists towards the Internet.
While some questions can be answered on a “yes” or “no” basis, many others
require the use of an agree/disagree Likert scale that allows researchers to better
understand the attitudes of respondents towards several issues. In this
questionnaire, we used this kind of scale each time we needed to ask respondents
if they agreed or not with some statements about the work of science journalists or
their attitudes. All the statements were positively worded, in order to lower the
possibility of influencing the respondents towards an answer. The responses were
coded consistently so that higher scores always meant stronger agreement with the
attitude in question.
A first version of the questionnaire was finished in March 2003 and was used to
build the website for the survey. Fellow PhD students, professors at the Institute
of Communications Studies and colleagues were then given a password and asked
to test the survey, in order to see if questions were clear enough, if the whole
questionnaire made sense, if the navigation was obvious and easy.

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Afterwards, and according to suggestions made during the testing of the survey by
several respondents, some questions were clarified, others simply erased. At the
end of this process, finished in September 2003, the survey had a total of 29
questions, consisting of a mix of mostly closed questions, two open-ended
questions and several sentences that the respondents were asked to evaluate
according to a seven-point agree/desagree Likert scale.
A complete version of the questionnaire can be read on Appendix I.

Sampling
In March 2003, we started gathering information about science journalists
working on staff for general print media and news agencies in all the countries of
the European Union¹³, so they could be invited to participate in the survey. From
the very beginning, it was clear that this was not an easy task, mainly because
there was no centralized information on these journalists. The website for the
European Union of Science Journalists’ Associations
¹⁴ seemed a good place to
start, but we soon realized that very few of these national associations had an upto-date
or reliable directory of their members. The exception to this rule was
perhaps the French association of science journalists – Association des
Journalistes Scientifiques de la Presse d'Information (AJSPI) –, whose very
complete directory was the main base for identifying the French journalists who
participated in the survey.
Having discarded the possibility of officially obtaining a complete and truthful list
of science journalists in each country, we turned our attention to personal

13

At that time, the European Union was formed by only 15 countries.

14

http://www.esf.org/eusja/

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contacts, in order to achieve this objective. The EUSJA site, together with the
sites of some of the science journalists’ national associations, gave us some very
good information on where to start, because they sometimes identified the names
of science journalists, their telephone numbers and their respective e-mails. From
then on, the process was similar to each and every country: e-mail one science
journalist, ask her/him the names of other science journalists in his/her
newspaper/magazine/agency, and the names of other science journalists in other
media, specifying, in each case, that contacts should be on staff in printed press or
news agencies. The process was repeated over and over again by writing to people
whose names were obtained with this technique.
This method of obtaining the names of science journalists in each country of the
EU was complemented with other methods, having always in mind that the list
should be as complete as possible. University researchers in some of these
countries were also contacted, in order to understand if all (or almost all) the
general print media in a given country were covered by the list we had. This
double-checking was also done with science journalists themselves, so we could
be sure the list was as inclusive as possible and was not overlooking some
important media or journalists.
In many cases, the contacts with the science journalists were not done uniquely by
e-mail. Telephone was used in order to ensure that the list of possible respondents
was built as fast and as accurately as possible. Telephone contacts with several
science journalists, members of the national associations of science writers and
university researchers allowed a very significant progress in the building of the
database of European science journalists.
In some countries, where not enough information was available by these methods,
newspapers and magazines were used in order to try to identify the science
journalists in each of those media. An e-mail or a telephone conversation with the
journalists identified would generally follow that effort.

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When building the database, a problem made us change our minds about how the
survey should be conducted: some of the people contacted by e-mail deleted the
first messages because they confused them with spam – e-mail messages, not
requested by the receiver, sent by companies promoting all kinds of products. To
greatly reduce (or even avoid) this problem when sending out the notifications
asking for participation in the survey, we then decided that the first notification
would be sent by mail in a cover letter with the logo of the University of Leeds.
The database was considered finished at the end of October 2003. It had 208
names and addresses of science journalists from 102 different media. Although
several last minute efforts were done, it was impossible to get the e-mails of three
journalists identified by this process. As a consequence, these three science
journalists only received the first letter of invitation to participate in the survey,
but they could get no subsequent e-mails. Each entry on the database had the
following fields: name of the journalist, name of the medium, country, address
and e-mail. This would allow the distribution of the first letter of invitation (sent
by normal mail) and the subsequent notifications (all done by e-mail).
During the whole process of gathering information about the respondents, it was
impossible to identify a single science journalist in Luxembourg. At the same
time, Ireland only has one science journalist working on staff for a daily
newspaper, as most of the daily science is written by freelancers. In all of the
other countries, the list of science journalists is, in our view, as inclusive as
possible. The complete list of the media whose science journalists were invited to
participate in this survey can be seen in appendix II.

Building of the website for the survey
The building of the website to host the survey of European science journalists
started in March 2003, as soon as a first revised version of the questionnaire was
ready.

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When building the website and designing the questionnaire, we took into
consideration the “Guidelines for Designing and Implementing Internet Surveys”,
suggested by Schonlau, Fricker Jr. et al. (2002, p.40-53). Especially useful were
the recommendations about the listing of only a few questions in each screen, the
need for password protection, the ensuring of the privacy of respondents, the
indications about the survey’s progress, the automatic validation of input and the
need for thoroughly testing of the survey before starting. We also took into
consideration the suggestions made by Wimmer and Dominick (2000) and
Bryman (2001) about the presentation of the questionnaire and its length. A
screenshot of the first page of the survey can be seen on figure 1:

Figure 1 - Screenshot of the first page of the survey

In order to ensure that the survey would be answered only once by each
respondent, the access to the survey was controlled by a password, embedded in
the URL sent individually¹⁵. In order to avoid double answers, this special URL

15

The URL had the following format: http://newmedia.leeds.ac.uk/sesj/index.cfm?user=wert56.
The letters after the equal sign were the unique password.

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was automatically blocked the moment the respondent clicked the button
“Submit” in the last page of the survey.
To easily deal with the collected data, it was decided that all answers would be
automatically recorded in an Access^© database that could be downloaded
periodically, in order to guarantee that, in the case of some major problem with
the server where it was hosted, most answers would already be in a safe place.
A backend was also built to ensure that the tasks of sending the e-mails to the
respondents could be done without much trouble. A webpage with a series of
links, allowed the researcher to see the contents of the e-mail that was about to be
sent and the list of people who were going to receive it. A simple final click was
enough for the e-mails to be sent to all the population included in this survey. The
aspect of the backend can be seen in Figure 2:

Figure 2 - Screenshot of the survey backend