Masterclass – Journalism of Science

In February, the first Masterclass of this year took place. It’s subject: journalism of science. The lecturer himself is a science journalist and provided us with insights in the media point of view on this. We learned how a scientific discovery can be interpreted differently in every step on it’s way to the newspaper. A small exercise in this helped us imagine how media select scientific news, in other words, what kind of news is befitting for a science part of a newspaper.
The lecturer had us all choose three different subjects with reasons for why they should be listed in the science rubrics of newspapers. We discussed in great detail which kind of articles and headlines were fit, and most importantly why they were fit from the standpoint of a science journalist. The practical process of how a scientific discovery is made into a news headline was explained. Furthermore, he showed us numerous examples of how things in practice are sometimes rushed and therefore exaggerated, or how articles can be of low qualitity due to various reasons such as time constraints.