And one thing we must always keep in mind is religion. Whether we have it or we don't, we have to respect that many others do.
The top three most engaging science topics to the general public are;
- The Big Bang Theory
- The story of life
- Human Origins
All media stories have to have either the "wow factor" or a significant human interest factor. With all of this in mind, I'm going to have a look at one of today's science media stories and see what of the above factors they have used;
- Well straight away the headline has both the "wow factor" and a large element of human interest - "Preparing for Climate change will boost economy"
- The politics in this are clearly seen in that it was a "government commissioned report" It's definitely got geopolitics in it too, with all the climate stories, and climate scientists and everything climate in the news these days the whole word "climate change" has large political connotations.
- Reading a bit further down we see some more human interest in the form of climate change effecting mobile phone signal- What would us modern human do without our mobile phones?
- There's no comedy or sex in this story but it definitely follows the rules I laid out above.
I'm going to have a look at another story in today's news, Hopefully not related to climate change (but somehow everything these days goes back to Climate change);
I picked this story, because it's a) or great interest personally as it's about dinosaurs!! (Everyone loves dinosaurs) and b) the Author is Howard Falcon-Lang, a well known palaeontologists at Royal Holloway, so let's see how the scientists and not the journalists write the news;
- Fantastic title, it drew me in straight away "Secrets of Antarctica's Fossilised Forests". Well from the off we have mystery "secrets" is a fantastic word to use in the title of an article!
- Ooooo climate change and geopolitics; the first paragraph and we are reading about an "Extreme greenhouse event" with polar rainforests, and the phrase "Is this a sign of things to come"
- After the first couple of sentences the normal reader would probably get a bit bored, the words such as "mystery" and "bizzare" leave and it's a lot of heavy science about palaeobotany that unless you had a prior interest in the field you wouldn't care to much about- so with that in mind I think I've found the big difference between the journalist and the scientist- The journalist keeps you hooked through the whole story using language that everyone can understand, the scientist explains the first few paragraphs in the language of the educated laymen but then starts to get a bit heavy in the science.
- Although the sub-heading that are used are quite catchy- we have "Dark Secrets" a nice play on words there, "Dinosaurs in the Dark" another nice pun, and "Emerald Antarctica" I don't know about you but that makes me think of lush green forests, glitter in the sunlight, the rain drops just catching the light...... maybe that's what the author wants us to think, if so he's done a good job with my imagination (although the dinosaurs in the dark conjured up images of dinosaurs stumbling around bumping into each other.... probably not the right idea).
- And then we finish with another short bit about climate change and will Antarctica be lush and green again in the future.
I personally enjoyed this story more than the first as it is a subject I am greatly interested in, but it was around three times longer than the first and had much more technical language in it. So I think the journalists definitely beat us scientists when it comes to communicating the science, even if their way is a little boring......
GF
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