Press junkets, part three: Winner of astronomy award was journalist-in-residence at one of award's sponsors.

[Update 10/25/12. I asked the BBC for a comment, and this is what I received, from a spokesperson who asked that I attribute it to "a BBC spokesperson":

“Katia Moskvitch’s article about the VLT was produced in accordance with the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines. Her visit to the ESO’s facilities in Chile was taken during a period of leave from her internship at the ESO and was paid for by the BBC. For the duration of the visit, Katia was contracted to the BBC after pitching a range of stories to the Science and On Demand teams. A note disclosing Katia’s prior secondment to the ESO is published with the story.”]

On Oct. 4, I expressed disapproval of new science-writing prizes in Europe that provided reporting trips instead of cash or plaques to the winners. I said the awards too plainly served the interests of those sponsoring them and that such awards should be avoided. I called them awards junkets in another guise.

On Oct. 9, in a post entitled Press Junkets, part two, I reported some of the comments that the first post had stirred up, some favorable, others critical.

Now the plot, already thick, thickens again. The winner of the astronomy prize was a journalist-in-residence at one of the organizations that sponsored the prize and that helped to pick the winner. And here's the icing on the journalistic cake: Her story was about that same organization.

The 2012 winner of the new European Astronomy Journalism Prize was Katia Moskvitch of the BBC. Her prize is to be "ESO’s guest at the inauguration of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Chilean Atacama desert next March 2013," the press release proudly announces.

This was the first year for the prize, which is run by the British Science and Technology Facilities Council "in conjunction with the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the Association of British Science Writers (ABSW), and the Royal Astronomical Society," according to the STFC website.

The description of the prize notes that "Employees of STFC, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) and their family members are not permitted to enter the competition."

According to the ESO's website, Moskvitch, the award winner, was a science-communication intern at the European Southern Observatory from Dec. 5, 2011 until Feb. 28, 2012–during the contest year. That would seem to disqualify her from entering or winning the award.

I asked the ESO about this conflict, and I got an email back from Lars Lindberg Christensen, head of the ESO's "education and public outreach" department. He said Moskvitch had been a "journalist-in-residence" and that the judging panel knew this when it awarded her the prize.

"Although Katia Moskvitch was a journalist-in-residence in 2012, she was not working for ESO at the time she went to Chile, when she wrote the piece, and when she submitted it," he said. Further, he said, "We discussed the precise circumstances surrounding Katia's entry in the jury meeting, but given the circumstances, the jury considered that not awarding the prize to Katia would have been unfair and not consistent with our criteria for good journalism."

To my mind, the exact timing of the reporting and the trip are not important; if employees are not eligible, she should not have been eligible, even if she has since left the organization.

To make matters worse, Moskvitch's prize-winning story was about the ESO. The ESO prize was awarded by a panel including ESO judges to a former ESO journalist-in-residence who wrote about the ESO.

According to its website, the BBC published Moskvitch's prize-winning story, "Red-hot Chile peepers: How to make a very large telescope," on March 28, 2012, one month after her journalism-in-residence stint at the ESO appears to have ended. A tagline at the end of the story reads, "Katia Moskvitch was on secondment to ESO for two months leading up to her trip to Chile." ("Secondment" is a British term for temporary transfer to another position or employer.)

Other astronomy stories by Moskvitch also carry that qualifier. Perhaps the BBC's editors thought that disclosing this relationship would absolve them of blame, but it raises a broader question for me: Should the BBC have published stories by a staffer who recently worked at the organization she is writing about?

We could also ask this question: Does the story merit the prize? It's a description of how the telescopes at the ESO work, with some interesting facts about, for example, how flat the surface of the mirror is–something familiar to anyone who has written or read much about astronomy. And it includes two short videos; I don't know whether Moskvitch was responsible for those. There is nothing in the story about any of the observatory's scientific findings or recent work. The story is about 1,000 words long; it quotes three people.

I've judged many science-writing contests, and, in my view, this is not close to being a prize-winner. It's serviceable, clear–and unremarkable.

-Paul Raeburn

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