Almost as long as I've been in journalism – science writing particularly – I've watched colleagues bristle and snort when told how important news media are to educating the public. I've gone into full-dismissal mode myself on such occasions. We're not educators!, the line goes. Right, we cover what is new – news – and we use facts, quotes, stories, and narratives surrounding events to get some of their meaning and context over to the public. Sure, people learn from journalism but it's almost a side effect, a welcome result but not the immediate taskmaster – editor be thy name. We don't have time to think like a syllabus composer. We got news to cover, places to go, people to quote. Education is for schools: vitally important but not our job.
Two things got me this week to realize how rapidly the distinctions in style and tools among training, education, advocacy, and journalism are getting even blurrier than they already were. Each of these two recent thought-provokers is an example of how people with deep experience in bona fide journalism and news reporting are seduced and compelled by technology and competition to do things that have the structure and experiential jumps found in the kind of pedagogy educators traditionally have used. Not that good reporters are becoming pedants, plodding along point by point to build edifices of knowlege or belief in their students' skulls. But some kind of hybrid is growing in our midst. A story – what journalists most commonly have aimed for – is a linear creation that keeps the attention moving along a path the writer or videographer etc. lays. A few photos may divert attention, but one usually picks the thread right back up. But boy, when there are movies and interactive graphics and text blocks and audio clips to go with longer form writing, the path is not tightly constrained. Whether due to structured lesson plan, or the kind of hop scotch that one uses to self-educate – pausing to surf the web or ask somebody a question or run an experiment – the sensation more closely resembles what a good teacher or mentor inspires.
1) One example is the wonderful package that Science Magazine's staff put together on what it calls the Thousand-Year Graveyard. Paul Raeburn just put a thoughtful tracker post up on it. Look at the post and then the Science mag website as it invites users to learn how a deeply layered burying ground at an ancient abbey is giving medical anthropologists a treasury of insight into life and death for generations of Europeans. The news-side science writers and editors at Science, chiefly the gifted Ann Gibbons, assembled what Raeburn rightly calls a "deeply immersive" experience for reader-viewers. It lets them jump print to movie to graphic until they've rabbited their way through a memorable lesson in science and history. It's journalism, sort of, but it feels also like an (exciting) schoolroom class.
2) I'll go at length into the second example. It arose in the pressroom of the recent American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. Daniel Grossman (link goes to his website's bio), an old time science and environment writer and film maker and jack of all trades, sat down to say hi. Dan lives near Boston. We'd met a few years ago when I was doing some business at tracker headquarters, MIT's Knight Science Journalism program. He told me about his current focus of interest: sea level rise. For one thing, he has written Deep Water, a "TED book" as in the conferences of that name. Broadly overlapping in content with the book, his interest has also generated a full-on commission from the NSF to collaborate with climate researcher Maureen Raymo of Columbia U's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. She's not only an ambitious researcher, she is familiar with the writing life. Her father is Chet Raymo, a physicist turned writer (I discovered him years ago via his Honey from Stone, which you all should read ) and practitioner of what he called Religious Naturalism – which in turn is not so much theist as it is a reverent regard for all that exists.
Grossman has crafted a new website SEA CHANGE, How High Will the Sea Rise? that combines videos, audio, text, maps, graphics, and everything else multi in media to make clear to the public what Raymo is doing to discover whether and how fast sea level will screw up the world's coasts and a lot of human economy. Well, okay, I asked Grossman before I'd looked at the site, as your doing this on commission to the principals, is this journalism or p.r. or what? I don't really know, he said. But he added that it uses all the skills he's picked up in decades of work as an environmental journalist, and he believes in its message.
I'll tell you one thing, it's not just a story but, like Science's 1000-year-graveyard, it is a deep immersion into information. Grossman is listed as writer and videographer and executive producer. Other credits go to narrators and website architects other professional hired help. It's almost a text book come to life, and with more excitement than most textbooks. It is on the hortatory side – Raymo is pretty sure sea level rise is a serious problem, but by studying the most recent time of an earth hotter than it is now (during the Pliocene, about 2.5 to 5 million years ago) she hopes to figure out how quickly Antarctica's and Greenland's icy massifs may melt.
Grossman certaintly know how musical accompaniment can maintain a multi-media mood. For instance, he has a clip of Raymo laying out the problem. A loud, ominous scrum of music plays in the background with a deep drumbeat and tortured, rhythmic strings – one almost expects Axl Rose or Paul McCartney to break in with Live and Let Die. And an image of warming Earth, all its continents portrayed as glistening slaps of melting ice, puts shivers in the spine.
Take some time and bounce around in both the Sea Change and the 1000-year Graveyard sites. I am not sure is either "journalism" or "multi-media" are appropriate terms to this kind of communication. Neither is a story, not in the sense of uninterrupted narrative. But each has one or more seasoned journalists providing vital leadership. And each achieves vivid science news and lessons. For an old-time print news guy like me, they are dizzying and daunting.
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