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Designing Digital Content to Support Science Journalism

Published: 26 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Journalists need to become more effective at communicating science and countering post-truth activities that seek to undermine scientific processes and evidence. Digital support for journalists when investigating and writing about science-related topics is one means of improving this science communication. However, little bespoke digital support is available. This paper reports the research and development of one new form of such digital support. During a participatory design process, experienced science journalists and other professionals were interviewed about their challenges experienced and understanding of good practices in science journalism. These challenges and good practices informed the development of a prototype of a new form of digital tool that was evaluated by journalists without specialist science training. A new version of the prototype, called INQUEST, was implemented to automate some parts of good practices in order to augment journalists’ capabilities. These practices included the retrieval of science information from diverse sources, targeting different science audiences, and providing different forms of guidance for explaining science to the target audience. This prototype is presented, and an early evaluation of it is reported.

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  • (2024)Understanding Practices around Computational News Discovery Tools in the Domain of Science JournalismProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36374198:CSCW1(1-36)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
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    NordiCHI '20: Proceedings of the 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Shaping Experiences, Shaping Society
    October 2020
    1177 pages
    ISBN:9781450375795
    DOI:10.1145/3419249
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 26 October 2020

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    Author Tags

    1. Science communication
    2. audience segments
    3. digital prototyping
    4. participatory design
    5. science journalism

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    • Refereed limited

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    NordiCHI '20
    NordiCHI '20: Shaping Experiences, Shaping Society
    October 25 - 29, 2020
    Tallinn, Estonia

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    NordiCHI '20 Paper Acceptance Rate 89 of 399 submissions, 22%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,572 submissions, 24%

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    View all
    • (2024)Understanding Practices around Computational News Discovery Tools in the Domain of Science JournalismProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36374198:CSCW1(1-36)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
    • (2024)Journalism Versus Churnalism: How News Factors in Press Releases Affect Journalistic Processing of Ocean Plastic Research in Newspapers GloballyJournalism Studies10.1080/1461670X.2024.2409836(1-20)Online publication date: Oct-2024
    • (2024)The publication facts label: A public and professional guide for research articlesLearned Publishing10.1002/leap.159937:2(139-146)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2024
    • (2023)Ibero-American journalism in the face of scientific disinformation: Fact-checkers’ initiatives on the social network InstagramEl Profesional de la información10.3145/epi.2023.sep.03Online publication date: 17-Aug-2023
    • (2023)“How Trustworthy Is This Research?” Designing a Tool to Help Readers Understand Evidence and Uncertainty in Science JournalismDigital Journalism10.1080/21670811.2023.219334411:3(431-464)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2023
    • (2022)Comunicación científica tras la crisis del COVID-19: estrategias de publicación en TikTok en el tablero transmediaRevista Latina de Comunicación Social10.4185/RLCS-2023-1841(109-132)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2022
    • (2022)Digital Journalism and Transmedia Narratives in the Communication of ScienceHandbook of Research on Digital Transformation Management and Tools10.4018/978-1-7998-9764-4.ch024(531-555)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2022
    • (2022)Can action research improve local journalism?Nordicom Review10.2478/nor-2022-001143:2(171-189)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2022
    • (2022)Beyond Cheerleading: Navigating the Boundaries of Science Journalism in South AfricaJournalism Studies10.1080/1461670X.2022.214182024:14(1734-1753)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2022

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