Diversifying into other beats
I delivered my annual talk AMA at the NCBS science writing workshop yesterday. While the questions the students asked were mostly the same as last year (and the year before that), I also took the opportunity to request them to consider diversifying into other subjects. Most, if not all, journalists entering India’s science journalism space every year want to compose stories about the life sciences and/or ecology. As a result, however, while there are numerous journalists to write about issues in these areas, there are fewer than a handful to deal with developments in all the other ones – from theoretical particle physics to computer science to chemical engineering.
This gives the impression to the consumers of journalism that research in these areas isn’t worth writing about or, more perniciously, that developments in these areas aren’t to be discussed (and debated, if need be) in the public domain. And this in turn contributes to a vicious cycle, where “there no stories about physics” and “there is no interest in publishing stories about physics” successively keep readers/editors and the journalists, resp., at bay.
However, from an editor’s perspective, the problem has an eminently simple solution: induct and then publish reporters producing work on research on these subjects. This doesn’t always have to be of newly minted producers but could also benefit from existing ones actively diversifying into beats other than their first choices over the course of a few years.
This sort of diversification doesn’t happen regularly but if it does, it could also benefit younger journalists who are looking to make their presence felt. For example, it’s easier to stand out from the crowd writing about, say, semiconductor fabrication than about ecological research (although this isn’t to say one is more important than the other). When more such writing is produced, editors also stand to gain because they can offer readers a more even coverage of research in the country instead of painting a lopsided picture.
One might argue that there needs to be demand from readers as well, but the relationship between editors and readers isn’t a straightforward demand-supply contest. If that were the case, the news would have become synonymous with populist drivel a long time ago. Instead, it’s more about progressively creating newer interests in the longer run that are a combination of informative and interesting. Put one way, this means the editor should be able to bypass the ‘interestedness indicator’ once in a while to publish stories that readers didn’t know they needed (such as The Wire‘s piece on quantum biology earlier this month).
Such a thing obviously wouldn’t be possible without journalists pitching stories other than what they usually do, and of course editors who have signalled that they are willing to take such risks.
