Swim President Fabio Turone interviewed on the L’Aquila trial

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The latest issue of WPK Quarterly – the newsletter of the German Association of Science Writers WPK – publishes an interview (written in German) to Swim President Fabio Turone, focusing on the complex and controversial court decision that sentenced several Italian scientists  to jail after the L’Aquila earthquake.

«The Italian justice failed», the headline by German science writer Markus Lehmkuhl goes.

The programme of the Erice School 2013 on Cognitive Neuroscience is online

Fabiola Gianotti, with her discovery of the Higgs particle at CERN, will be a special guest of this year’s course at the Erice International School of Science Journalism, devoted to Magnetic Resonance and Cognitive Neuroscience.

Other speakers include: Arno Villringer (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science), Barbara Bottalico (Neuroscience and Law Uni Pavia), Beatrice Mautino (Codice/Genoa Science Festival), Connie StLouis (BBC, City University London), Daniela Ovadia (Agency Zoe/Niguarda Hospital), Federico Giove (Centro Fermi), Fred Balvert (Erasmus MC), John Womersley (UK Science and Technology Facilities Council), Marco Cattaneo (Le Scienze/Mente&Cervello), Mo Costandi (Neurophilosophy/The Guardian), Nicla Panciera (CIMEC), Silvia Bencivelli (RAI), Souad Zgaoui (Erasmus MC).

The preliminary programme – designed by Course Directors Umberto Dosselli (INFN-LNF) and Fabio Turone (President of Science Writers in Italy) – is available in the website of the Erice School, along with the instructions to apply to one of the 30 fellowships covering fee, travel and accomodation.

The Autumn issue of EUSJA News is out

View this document on Scribd

(You can also download the pdf from the EUSJA website)

Marco Ferrari interviene su Tabloid su clima e media

L’ultimo numero della rivista Tabloid dell’Ordine dei Giornalisti dela Lombardia ha di nuovo in copertina un tema legato alla scienza, oggetto di un’inchiesta curata da Marco Ferrari, coordinatore del gruppo di lavoro “Ambiente e media” di Swim, e di un approfondimento di Fabio Turone sul ruolo avuto dal Science Media Centre britannico nel rimettere sui binari della chiarezza e completezza dell’informazione la controversia seguita al cosiddetto “Climategate” innescato da alcune e-mail trafugate dai computer dell’Università dell’East Anglia.

L’inchiesta può essere scaricata in pdf.

Anne Glover will be in the panel on Science Media Centres at PCST 2012, in Florence

The newly named Chief Scientific Adviser of the European Commission, professor Anne Glover, will take part in the panel of the PCST Conference in Florence on Science Media Centres organised and moderated by Swim President Fabio Turone, that will address the issue of bad coverage of scientific controversies in the general press and the possible countermeasures that can be adopted, and specifically on the results obtained by the British Science Media Centre in its first ten years of activity, characterised by considering itself at the service of the science journalism profession.

Along with Professor Anne Glover, the panel will see the presence of Fiona Fox, director of the UK Science Media Centre, Charlotte Wien, researcher from the University of Southern Denmark, and Morten Busch, head of the project for a Danish Science Media Centre at the Experimentarium in Copenhagen.

The panel will be on Thursday from 14:30 to 15:45
Mad Cow Disease, Franken-Food and Killer Vaccines: this sensationalistic approach to scientific controversies typical of British tabloids – but often a prerogative also of more serious and respected media – caused in recent years a long-term damage not only to the image of science, but also to health policy and science research itself.
The first ten years of activity of the UK Science Media Centre have shown that authoritative and independent scientific sources can be helped not to shy away from media storms, so that they can timely and effectively intervene in the debate about sensitive issues by establishing a relationship with representatives of the media in an open and collaborative climate during and especially between media crises.
Now an international network of such centres has taken impulse from the successful British experience and has started operating to build trust and dialogue between the scientific community and the media, knowing that each country will pose specific challenges but a coordinated network can be useful on several accounts, as it was the case with the emergency following the nuclear accident at the Fukushima plant, in Japan. The panel will discuss the Science Media Centres model, its strenghts and its weaknesses from the point of view of the proponents and of the professionals working in science communication and in the media.

The Foundation Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze provided a grant to make the panel possible.
Several other panels have been produced by members of Swim.

The new issue of EUSJA News is online

Click on the image – and use the menus – to read it online (or else you can download it in pdf)

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Women at the top of EUSJA. Turone named associate member of the board

Barbie Drillsma, a UK freelance journalist, writer and editor and Viola Egikova, science desk chief on a daily Moscow newspaper have been elected President and Vice-President of EUSJA, the European Union of Science Journalists’ Associations at EUSJA’s general assembly in the Netherlands.

Wolfgang Goede, a senior editor at German’s popular science magazine, PM takes on the role of Hon Secretary whilst Dutch broadcaster and science editor, Elmar Veerman is treasurer.

Menelaos Sotiriou, writer, broadcaster and editor of Greece’s Science View and Fabio Turone, freelance science journalist and director of the Agency Zoe based in Milan have been co-opted to the board with special responsibilities for fund-raising and strengthening social media networks.

Follows at: http://www.eusja.org/?p=555

Anche a Firenze per PCST 2012 una ricca presenza di Swimmers

Sarà il decano del giornalismo scientifico italiano Piero Angela a tenere il discorso inaugurale della 12^ conferenza international del Public Communication of Science and Technology network (PCST), che si terrà a Firenze dal 18 al 20 aprile prossimi.

Nel corso delle due intense giornate un gran numero di accademici e comunicatori della scienza discuteranno di qualità, onestà e bellezza dai più disparati punti di vista, confrontandosi con un gran numero di giornalisti scientifici tra cui parecchi membri di Swim.

Nel programma definitivo appena pubblicato figurano infatti Jacopo Pasotti, che coordinerà una sessione in cui si discuterà su ciò che gli scienziati devono imparare per comunicare efficacemente con i media ed Elisabetta Tola che gestirà la sessione pratica “Show, tell and talk” sui media audiovisivi. Gianna Milano modererà poi una sessione dedicata alla vaccinazione contro il Papillomavirus sui giornali italiani, in cui Chiara Palmerini e Daniela Ovadia discuteranno con Carla Cogo, dell’Istituto Oncologico Veneto, e con Michele Grandolfo dell’Istituto Superiore di Sanità.

Infine Fabio Turone coordinerà una sessione sul nascente network europeo di Science Media Centre – che vedrà tra gli speaker la direttrice del Science Media Centre britannico Fiona Fox, il direttore del progetto danese Morten Busch e forse la nuova Chief Scientific Adviser della Commissione Europea Anne Glover (che ha dato la sua disponibilità di massima ma non ha ancora confermato) – e in un’altra sessione discuterà con Ruth Francis di Nature, Eric Merkel-Sobotta di Springer e Tom Reller di Elsevier sul tema dell’embargo e dell’accesso open alla letteratura scientifica.

Qui è possibile scaricare il programma definitivo.

Risk and bioethics at WCSJ2011 in Doha (from a European perspective)

The following article, by Swim board member Daniela Ovadia, has just come out in the newsletter of EUSJA.

European science journalism was represented at WCSJ 2011 in Doha also by two panelists from Italy: Fabio Turone, who produced a panel on the communication of risk, and myself, in charge of a session on bioethics.

Moderated by Wilson Da Silva, editor in chief of Cosmos, the most widely read science popularisation magazine in Australia, the panel on risk offered three very diverse points of view on the issue.

source: http://www.davidajao.com/blog/2009/01/07/nigerians-and-crash-helmets

Nigeria’s Akin Jimoh, who is the anglophone coordinator for the SjCOOP mentoring program of the World Federation of Science Journalists, discussed about the many difficulties a reporter has to overcome when trying to involve the population of African countries in the debate on risk, difficulties summarised in the picture of two motorbike riders wearing ludicrous – but not uncommon – substitutes for the helmets mandated by the law.

The lively and entertaining contribution by former TV reporter David Ropeik, book author and instructor at Harvard, focused on the elements that contribute to make objective hazards more or less scary, which should be known and used with caution by media professionals: from trust to familiarity, from choice to uncertainty through the dualism between risk and benefit, natural and man-made and between catastrophic and chronic, and more. His extensive research on the perception of risk was recently summarised in the book “How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts”.

Finally Fabio Turone analysed the available medical litterature on the quality of health and specifically risk reporting, to stress the importance of providing lifelong training for science journalists by journalists, specifically to practice and reinforce a critical approach. He presented the existing attempts at establishing a stronger and more effective alliance among scientific institutions, health policy makers and the media professionals in which the latter are considered “professional equals”.

From left: David Ropeik, Fabio Turone, Akin Jimoh and the moderator Wilson Da Silva.

Bioethics is more and more important in health reporting. It’s harder and harder for a science journalist to separate opinion from scientific evidence in topics such as end of life decisions or the  assessment of consciousness and coma. The panel in Doha was composed by journalists from the US – Joe Palca, science correspondent from NPR, and Jon Cohen, correspondent with Science who acted as moderator – the Canadian bioethicist Eric Racine, from Mc Gill University in Montréal, and myself. Racine illustrated his research on media reporting in cases that have a strong bioethical angle, especially with regards with neurology and neuroscience. He discussed the media coverage of the Terry Schiavo case in American and British newspapers through the analysis of the language used to describe her medical history, the most common mistakes in reporting and the misunderstanding of the experts’ comments.

Joe Palca discussed the hypes and hopes of stem cell research in neurological diseases and raised the question of how to report such an important issue. Finally I summarized two important cases involving end-of-life decisions that were debated in Italy for many years: the case of Piergiorgio Welby (an ASL patient who asked to withdraw assisted ventilation) and the case of Eluana Englaro (a coma patient with many similarietis with the Schiavo’s story). The speech benefited from the work by Gianna Milano, an Italian colleague who followed both cases for many years but could not attend the Doha conference.

From left: Daniela Ovadia, Eric Racine, Jon Cohen and Joe Palca.

The final discussion on the role of science journalism in ethical and scientific controversies sparked a debate about the difference between informing and teaching. The majority declared that the role of journalists is to inform and not to teach nor to judge the experts’ or the families’ position. An interesting part of the discussion involved colleagues from Islamic countries, where the bioethics debate is still in its infancy but is an emerging issue.

Giornalisti scientifici non sudditi delle fonti

IL RESOCONTO DELLA NOSTRA INVIATA AL 7° CONGRESSO MONDIALE DI DOHA, IN QATAR

Nutrita la presenza di italiani, tra cui cinque colleghi lombardi che hanno vinto una borsa di studio del nostro Ordine. Il prossimo appuntamento sarà, nel 2013, a Helsinki
di Daniela Ovadia

(Da Tabloid, periodico dell’Ordine dei Giornalisti della Lombardia, n 4-2011)

Oltre 720 partecipanti di 91 diverse nazionalità, per la metà provenienti da Paesi in via di sviluppo: è questo il bilancio conclusivo del 7° congresso mondiale dei giornalisti scientifici, organizzato dalla World Federation of Science Journalists (Wfsj), svoltosi alla fine di giugno a Doha, capitale del Qatar. Un successo meritato, dovuto anche alla tenacia delle organizzazioni promotrici, la Nasw, che riunisce i colleghi statunitensi, e la Federazione dei giornalisti scientifici di lingua araba, che hanno voluto portare questo importante evento per la prima volta in un Paese islamico, dove ha sede, peraltro, la ben nota emittente televisiva Al Jazeera.

I membri vecchi e nuovi del direttivo della Federazione Mondiale Giornalisti Scientifici: il nuovo presidente Vesa Niinikangas, finlandese che organizzerà il congressso del 2013 a Helsinki (secondo da sinistra) e la presidente uscente, l’egiziana Nadia El-Awady (al centro con l’hijab).

Il congresso, che ha luogo ogni due anni, costituisce una preziosa opportunità di formazione e collaborazione per i giornalisti scientifici di tutto il mondo. I delegati, tra i quali si contava per la prima volta un folto gruppo di italiani, grazie anche al contributo che l’Ordine della Lombardia ha voluto dare attraverso l’istituzione di borse di studio (vedi box), sono stati ospitati nel nuovissimo campus universitario alle porte di Doha, dove hanno costruito le loro sedi distaccate le migliori università statunitensi, tra le quali Harvard, il Mit, la Georgetown University e la Carnegie Mellon. Gli impressionanti edifici, opera di famosi architetti, sorgono in mezzo al deserto e hanno visto susseguirsi, per cinque giorni, sessioni dedicate a tutti gli aspetti della professione. Nelle freddissime sale del centro congressi si è parlato anche di formazione, con un workshop internazionale dedicato alla didattica del giornalismo scientifico. A fianco di ricercatori di chiara fama, come il Nobel per la chimica egiziano Ahmed Zewail, c’erano anche giornalisti specializzati in grado di discutere di scienza dal punto di vista dei media.