Science media: Centre of attention

Science media: Centre of attention
Fiona Fox and her Science Media Centre are determined to improve Britain's press. Now the model is spreading around the world.
http://www.nature.com/news/science-media-centre-of-attention-1.13362

Depending on whom you ask, Fiona Fox is either saving science journalism or destroying it. But today, she is touting its benefits to a roomful of reluctant scientists. “Your voice has to be heard,” the charismatic and sometimes combative head of Britain's Science Media Centre (SMC) tells the audience of more than 70.
That is a message that Fox has honed well since establishing the SMC in London in 2002. The centre's aim is to get scientific voices into media coverage and policy debates — and by doing so, to improve the accuracy with which science is presented to the public. It tries to do this by providing select journalists with a steady flow of quotes and information from its database of about 3,000 scientists, and by organizing around 100 press briefings a year. “Our philosophy is we'll get the media to do science better when scientists do the media better,” says Fox.
<...>
In March 2002, as the centre got under way, Fox and her team released something of a manifesto, stating that the SMC would be “unashamedly pro-science”, would “operate like a newsroom” and would be “free of any particular agenda within science”. It also stipulated that a single donor could provide no more than 5% of the SMC operating budget, to ensure the centre's independence. That rule that still stands today, with a few exceptions, including London-based biomedical charity the Wellcome Trust and the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which last year provided 6.3% and 6.6%, respectively. Industry funding — from donors including Proctor & Gamble, agribusiness firm Syngenta and GlaxoSmithKline — makes up about one-third of the SMC's budget. In the past two years, Nature Publishing Group has given the SMC a total of £10,000.
<...>
That over-reliance has been highlighted by St Louis. In the latest spat, a forum article last month on the website of the Columbia Journalism Review, St Louis accused the SMC of “fuelling a culture of churnalism”. Because journalists have started attending SMC briefings rather than digging for stories, she wrote, “the quality of science reporting and the integrity of information available to the public have both suffered”.
<...>
Science media centres inspired by the British one have already opened in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan, and more are planned in Germany, Denmark and France. But an SMC in the United States — with its vast, fragmented media and bitter controversies over certain scientific issues — may provide the fiercest test of Fox's model.