20140403_CS

Source: City University London, YouTube

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB_j62ijuV4

Date: 03/04/2014

Event: Connie St. Louis: science "needs a profession like journalism to call it to account"

Credit: City University London

People:

• Connie St. Louis: Program Director, Science Journalism MA, City University London

Connie St. Louis: The MA in Science Journalism, here at City University London, is a really unique course, because it's the only course of its kind in the UK. There are very few science journalism courses in the world, which is really interesting, given the importance of science and health in our everyday lives. And the journalism is a particularly important thing here, because we're not doing communications, though some of the students do go on to be comunicators.

Most of them go into places like the BBC, ITV, newspapers, so that they can be critical consumers of scientific information. That's incredibly important - science needs to be challenged, like every other profession, um, it doesn't need too many cheerleaders, it needs a profession like journalism to call it to account, also to translate the information for the general public, so they can understand what's going on, more. At the University, we try to teach our science journalists to be good interrogators of data and information, so they can call science and medicine to account.

The other thing we try to do is to make sure they have all the very latest skills, so they are great data journalists, they know how to scrape the web, but they also need to know how to use all platforms. So students here at City, doing science journalism, learn how to use television, how to use radio, print and online, and they tend to do projects on every aspects of those platforms.