Friendship or Friction? Bringing journalists and researchers together

TARGETS RPC and Panos London’s Relay Programme recently formed a four-way collaboration that linked their respective partners ZAMBART (Zambia AIDS-Related TB Project) and Panos Relay Southern Africa, both based in Lusaka, Zambia. Having worked together on a media toolkit on reporting TB last year, both partners saw an ideal opportunity to  engage further and bring researchers and journalists face to face to discuss their shared ground.

The idea behind the partnership was to link our experiences in health research and media capacity-building to raise debate about TB in the Zambian media. In the process, we wanted to highlight research as a valuable source for journalists, and make that research more accessible through building trust and practical skills for journalists and researchers to work together.

The Reporting Research Workshop: Raising Media Debate Around TB was co-facilitated by TARGETS, Panos Relay, and ZAMBART, with lead researchers and media experts designing and delivering joint sessions to bridge the gap and facilitate exchange between the 20 journalists and 8 researchers who participated.

Here’s a film that shows some of the issues we tackled over the two days:

Click To Play

What follows is not exactly ‘lessons learned’, but a list of (by no means easy) questions that came up as we progressed with this incredibly fruitful collaboration between four organisations working in different fields and contexts.

1. How can the mutual value of working together be converted into practical skills and working relationships?

Often one critical and very practical barrier to communication is specialist language, and what is perceived by journalists to be scientific jargon. We put everyone on the spot to address this issue, asking journalists to define a list of TB-related words and researchers to refine these definitions in ‘lay’ terms. It wasn’t as easy as either group expected.  Where a journalist wants to know the ‘straightforward’ meaning of an acronym for a TB treatment such as DOTS (Directly Observed Treatment, Shortcourse), for example, researchers want to ensure that the nuances of what the acronym really means are included: DOTS represents an entire five-point strategy for TB treatment in Zambia, not just the medication. The session provided an opportunity for challenging definitions and clarifying information, forcing both journalists and researchers to think again, and then again.

2. Where does the responsibility of researchers end and that of journalists begin?

How far should researchers have to take their research to make it accessible to other audiences? How deeply should the journalists be engaging with the research in order to take it to broader audiences? During the workshop, ZAMBART researchers presented their methods and findings to the journalists in PowerPoint presentations. The journalists were keen to get the facts straight and ask questions afterwards. There was a lot of ground to cover so many of the researchers’ presentations overran. It was remarked that in fact, what the journalists needed to see first and foremost were the researchers’ ‘Conclusion’ slides, where they can get an immediate idea of the ‘so what?’ factor and follow up with their own questions and research. Modifying the usual way of both communicating academic research and going about journalistic research would seem invaluable if both sides are to meet in the middle as partners, rather than expecting the other to come to them.

3. Don’t forget the media! How can we ensure the media is viewed as a stakeholder in research?

One very important outcome of the workshop was the recognition that journalists can help dispel myths and educate communities about TB transmission to combat the stigmatisation of people with TB and its link with HIV – but rarely are they included as a key partner. The workshop involved some reflexive exercises from a TB anti-stigma toolkit developed using ZAMBART research for use in communities. Its success in making the journalists think about stigma from their own experience, and highlighting the role of the media in perpetuating or helping to reduce stigma, showed that journalists as a potentially influential ‘community’ of key information users had thus far been neglected.

4.  The Long View: Institutionalising research communication

As always, there was so much to cover in our workshop but so little time… As part of the collaboration, TARGETS and ZAMBART have funded 10 Panos Media fellowships to enable a group of journalists to follow up some of the story ideas that they developed as part of the practical skills training in the workshop, led by an Editorial team from Panos Southern Africa. However, further questions about the sustainability of research and media capacity to engage with one another arose from some of the discussions about journalism as a professional career, specialising in health, and embedding communication into the research process. How might it be possible to introduce reporting research into existing journalism training? And how can we build institutional support for researchers and journalists to work together more efficiently in developing countries?  Panos London’s Relay Programme and TARGETS RPC are both working to address these issues.

For further information about TARGETS RPC visit our website, or contact Alexandra.Hyde@lshtm.ac.uk.
For further information about the Panos Relay Programme go to the Panos London website, or contact Annie.Hoban@panos.org.uk.

Friendship or Friction? DFID Lunchtime Session at the World Conference of Science Journalists, June 2009