Designing Digital Content to Support Science Journalism

Journalists need to become more effective at communicating science and countering post-truth activities that seek to undermine scientific processes and evidence. Digital support for journalists when investigating and writing about science-related topics is one means of improving this science communication. However, little bespoke digital support is available. This paper reports the research and development of one new form of such digital support. During a participatory design process, experienced science journalists and other professionals were interviewed about their challenges experienced and understanding of good practices in science journalism. These challenges and good practices informed the development of a prototype of a new form of digital tool that was evaluated by journalists without specialist science training. A new version of the prototype, called INQUEST, was implemented to automate some parts of good practices in order to augment journalists’ capabilities. These practices included the retrieval of science information from diverse sources, targeting different science audiences, and providing different forms of guidance for explaining science to the target audience. This prototype is presented, and an early evaluation of it is reported.