The unfinished science story: Journalist–audience interactions from the Globe and Mail ’s online health and science sections

Abstract

Science journalists are increasingly confronted with the ability of audiences to comment on science stories, create and share multimedia content, and blog about science. Yet, there is a surprising lack of literature exploring the narrative impacts of such changes on science journalism. To fill this gap, this article draws on the concept of the ‘unfinished’ science story to provide a narrative analysis of story-commentary sets from a Canadian newspaper (the Globe and Mail). It shows how the authority to ‘finish’ a scientific narrative now faces: (1) the opening up of science journalism narratives to raw experience; (2) the reframing of issues by audience comments; (3) the emergence of a journalists–audience ‘stress test’; and (4) the heavy existence of negative commentary.

Keywords

audience commentary journalism narrative analysis online qualitative interviews science

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