Journalism as a bridge - Connecting Research to Public Awareness

and pollution. I think when it comes to investigative reporting, we imagine someone in conversation with secret service agents or whistleblowers. However, a good chunk of journalism is spent reading the work of researchers in different fields and looking at how you can piece them together for a story. So, it seemed like fate when I came to the IAS, a place of unexpected collaborations, I walked in with greater admiration for interdisciplinary work than before. I think that’s what’s been truly enriching about this experience - the ability to see connections between different fields like climate science, atmospheric chemistry, medical research and trace lines connecting them to each other, to find stories within them. 

So, when I had a chance to present my work in front of all these academics, I chose to speak about that process of collaboration - how can an academic and a journalist work together? And what are the ways in which this could benefit the public? 

In my experience, academics are the fastest to reply to journalists - they want their work, that they’ve put their lives into, to reach the public. But it’s important to recognise why there’s a barrier to this relationship with the public. People don’t connect with information, they connect with stories. Knowing your town has become 10°C hotter in the last 40 years feels distant. Hearing that it’s causing unhoused folks to die in their sleep in the street outside your apartment feels real. 

Journalists can be the bridge between the information and stories.  Academic sources can be more than just an expert comment in a random story, or a paper that you can write about in a news article. Bridging these together can create entirely new ways of looking at the world. My esteemed colleagues in the Data and Computational Journalism team at Reuters worked for months, in consultation with two dozen academics, to create the Heat Storms Tracker and look at how supersized heatwaves are fundamentally changing people’s lives. It has been an honour and privilege to work with them to find new ways of telling these stories about heat, and how we feel their impact, even when we don’t recognise it.

Nandhini Srinivasan