Learning to swim with salmon: pilot evaluation of journalism as a method to create information for public engagement.

• Author: Secko, David M.
• Position: Canada

Democratic public engagement is an endeavor that must cope with information. In their recent typology of 102 engagement mechanisms, Rowe and Frewer highlight this importance and state:

According to such an information flow perspective, an exercise's effectiveness may be ascertained by the efficiency with which full, relevant information is elicited from all appropriate sources, transferred to (and processed by) all appropriate recipients, and combined (when required) to give an aggregate/consensual response. (1) Hence, in part, it is information that must flow and be taken up for democratic public engagement to achieve its goals. (2)

However, how best to create this 'engaging information' is a challenging problem. For instance, in the case of democratic engagement over the governance of genomics--the study of 'genes and their functions'--much of the information required for democratic public engagement is scientific and hence conceptually complex, as well as riddled with technical jargon and the vested interests of experts in developing their own field. This information is therefore not easily presented to citizens with often limited technical expertise.

Consequently, efforts to engage citizens about genomics need to answer i) what information someone would need to effectively participate in democratic deliberation on a given topic, and ii) how to obtain, assess, and present this information in a manner that encourages public engagement with the information and each other?

This paper presents a brief summary of early experimentation with the use of journalism as a technique to cope with the above difficulties and produce information useful for democratic engagement on the topic of salmon genomics. Journalism is a widely variant profession, but for the purposes of this paper is defined as storytelling, in a truth-seeking tradition, that aims to serve citizens without a legal foundation. (3) As a research technique, journalism has similarities to qualitative methods (4) in requiring (i) restraint, (ii) direct observation, and (iii) continual examination of a topic in light of new observations to a previously established news standard. (5)

With this in mind, journalism was used as a research method in an initial pilot study that aimed to create print media stories with an increased potential to engage citizens over salmon genomics. Two test stories were developed within a hypothetical situation where a local news media outlet decides to write a 650 word story on a science project involving salmon genomics that may help in developing disease...