Journalists still not publishing African research

Andy Burness, Adjunct lecturer in public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and President of Global communications firm Burness.

Researchers globally are well known for being purely scientific and often spend large amounts of time deciphering material but little or none of the contents has attracted journalists to chase and cover stories for public consumption. It has instead made storytelling difficult for majority of journalists who don't comprehend scientific technical jargon.

The founder of Burness, a mission driven global communications firm, Andy Burness made a presentation at the Aga Khan Graduate school of Media and Communication on "Practical communications strategies for influencing a better world," says, "99 per cent of research is never published by journalists on media space."

It was noted that researchers should communicate in a simple but compelling way to reach multiple strings of audience types rather than permitting journalists to peruse through technical jargon that turns many news reporters off.

The implication is that if the article is never published then critical issues that inform the necessary policy change in areas of health, agriculture, tourism, population growth, education and much more will have suffered a major setback.

An example was cited of scientists who conducted Journal of Zoology research on the dynamics of Mara- Serengeti ungulates in relation to land use changes. When journalists broke down the technical jargon they published stories such as "Shocking game losses in Mara" and "Big fall in number of giraffes and other wildlife as humans encroach."

The stories created the desired impact and locals were relocated while the vacant land was set aside for wildlife.

However, the Senior Program Specialist, Agriculture and Environment, International Development research Centre, Dr. Jemimah Njukis expressed her dissatisfaction with journalists who misinform the public and still revealed how researchers fear to share their findings due to the problem of being misrepresented.

While this was an issue Mr Burness who has advocated for simple to understand story telling ideas to capture sophisticated research says, “Researchers must learn to convey their findings in a language that journalists understand but the journalists also have an obligation to be humble and ask questions rather than assuming."

While it's important for journalists to write and document stories, the media landscape appears to be going through drastic job cuts and layoffs. This disruption may now require journalists to rethink how they target their audience when constructing news content expected to draw attention and spark the change desired with weak policies.

As we usher a new decade journalists still have a task at hand to unravel hidden technical information in journals, as simple digestible news content through use of different and a variety of platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and much more to tell the story.

As Burness put it, "The message is important but also the messenger is important."

Andrew Arinaitwe @andrewarinaitw1