Niche journals spark unusual stories – and dinner conversation

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Eric Freedman

By Eric Freedman

Many scientists look at the “big picture” – curing cancer, reversing climate change, saving the rainforest, engineering pothole-proof roadways, developing new alternative energy sources – but sometimes small results are more fascinating and intriguing because they pique our interest as human beings.

Most such aha-moment or quirky-sounding studies don’t appear in the marquis prestige journals that mainstream journalists follow –Nature say, or Science, PNSA or the Journal of the American Medical Association – but in niche journals read by virtually no one outside the discipline or specialty. That means general audiences – often the taxpayers who directly and indirectly fund much scientific research – never hear the results.

It’s the enterprising journalist who finds such findings and shares them with his or her audience. Continue reading →

How we got the story dead-on

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By Eric Freedman

Is it true that nobody likes roadkill except scavengers – mostly animals but occasionally human. (More on human scavengers later.)

Nope.

“Learning from Death, my new article in Earth Island Journal, began, as do all stories, with an idea. This one had been germinating for a couple of years after I wrote an article for Great Lakes Echo about a roadkill study in Ontario.

I wondered: What if somebody human other than scavengers likes roadkill? What if the splatter, the gore and the stench don’t matter? What if there are scientists out there who find something valuable in things that the rest of us swerve to avoid?

Lab assistant with roadkill

Lab assistant Ricki Oldenkamp prepares the lymph nodes of a white-tailed deer for analysis in the Michigan Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Disease Lab at MSU. Image: Tony Cepak.

I headed to the database Web of Science, typed in “roadkill” as my search term and, voila, there were studies from Canada and the U.S., Uganda and Portugal, Norway and Brazil, Argentina and Brazil and elsewhere written by researchers who’d found scientific gold in blood, guts and DNA. I read a dozen or so of them and crafted a pitch to the environmental magazine Earth Island Journal. Here’s how I began my inquiry to editor-in-chief Maureen Nandini Mitra, with a working title of “Splush! Thwap! Blam! Ugh!” and a working lead of:

Squished squirrels. Pulverized pigeons. Skewered skunks. Dismembered deer. Chopped-up chipmunks. Flattened frogs. Eviscerated elk. Violated voles. Blasted bunnies. Crushed cats. Mangled moose. Blistered butterflies. Ravaged ravens. Smushed snakes. Motorists swerve to avoid them. Bicyclists wrinkle their noses and hold their breath when pedaling past them. Rats and raptors feed on them. And scientists study them.

She said yes. Continue reading →

Seeing the real America through national parks

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Eric Freedman

Eric Freedman

By Eric Freedman

If we want international visitors to understand what makes America so special a country, we need to do more than talk in lofty terms about constitutional rights and economic opportunities. We need to show them more than Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Washington or New York City.

They need to see our national parks – the oldest and most extensive such system in the world. After all, cities are cities. The skyscrapers of Chicago, Shanghai, Tokyo and Dubai are much of the same, but no place else has the geysers of Yellowstone, the grandeur of the Grand Canyon and the towering giants of Sequoia. Continue reading →

Knight Center director publishes new book on international journalism

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Global JRN coversmallerEric Freedman is a co-editor of a new book on challenges facing international journalism. Critical Perspectives on Journalistic Beliefs: Global Perspectives was just published by Routledge.

It provides case studies, many incorporating in-depth interviews and surveys, that examine such issues as journalists’ attitudes toward their contributions to society; the impact of industry and technological changes; culture and minority issues in the newsroom and profession; the impact of censorship and self-censorship; and coping with psychological pressures and physical safety dilemmas.

The book also highlights journalists’ challenges in national and multinational contexts. International scholars, conducting research within a wide range of authoritarian, semi-democratic and democratic systems, examined journalistic practices in the Arab World, Australia, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, China, Denmark, India, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, Samoa, South Africa, Taiwan, Turkey and the United States.

Freedman’s co-editors are Robyn S. Goodman, a professor of Communication Studies at Alfred University, and Elanie Steyn, an associate professor and head of Journalism in the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma. Goodman earned her Ph.D. at MSU’s College of Communication Arts & Sciences.