Media don't cover innovation well

Journalism needs to do a better job of covering innovation, argues David Nordfors, director of the VINNOVA Research Center of Innovation Journalism at Stanford University, in an interview on EurActiv.

Here is an excerpt:

Are traditional newsrooms equipped to cover innovation?Â

Journalism is no different to other professions and organisations in society. Large organisations tend to separate reality into different sections. So in media, there is usually somebody who takes care of science reporting and another guy who looks after business reporting. If we have that kind of partitioning, then the science journalist tries to avoid business, because it’s not his beat, and the business journalist ignores science.Â

That works well in a world where science and business are separated, but today, where innovation is becoming a driving force in the economy, these things are closely linked. We have to either partition things differently or find ways of working together to write innovation stories.Â

One example would be medical research. Those stories used to be about ground-breaking research on new medicines. Nowadays, so much of the money is in the pharma industry that they are affecting the direction of basic research, making it very difficult to separate those issues. If you want to understand what is happening in basic research, you have to know what the pharma companies are doing. And if you want to know about the pharmaceutical industry, you actually have to understand a little about the rules governing how they have new medicines accepted. That brings you into politics, and leads you into issues like intellectual property management. So you try to decide which elements are most important for the story you want to tell.Â

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