When institutions navigate natural stories

Last week I watched science and journalism face converging crises with diverging paths

A mountain view from the conference’s home page (Jacob W. Frank for National Park Service)

Rather than endure another rubber-chicken lunch at the big impersonal conference hotel last week, I drove seven miles downvalley to meet a magazine editor at a locally owned hole-in-the-wall café. I expected contrast: in food, in vibe, and in topic. But it turns out that sneaking out of a science conference to talk journalism is like sneaking out of a poker tournament to play blackjack: it’s the same game, and your odds are even worse.

In other words, the worlds of science and journalism are facing similar crises of trust and relevance. But they’re not equally equipped to face the future.

The 16th Biennial Scientific Conference on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem was fascinating, and I hope that what I learned there will shape my writing for months to come. But first, I want to tell a natural story about the emotion of my experience.

It’s been a tough few years for science. Here’s how I would frame the narrative: a lot of people who chafed at pandemic-related restrictions focused at least some of their frustration at the very idea of science as unbiased truth. They felt that scientists too often put an ideological finger on the scales, not only in terms of public health measures but also in fields ranging from the environment to the economy to woke road design. To be clear: I strongly disagree with such opinions, but I do think they are legitimate. They come from a sincere place, which neuroscience could probably explain.

At the conference, I felt scientific leaders responding to these trends. Two of the conference’s leading themes were narratives and science communication. Scientists seem increasingly aware that their facts always end up being placed into narratives, which are often shaped by culture or politics. For example, narratives around bison are very different for Indigenous people, fans of the Lewis and Clark expedition, or cattle breeders. Better acknowledging these narratives should lead to more effective use of science.

Meanwhile, effective science also requires communicating results to popular audiences. The conference’s (well-deserved) poster child was the Wyoming Migration Initiative, which I have highlighted before. It uses compelling graphics and maps to build interest in the fate of migrating deer, elk, and antelope. Of course, good science communication is hardly a new topic; I’ve long been a fan of Edward R. Tufte’s 1983 book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. But it felt to me that scientists increasingly feel responsibility for that communication.

Why? Well, the answer became obvious during my journalists’ lunch: It’s been a tough few years for journalism. To me, the struggles appear to be fueled by the same types of resentments against gatekeepers, the same types of fears about practitioners putting ideological fingers on the scales. But journalism’s crisis has been worsened by a breakdown in the institution’s funding model.

There used to be lots of science journalists who had fulltime jobs applying Tufte’s (and others’) wisdom. These people worked for local and national newspapers, general-interest and specialty magazines, and television and other media. With the collapse of advertising revenues, many of those jobs are gone.

Worse, as the jobs dwindle, the functions get outsourced to freelancers. The trust relationships among reader, writer, and publication thus decline. Because a freelancer is more likely to put fingers on the scales—or at least be perceived as having reason to do so.

To be clear: I am one of these freelancers. Through my career, I have written for a variety of businesses, nonprofits, and publishers. I’d like to think that I’m just as objective as a fulltime magazine staff writer, but am I really? Consider a specific example: three years ago, I proposed a magazine article on how electric vehicles (EVs) would transform mountain life. I was able to write it only because I came into the situation with some knowledge. As I disclosed to my editor, I had previously ghostwritten an article for a business seeking to influence the government to subsidize EV charging networks.

The business had hired me on a contract to draft some sentences, not on retainer to continually promote its views. Now the magazine was hiring me on a contract with a different purpose. Personally, I think I did a good job. It felt to me like journalistic professionalism. I was selling my services as a writer, researcher, and/or objective thinker. I wasn’t selling my soul.

An old freelancers’ dictum: If you want to buy my soul, the minimum price is a fulltime salary with benefits. In other words: if you’re not paying my health insurance, you can’t have any say over what else I do with my time, what other clients I engage with to pay for what you refuse to.

But that does put me and my editors in difficult positions. If I had come into the EV story with a different type of experience—say, ghostwriting for an oil company—I would have acquired a different set of background facts. (Or, in the case of oil companies, “facts.”) Would that have changed me?

In 1928, famed ecologist Aldo Leopold left fulltime employment with the US Forest Service. In 1933, he gained a fulltime appointment with the University of Wisconsin. But for five years, he was a freelancer, conducting game surveys funded mostly by contracts with ammunition manufacturers. At lunch, my editor and I were talking about a story I’m writing, profiling a conservationist who criticized Leopold for bias. “In our opinion the failure of conservation is largely due to a want of courage in telling the truth,” she told him, implying that freelancing had diminished his truth-telling.

In journalism, objectivity becomes easier to manage if you just label every article “opinion.” And many readers seem to prefer opinion articles—especially ones they already agree with. So publications overflow with op-eds, sometimes “balanced” by opinions from “the other side.” It’s as if every scientific experiment had to be conducted twice: once by a scientist who comes into it with one hypothesis, and once by one from the other side.

In science, there’s an institution that shuns biased researchers unless and until objective data can prove them correct. Despite recent struggles, there’s still enough stability and funding for that institution to thrive.

In journalism, not so much. Maybe this fate is deserved; maybe journalistic objectivity has always been a myth; maybe Walter Cronkite constantly repeating “and that’s the way it is” was the problem rather than the Garden of Eden. Maybe journalistic institutions deserve to die.

But at the conference, I saw scientists contemplating the need to take a bigger role in communicating results and defining narratives. In other words, I saw them pursuing a similar set of values: the search for objective truth at the intersection of narratives and communication. When those truths offer a chance to enhance or transform our relations to the natural world—to me those are the natural stories.