Story by Kavin Senapathy
When science writers join forces with communities, their reporting can change an unjust status quo. At the virtual portion of the ScienceWriters2024 national conference, three panelists shared their firsthand experience at the NASW opening plenary session "Working Together to Make a Difference: Science Communication Collaboration to Drive Real-World Impact”, held on Oct. 17.
Organizer and moderator Erika Check Hayden, the director of the Science Communication Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, introduced panelists Yvette Cabrera, Rodrigo Pérez Ortega, and Elijah Yetter-Bowman, all recipients of the National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications, for the session.
To start, each panelist introduced their change-making work. For all three, community collaboration and the resulting impacts began unexpectedly. Yvette Cabrera, a senior reporter at The Center for Public Integrity, explained that her reporting that spurred a fight against toxic lead contamination started with her coverage of juvenile criminal justice in Southern California. She realized that she was only looking at “half of the story” about environmental exposures and their role in behavioral issues and ADHD.
While looking at factors like police presence, violence, and poverty, Cabrera had an epiphany when she “serendipitously” came across an article discussing the connection between lead exposure and ADHD. Cabrera began looking into whether lead exposure was affecting the youth that she was writing about. “As I started digging for data, I realized that there wasn't publicly available data for the city that I was focusing on, Santa Ana,” she told attendees. “So I decided to test the soil.”
Next, Rodrigo Pérez Ortega, a staff writer at Science, introduced what he says is one of the “most personal” stories he has ever written about — the fossil of Ubirajara, a tiny “chicken-sized” dinosaur that lived over ten million years ago in Brazil but kept in a museum in Germany. His reporting caused a “hurricane” in the paleontological community involving the egos of those concerned, social media campaigns to repatriate the dino, and even death threats to the German museum. But it had “a good turnout,” Ortega explained, with the eventual return of the fossil to its homeland of Brazil.
Elijah Yetter-Bowman, an independent filmmaker and founder of Ethereal Films, shared that their entry into community collaboration came “in the middle of a pretty long project.” Early in their career, Yetter-Bowman was interested in “how bodies work,” initially studying science and chemistry with plans to “become a physician.” Fortunately, their academic background would later become invaluable in their roles as a documentary filmmaker and storyteller, and in creating social impact.
Growing up in a heavily polluted town, Yetter-Bowman took on a documentary project called GenX: The Saga of Forever Chemicals. A few years in, Yetter-Bowman and their team met Diane, a community scientist who had fought for years to raise awareness that firefighters were being exposed to high levels of toxic forever chemicals PFAS in their iconic protective gear, and that this information had gone intentionally undisclosed for decades. The team got the attention of the president of the International Association of Firefighters. This partnership happened by “accident” and they decided to seize the opportunity when it struck. They paused work on GenX and began work on the documentary, Burned: Protecting the Protectors. With the awareness the film raised, the state of Massachusetts banned the use of PFAS in firefighters’ gear.
All three panelists talked about what real-world impact looks like.
Yetter-Bowman knew that change would happen when their film received the endorsement of the International Association of Firefighters. One of the biggest impacts came when they premiered the film in Las Vegas in front of two thousand firefighters from around the United States and Canada. That was their first big opportunity to be “in the room with the audience that needed to hear this message.” They distributed Burned directly to fire departments and medical and academic institutions, and the momentum has picked up from there.
Pérez Ortega said that community collaboration sometimes begins with “being in the middle” and asking questions while trying to encourage people to communicate. The Germans in possession of the fossil claimed they had acquired it legally in 2006, but Ortega pointed to a paper in which a researcher documents acquiring it in the 1990s. He basically asked, “what’s happening here?” That question triggered an investigation in which museum officials found that they could not produce provenance documentation for the fossil. Upon repatriation of Ubirajara, a Brazilian researcher shared with Pérez Ortega that, when he was doing his PhD thesis, he was forced to travel outside of his country to study a specimen that was taken from his backyard.
Ultimately, the story has helped catalyze a bigger conversation about ethics and decolonizing science and stirred up activism around returning other rare fossils to their homelands. For Pérez Ortega, the lessons from this story aren’t just about avoiding parachute science, but also about avoiding “parachute journalism.”
For Cabrera, community collaboration and resulting impact came in increments. Her advocacy started in 2017 by establishing trust with community members and walking the neighborhoods to test lead levels, which led to further investigations. One “big win” for the community came as recently as 2024 when the city of Santa Ana, Calif., issued a moratorium on industrial permits in the two neighborhoods where Cabrera focused her investigation.
A key takeaway from the plenary session is that, in reporting on real-world problems, a science journalist’s identity and role is part of their reporting perspective. When journalists investigate an unjust status quo, they may necessarily increasingly side with the community harmed, as more and more evidence comes to light. Traditional sensibilities regarding “journalistic objectivity” are no longer practical — especially if the community harmed is the reporter’s own.
As Pérez Ortega put it, in this day and age of journalism and its growing impacts, reporters cannot necessarily guarantee that they will be impartial. As a Latino journalist reporting on issues related to the Latino community, he naturally wants more parity. “My guiding principle is I won't always be objective, but I will always be fair.”
Erika Check Hayden, Yvette Cabrera, Rodrigo Pérez Ortega, and Elijah Yetter-Bowman speak during ScienceWriters2024 Early Access. (Ben Young Landis/NASW)
Kavin Senapathy (www.kavinsenapathy.com) is a freelance journalist and author of The Progressive Parent: Harnessing the Power of Science and Social Justice to Raise Awesome Kids (Hanover Square, 2024).
This ScienceWriters2024 conference coverage article was produced as part of the NASW Conference Support Grant awarded to Senapathy to attend the ScienceWriters2024 national conference. Find more 2024 conference coverage at www.nasw.org
A co-production of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing (CASW), and the Science Communicators of North Carolina (SCONC), the ScienceWriters2024 national conference featured an online portion Oct. 16-18, followed by an in-person portion held in Raleigh, N.C., Nov. 8-11. Follow the conversation via #SciWri24 on Bluesky and on LinkedIn.
Founded in 1934 with a mission to fight for the free flow of science news, NASW is an organization of ~2,400 professional journalists, authors, editors, producers, public information officers, students and people who write and produce material intended to inform the public about science, health, engineering, and technology. To learn more, visit www.nasw.org and follow NASW on LinkedIn and Bluesky. And join us in celebrating #NASW90th.
Credits: Reporting by Kavin Senapathy; edited by Ben Young Landis.
