Communication

Prof. Maarja Kruusmaa: Nowadays crises are complex, spread quickly and come in cascades
Interview with the European Commission’s Chief Scientific Advisor Prof. Maarja Kruusmaa of Tallinn University (Estonia), about lessons and challenges for future strategic crisis management. For years, the EU has been rushing from crisis to crisis. The European Commission has asked the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors to the European Commission (GCSA) to write a scientific ...

Talking sustainability on TikTok: how ‘eco-influencers’ communicate
Joachim Allgaier, Professor for Communication and Digital Society at Fulda University (Germany), co-authored an academic paper on environmental communication on TikTok. The study found that the rapidly growing social media platform could have the potential to deal with sustainability issues in short and punchy videos without neglecting the complexity of the topics. He spoke to ...

How much has digital news consumption affected the public perception of climate change?
Digital news consumption has been overtaking traditional news consumption in the past decade. Academics are researching the effect this has on the public perception of climate change.

Between truth and trust – young and established scientists discuss public trust in research
The pandemic has changed a lot in our society, including the perception of science by the general public, politicians and governments. The general media has increasingly covered science news during the rise of the health crisis. Shortly after the start of the coronavirus outbreak, public confidence in scientists increased according to a May 2020 survey. ...

Interview with Dr. Ed Pertwee: vaccine hesitancy and lessons learnt
Rumors, conspiracy theories and misinformation during a health crisis: "The problem seems to be informational reliance on social media, not social media usage per se," says expert Dr. Ed Pertwee. With possible new Covid-19 waves in the back of our mind and in order to save lives, understanding communication during a health emergency is critically ...

Why hype in press releases is ineffective – and how to fix it?
Press releases sometimes exaggerate scientific findings and omit study limitations. Scientists are investigating why, and testing ways to make them more accurate.

Reporting on climate change, a complex task: challenges and solutions
During the three days of the ESMH Summer School "Journalism and climate change: how to tell complex stories", journalists from different countries had a chance to learn about climate change reporting, its complexity and its main issues, but - above all - about possible solutions. It all started with ... a chameleon, as Tim ...

‘Predatory’ publications put pressure on the integrity of scientific literature
Over two million scientific papers are published every year worldwide. Faced with the pressure to 'publish or perish', researchers can be tempted by journals that charge low publication fees and publish articles of dubious quality. The scale of these 'predatory publication practices' and 'predatory publication journals' is global and can have far-reaching consequences, as such ...