Interviews
A scientist’s opinion: interview with Maria Elena Bottazzi on vaccines in low- and middle-income countries
Maria Elena Bottazzi, born in Italy, raised in Honduras, is a microbiologist and infectious disease expert at Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, United States). She and her colleague Peter Hotez led a team in India to develop the Covid-19 vaccine Corbevax, get it manufactured, and then give it away to low- and middle-income countries, patent-free. ...
A scientist’s opinion: interview with Petro Terblanche on the first African vaccine hub
Petro Terblanche is Health Science Professor at North-West University and is Managing Director at Afrigen Biologics in South Africa. Next to developing an open source vaccine, Afrigen hosts a global vaccine hub to build capacity and capabilities in low- and middle-income countries to design, develop and produce messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines. Professor Terblanche, as managing ...
A scientist’s opinion: interview with Ionica Smeets on hype in press releases
Interview with Ionica Smeets, professor of science communication at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Prof. Smeets, how do you feel when you encounter buzzwords such as 'groundbreaking', 'world first' and 'landmark study' in a press release? Ionica Smeets: One of the first things a journalist should realise is that press releases tend to overstate findings using ...
A scientist’s opinion: interview with Maike Winters on hype in press releases
Interview with Maike Winters from the Karolinska Institute. Press releases are clearly shorter than the studies they describe. What is wrong with leaving out some aspects of studies? Maike Winters: We saw that studies' limitations, funding sources and conflicts of interest are frequently omitted from press releases. But they are needed to convey a complete ...
A scientist’s opinion: interview with Petroc Sumner on hype in press releases
Interview with Petroc Sumner, psychologist and co-director of the InSciOut project on science in the media. What do we know about how the quality of press releases influences news stories? Petroc Sumner: There is a strong correlation between the quality of press releases and the quality of the news stories that are based on them. Whether ...
Katherine Dunn: ‘Climate change isn’t going away, both journalists and their audiences are in this for the long haul’
Katherine Dunn is the Content Editor of the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, a new initiative by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford that aims to improve climate coverage in newsrooms worldwide. She was previously an editor at Fortune magazine, where she covered climate change and the energy transition, including writing features on a ...
Kristoffer Frøkjær about constructive journalism: ‘We need to empower people to believe that they can actually do something about climate change’
Kristoffer Frøkjær has been editor and radio host for ten years at the Danish Broadcast Corporation. Furthermore, he has participated in creating the scientific website Videnskab.dk, lectured about science and media at the University of Copenhagen, and written several books in the field of popular science. Lately he has participated as editor and idea developer ...
Science Media Days in Madrid: Interview with Patricia Fernández de Lis
Interview with Patricia Fernández de Lis, multi award winning science and technology journalist and Chief-Editor of Materia, El País’ science section. Based on your long experience, what makes a good science journalist? Patricia Fernández de Lis: Although I cannot say that there is a fixed recipe, there are some general characteristics of good journalists. First, ...
