Health and science news
As with other kinds of news, newsworthiness is the essential element of health and science coverage. Along with the factors that generally influence newsworthiness, Boyce Rensberger, in A Field Guide for Science Writers, identifies four factors specific to science stories:
Close Reading Genre
The Close Reading Genre workshop trains teachers to use genre as a tool to help students engage with media. It explores how genres can be identified and analyzed through their characteristics, tropes and industry practices and demonstrates how this can be done with key genres such as advertising and news.
The Environment Canada hoax: a news story that's full of hot air
If anyone still doubts that youth need to learn how to evaluate online information, those doubts should have been dispelled by a recent hoax perpetrated by the group called the Yes Men. This group, which has a history of staging fake press conferences, decided to draw attention to Canada's position at the Copenhagen conference on climate change by creating a number of fake Web sites purporting to be, among others, the Copenhagen summit site, the Wall Street Journal, and Environment Canada's site. While it didn't take long for Environment Canada to make a statement exposing the hoax, by that time many journalists had reported the story as fact and the story had been widely distributed by wire services.
Reality Check: News You Can Use
In this lesson, students consider the meanings of the term “fake news” and learn facts about the news industry that will help them recognize legitimate sources of news. They use an educational computer game to learn how to track a news story to its original source before evaluating its reliability, then practice the same skills “in the wild” with actual news stories.
Health and science journalism norms and practices
Health and science reporting is influenced both by economic norms (the conditions and constraints in which journalists do their jobs) and journalistic norms, such as objectivity and balance.[1] Both of these have an impact on how reporting on these topics is done.