ABSTRACT
We started this project some years ago when the British Council and the CRUI-Conference of Italian University Chancellors-offered an opportunity for joint activities on science communication. We called a meeting in May 2003, on some beautiful spring days in the northern Italian Trentino, and invited a group of Italian and British science journalists to discuss issues and trends in their daily practice, asking them to refl ect, in particular through case studies, on their own criteria for ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in science writing. The positive experience encouraged us to call a second meeting, with the support of the same sponsors. This time we invited voices from the public relations departments of scientifi c institutions. A handful of Italian and British professionals arrived for the weekend in Trento in May 2005, and some academic colleagues joined for the discussions. Again the proceedings were rich in detail and more questions were raised, so we decided to expand the discussions for the purpose of this book beyond daily newspapers and the geographical scope of Italy and the UK. The basic idea was to juxtapose, in the fi eld of science communication, the worlds of science journalism and public relations, each with its own modus operandi, rules of engagement, and quality criteria, established but changing for science journalism, newly emerging for science PR. How are these two practices interacting? How is this interaction changing the overall framework of science communication? Are there signifi cant discontinuities with regard to the past? The resulting book investigates two main scenarios:
S1: The increasing private patronage of scientifi c research changes the nature of science communication by displacing the logic of journalistic reportage with the logic of corporate promotion.
