By Yvonne Blaschke
Water is essential for life, and the world’s oceans are currently facing various challenges. Nevertheless, in many European countries, whether or not newspapers regularly report on maritime issues depends on the personal interest of the journalists.
A mere pixel in size, glowing a faint blue: on 14 February 1990, a photograph of our Earth was taken that would go down in the history of space exploration and four years later be given the title ‘Pale Blue Dot’. It was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, about six billion kilometres from Earth. Blue – this colour alone shows how important the oceans are for our planet. They cover about 71% of its surface. But how important are seas for newspapers, how present are maritime topics? According to the theory of agenda setting, journalists influence public attention by bringing topics into focus. In 2022, Bruno Pinto and Ana Matias, two researchers from the Aquatic Research Network in Portugal, looked at how regularly they do this with the ‘blue’ of our planet. In the study, 26 science and environmental journalists from 13 European countries were interviewed. The selection criterion was that they had reported on the oceans between 2017 and 2022 and worked for a quality newspaper in their respective country that published print and online texts. They were asked to what extent they and their media outlets reported on maritime topics and what reasons there were for this.
As in many areas of science journalism, there has been little research on this specific journalistic topic area so far. The sea, on the other hand, has been and is still extensively researched, for example with regard to man-made effects such as overfishing. Here, journalism could play a key role between science and society – however, according to the study, it is still a long way from doing so. Almost all of the journalists interviewed felt that reporting does not focus enough on maritime topics.
Insufficient resources for maritime reporting
Whether such topics are reported on depends both on the personal interest of the journalists and on external factors. External factors can be the priority given to maritime issues by superiors or the size of the national interest in the sea. In addition, European journalism has to contend with problems such as little money and little time – this was noted by journalists regardless of country and can also lead to lower quality reporting.
The personal interest of individual journalists is particularly important in countries where external factors tend to militate against regular reporting on maritime topics. For example, national interest in the sea was less pronounced if the country did not have large coastal areas or islands. In Germany, for example, national interest in forests was considered greater than interest in the sea.
From the results of the interviews, the authors derived three levels summarising the resources for maritime environmental journalism in the respective country:
Level 1 countries have more than enough resources for maritime reporting, including England, France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. It was found that these countries’ newsrooms often have dedicated science and environment teams, and that maritime issues regularly appear in the news. The quality newspapers examined each employed between six and twelve science and environmental journalists.
Denmark, Italy, Norway, Portugal and Poland were listed as level-2 countries. The main difference to the level-1 countries is the smaller science teams, which consist of around three to five journalists, and maritime topics are reported on less regularly.
Bulgaria, Croatia and Greece were identified as level 3 countries, where there is a lack of sufficiently specialised employees (typically 1-2 journalists who also have to cover other topics). Furthermore, the quality of reporting on maritime topics is said to be lower.
Science communication via social media
In addition to media coverage, scientific institutions now also have the opportunity to disseminate information and resources directly themselves using social media. In an experimental study on the X-Account of their own research centre, Kathrin Kopke, Jeffrey Black and Amy Dozier from the Centre for Marine and Renewable Energy in Ireland found that this approach mostly reaches people who are already involved in marine science themselves or are otherwise very interested in the topic. Sixty-five per cent of the account’s retweets were from this group. This implies that quality media are still needed to reach a lay audience. However, it is interesting to note that laypeople found some tweets more interesting than others. If the tweet had a photo attached, there were 82 per cent more retweets from laypeople. If the tweet had a positive sentiment, there were 12 per cent more.
What remains of the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ photo: fascination. Journalism that provides scientific information about the oceans is still needed. So far, in Europe, how much is reported on maritime topics often depends on the personal interest of journalists. Perhaps fascination can help spark interest in these topics and increase demand. The photo certainly moved more than just the astronomer Carl Sagan, on whose decision it was made: ‘To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.’
This article, “Europe´s newspapers don´t report report enough about the oceans”, was originally published by the European Journalism Observatory on 29 August 2024.