| Abstract: | By developing model-based news articles and presenting them to audience focus groups, this research gauges reader response to “test stories” based on four models of science journalism: science literacy, contextual, lay-expertise, and public participation. This approach allows investigation of how to tie journalism theory to practice to audience reception, and back again. The results show how journalists and readers differently engage with various models of science journalism and used them to gain different knowledge and understanding. These differences show the need to articulate more clearly hybrid models of science journalism that make use of the overlapping positive features of the models investigated. Such hybrid science journalism models could provide new educational tools aimed at showing how to better understand who “the audience” is and exemplifying how to position audiences as active members in stories and as stakeholders in the scientific process. |
