7 takeaways from 2 weeks of science journalism conferences

Regular readers will have seen variations on the "hey, I'm traveling, sorry this post is short" banner quite a bit over the past month or so. That's because I've been on the road (well, on the train tracks and in the sky) for science journalism conferences: ScienceWriters in Corvallis, Oregon and now ECSJ/WISSENSWERTE in Hannover, Germany.

Those two conferences, especially ECSJ/WISSENSWERTE, gave me ideas for about 1,000 newsletters. But since I'm on a train trying to type this from the tiny sliver of space that my very considerate seat-neighbor has graciously decided not to spread himself into. So are a few quick takeaways from the two conferences:

Germany plans to gut its freedom of information act?!?!?!

In a political move worthy of a most-short-sighted-policy-proposal-ever award, Germany's center-right party, the CDU, and its governing partner the center-left SPD agreed on a plan to gut the law that allows journalists, NGOs, and ordinary citizens to request documents from German public institutions (something like FOIA in the US). A representative of FragDenStaat, a website that helps people make German freedom of information requests, told Deutschlandfunk that 99% of the existing requests would be denied under the new rule.

Journalists are broke everywhere

The specifics of why, exactly, journalists are going broke varies a little by country. But brokeness is universal. In Germany, where the media system is dominated by publicly-funded broadcasters, political pressure on broadcaster budgets are more salient than, say, in the US. Media everywhere feels the squeeze of the absolute implosion of newspaper ad revenue and the loss of young audiences to social platforms that are hard to monetize in ways newspapers are traditionally comfortable with. Freelance rates seem to be stuck in the 2000s basically everywhere.