Journalistic narrative practices used in the mediation of scientific and technological knowledge for newspaper audiences

Abstract

Use of narrative journalism techniques to communicate science and technology to non-expert audiences remains understudied in global context. In Kenya, science and technology as a beat together with non-expert audiences on matters science and technology communication, comparatively remain underexplored. The current study sought to address this gap. The aim of the study, therefore, was to examine the extent to which journalists utilize narrative techniques in newspaper news stories to communicate science and technology information to non-expert audiences. The study was anchored on the functionalism and structuralism approaches to the study of narratives. The study sought to test three hypotheses: There is no significant association between the journalists‘ use of scene construction techniques in news stories and the communication of scientific and technological information to non- expert audiences; there is no significant relationship between the journalists‘ use of viewpoint techniques in news stories and the communication of scientific and technological information to non-expert audiences; there are no significant differences between the journalists‘ events scheduling techniques and the communication of scientific and technological information to non-expert audiences. The study adopted a mixed method research and an exploratory sequential design. The study included all the 64 journalists, from the North Rift region drawn from four leading media houses namely: The Daily Nation, The Standard, The Star and The People Daily. Questionnaire with structured questions was used to collect quantitative data. Qualitative data comprised of copies of news stories on science and technology published by the four newspapers in 2019. Data was analyzed through inferential statistics, corroborated with direct content analysis of the published stories. Chi Square Test of independent samples and T-test for Independent Samples were used to analyze quantitative data. Direct content analysis of the stories based on the codes derived from the narrative theory revealed that journalists employed scene construction, viewpoint and event scheduling techniques to communicate scientific and technological information to non-expert audiences. Inferential statistical analysis of quantitative data established that there was a statistically significant relationship between the journalists‘ use of scene construction techniques and their communication of scientific and technological information (χ 2 (1) = 8.195, p=0.004). There was also statistically significant association between journalists‘ use of viewpoint techniques and communication of scientific and technological information (χ 2 (1) = 6.668, p=0.010). However, there were no significant differences between event scheduling techniques and communication of scientific and technological information to non-expert audiences (t (126) = 0.333, p=0.739). The study concludes that journalistic narrative techniques are utilized in newspaper news stories by journalists to communicate scientific and technological information to non-expert audiences. The study will be beneficial to the media houses whose journalists comprise the study sample; practicing journalists who specialize in science and technology, other researchers interested in science communication, and the entire Kenyan media industry. The study recommends the need for media houses to dedicate specific journalists to particular beats and train them on the use of literary journalistic techniques. The Media Council of Kenya needs to include literary journalism in its list of refresher courses for practicing journalists.