New Model For Concurrent Scientific, Journalistic Investigation Being Pioneered at USU

LOGAN — Science and journalism might be considered sibling fields — each is the pursuit of knowledge through discovery with an emphasis on objectivity, the collection of evidence, and the reporting of verifiable conclusions.

Yet scientists do not often engage in journalistic storytelling, and it is almost unheard of for journalists to explicitly engage the scientific method in their explorations of the world.

Utah State University Professor Matthew LaPlante thinks that should change.

In a manuscript published in the journal Science Communication this month, he called for practitioners of both professions to become “boffinhacks,” engaging in concurrent scientific and journalistic explorations of the world.

“It’s not used much these days in the United States, but ‘boffin’ is an old slang term for a scientist, and ‘hack’ is a sometimes derisive way of describing a journalist,” said LaPlante, who teaches in the Department of Journalism and Communication and also has a Ph.D. in climate science from the Department of Plants, Soils and Climate at Utah State. “I’ve started introducing myself using those terms together, which is a pretty fun way to start a conversation.”

It’s also an eye-opening way to engage the world, LaPlante said.

“It gives you two views of the same thing, which of course is how we are able to see in more dimensions,” he said.

The process LaPlante uses to meld these two forms of exploration is formally called research-based reporting, or ReBaR.

“That’s more than a convenient acronym,” LaPlante said. “In masonry, rebar is used to strengthen construction but is generally hidden within the construction of buildings, bridges and other structures. In the same way, in a ReBaR project, the journalism fortifies the science, and the science strengthens the journalism, but in neither case do you really notice that reenforcing element.”

An example of a ReBaR approach was published in the journal Water earlier this year and in a series in The Salt Lake Tribune this month. Both the scientific and journalistic articles were focused on a new way of predicting the possible future trajectories of the Great Salt Lake — and how the use of such a model might have provided greater nuance to a much-publicized warning in early 2023 that the lake was at risk of drying up in five years.

Within a few months of the dire report, record-setting snowfall in the lake’s watershed made it nearly impossible that the lake would disappear in the next few years. That led some people to mock the warning and wonder how the team of researchers and activists who issued it got things so wrong.

“But our research shows that the risk was real, albeit low,” said Shih-yu Simon Wang, a co-author of the scientific paper. “And that brings up interesting questions, such as ‘at what point of confidence that something bad is going to happen should scientists sound the alarm?’ It’s hard to answer questions like that in a scientific study, so attacking it journalistically at the same time is an exciting approach.”

LaPlante credits Wang for inspiring the ReBaR framework.

“I was a journalist whose understanding of global warming was pretty much limited to ‘the globe is warming,’” LaPlante said. “Simon suggested that I become a scientist so that I could write about this crisis with a substantially more expansive perspective.”

That’s what LaPlante is now doing with climate issues, but he also thinks there are potential boffinhacks in every field of science.

“The article in Science Communication is a step toward trying to find other journalists and scientists who might want to approach their work in this way,” he said. “It’s thrilling to see that it’s working. Within a few days of the article being published, I was in conversations with people from several universities across the nation who are interested in this model for telling scientific stories.”

The recent series in the Tribune — which is being published alongside a companion series being broadcast on Utah Public Radio’s weekly science program, UnDisciplined — is the third ReBaR project LaPlante has undertaken with scientific and journalistic collaborators.

The scientific arm of the first project, which was focused on the surprising connection between a series of typhoons in Korea and wildfires in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, was led by Jacob Stuivenvolt-Allen, who was then a Ph.D. student at Utah State and is now a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. It was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Stuivenvolt-Allen and LaPlante worked together on the journalistic arm of that story, which was published in the newspaper Eugene Weekly.

LaPlante led the scientific half of the second project, on an ocean temperature pattern in the tropical Pacific that helps predict wheat harvest yields in the U.S. Midwest, which was published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. He worked with Utah State journalism graduate and former White House correspondent Corryn La Rue, who is now a broadcaster for the American Ag Network, on the journalistic part of that project, which was published in The Pitch, a newspaper in Kansas City.

LaPlante also led the scientific side of the recent project on the Great Salt Lake. The journalistic story was co-authored with Utah State journalism graduate Clarissa Casper, who is now a reporter for the Tribune.

LaPlante is currently working with USU doctoral student Alex Theophilus and sociologist Jessica Ulrich-Schad to understand how community cohesion is affected when people looking for a better quality of life move to areas of the United States as “amenity migrants.”

“I am excited to be on the cutting edge in this type of exploration,” said Theophilus, who will be doing sociological research and journalistic interviews in Grand Traverse and Leelanau counties in Michigan. “Making research interesting and accessible to broader audiences is important, and I’m pleased that this project will result in science and stories we can be proud of.”