GSO4SCHOOL Summer School 2020
A successful event was organised in Brussels to celebrate the RELATE Final Conference. It took place last 28th of January and met around 80 attendees, among journalists, science communicators, European media, researchers, journalists associations, students, EC representatives and policy makers.
RELATE – REsearch LAbs for TEaching Journalists – was a two years project, started in February 2009 and run until January 2011, funded by the European Commission, 7th Framework Programme (FP7), Capacities, Science in Society programme, under the action aiming at supporting training activities of journalists and authors in the EU
Member States and the associated countries in EC funded research laboratories.
The objective of RELATE is to strength the relation between scientists and journalists so as to improve the dissemination of scientific topics to the general audience. The project insisted around the idea of defining a possible way to reduce the gap between the two main responsible to release the scientific information, the scientist and the journalist, by creating a more effective communication exchange.
Run across three training sessions in November 2009, March 2010 and November 2010, this initiative gave the chance to journalism students and young journalists to enter in research laboratories and spend one week alongside scientists.
RELATE involved 78 young journalists from 23 countries, writing in 17 languages, who visited a total of 12 outstanding EU research centers, with more than 30 different labs in 7 European countries. Journalists discovered about biotechnology, chemistry, food, global health, microbiology and genetics, photovoltaics, nanotechnology, space and many other research topics.
The project offered journalists the chance not only to meet and learn from researchers but to collect a unique content from inside the labs and then to transform it into a written article or a video or radio production, and finally send it out for publication.
This experience gave journalists the opportunity to launch their career as a scientific journalist but also to researchers the occasion to practice a communication exercise, ending in a learning curve for everyone.
Finally a number of around 80 among articles, audio and video pieces were prepared.
Over 1/4 of participants published their work in specialist or mainstream media, like
The Economist, Cosmos magazine, Robotics magazine, Le scienze or major news websites in Eastern European Countries, like in Romania and Lithuania and websites of national associations of science writers, or other online platform like ‘New Science Journalism‘.
Among the research centers involved in RELATE there are EPFL – École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne – (Switzerland), ENEA – Italian National agency for new technologies, Energy and sustainable economic development – (Italy), TUBITAK – The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey – (Turkey) with Bilknet University in Ankara and Marmara Research Centre; Von Karman Institute (Belgium), INRA -Institute de la Recherche Agronomique – (France), ICFO -Institute of Photonic Sciences – and Estación Biológica de Doñana, both in Spain, Max Planck Institute and European Southern Observatory, both from Germany, Universitá di Bologna and Lens Institute, from Italy, and CEMAGREF – L’institut de recherche en sciences et technologies pour l’environnement – (France).
Contact reference:
MINERVA Consulting & Communication Sprl. – Hinano Spreafico –hinano@minervacommunication.eu
RELATE project website: http://relateproject.eu
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