Transcribed Panel discussion from recorded panel discussion from Fulbright Arctic Symposium.

Transcription

1 Transcribed Panel discussion from recorded panel discussion from Fulbright Arctic Symposium. Date of recording: 11 February 2016 Location of recording: Oulu Titel: II Panel discussion Presenting the Arctic to the World: The Role of Scholars and the Media in Translating Science to the Public. Moderators Dr. Bruce Forbes, Research Professor, Arctic Centre, University of Lapland; Docent in Plant Ecology/Biogeography at the Faculty of Science, University of Oulu; Research Professor, Institute of Arctic Studies, Dartmouth College Markku Heikkilä, Head of Science Communications, Arctic Centre, University of Lapland Panellists Yrsa Grüne, Editorial Writer, Hufvudstadsbladet Dr. Mari Maasilta, University Lecturer of Media Education, University of Lapland Pirita Näkkäläjärvi, Director and Head of Yle Sápmi, the Sámi-speaking arm of the Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle Laura Tauriainen, Student, TIEMA, University of Oulu

2 Summary During this discussion, panelist answered two main questions as well as commenting on questions and comments from the audiences. The discussion focused around two main questions: 1) when you use the word media in the context of this panel, what media are you thinking of? Is there a different in regional media in Arctic Countries, national media and Arctic Countries and international media? 2) what kind of experiences do you have in translating science to the public? To the first question, panelist emphasized the challenge of getting media attention. The interest in the Arctic might sometime be skin deep and stories are focused on their exotic context to nonarctic (interested) audiences. Beside this, the current information overload on media channels like print media, social media, TV and radio might be the cause that messages from scientists are not heard. Good story telling can help to get attention in this ocean of information that people relieve every day. Good stories require creativity and a good understanding of the wishes of the audiences. Stories can bring topics closer to home by answering important questions like: why is this message relevant to me? Why does this affect my life? Depending on which channel you choose images can play an important role in simplifying complex content. As the saying goes: one image says more than a thousand words can. But simplification can be dangerous. Complex topics like climate change can lose their value and importance when it is explained too simplified. Repeated dialogue with a specific audience can help to build up the amount of information you give and also engage in a learning process with your audience. Communication experts can form a valuable addition to a research team. Nowadays, the media is very fast. Internet allows a local message to become global in a short time. Controlling your message once it is out there is virtually impossible. It should always be taken into consideration that the response to messages might not always be positive, depending on the political climate of a country or certain research topics. It is therefore important to realize that the media can be very powerful and that care and attention needs to be given to every message that goes into the world. However, universities should allow researchers and scholars to speak freely to journalists or manage their own blogs. An example was given by one of the panelists about formal press releases. Journalists have trouble engage with the message and create a story from its content. Impact of press releases might be minimal. Even though the news seems to be filled with negative stories a trend of constructive journalism is gaining popularity. People more and more want to read positive news. For scientist working on complex issues like climate change this new trend might be relevant for the way they want to communicate with the general public. Instead of focusing on nature of the problem, example of how problems are solved might have more news value and impact.

3 -*BEGIN*- Well, hello everyone. It is time to start our session discussing to the role of media and scholars in translating science and presenting the arctic to the world. And the headlines of the sessions is that the arctic is not part of the world is something that needs to be presented to the world, it is not part of the world itself but let us assume that it might be in that. So my name is Markku Heikkilä and I am one of your two moderators. I am working at the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland in Science Communications and I am working there since 2010 and before that I used to work for a long time as a journalist for the newspaper Kalava here in Oulu, taking part in many Arctic events, meetings, following the developments in the Arctic Council, Barents council, northern ( ) and all that stuff. And meeting scientists and scholars, quite often actually and trying to make news out of what they have to say. So today we try to do this discussion in quite an informal way, having some common rounds, individual questions and opening the floor to you. But I will first ask my colleague Bruce Forbes to introduce himself so Bruce is my colleague at the Arctic Centre. We have some experience in common since we are colleagues, we have been born on exactly the same day of the same year on different continents. But so Bruce ( ) I think. Thank you Markku and thank you to Fulbright for having me here this being a Fulbright Arctic Symposium I should actually mention that I came to Finland as an early first year scholar, as a postdoc in 1994 for one year 22 years ago. And this year I was actually in Dartmouth Collage Institute of Arctic studies, so I am visiting Finland from my home institute ( ) Virginia. ( ) of this initiative is my host and I am happy to be here and thinking about this question about this of media. I can say my background is in geography and I lead the global change group at Arctic Centre University of Lapland. When I came as an early career scholar I was already working in the Soviet Union in 1991 and then started a long career where I still work. It is your dream as an early career scholar to have a big interdisciplinary project particular as a geographer. So we have this framework program going on with the EU and in 1999 sat down with a group of indigenous reindeer herders, (Sami) and scholars and we wrote a proposal with natural and social scientists and ( ) this framework and I thought great. But what they don t tell you is that overnight you go from being a scientists from being a scientific administrator and the other thing they don t tell you is that a lot of your time is going to be spend on media and public outreach. And there is no handbook that comes along with it. It is kind of like being a father for the first time. What do you do when you have a child, so you have a very steep learning curve. But now when you apply at this EU and other programs, 30% of your ranking on that is your management plan including dissemination. How are you going to make science understandable to the public? We are in a different world now and the responsibilities that come with it are for all of us to think this through. Clearly at the time we had the research inception we had the idea so I am looking forward I am here to learn (laughs) actually from our experts and I am very happy to be here with this distinguished panel and Markku is going to introduce them. Thank you. (Applause) (04.44min) So, in our panel have very wide experience of different parts of the media world. We have media studies and I am now introducing who we have here at the panel. So we start with Laura Tauriainen who is a student studying science communications here at the University of Oulu. And she will be I this panel a specialist in social media ( ) a medium useful for communicating science aswell. Then we have Pirita Näkkäläjärvi who is the head and editor of Sami language activities of the Finnish broadcast cooperation. Pirita has a background as an economist. She has been working with development companies in both Finland and abroad and after returning to Inari has done a marvelous job in developing Sami language services of the Finnish broadcasting

4 cooperation into the level where they are now and I really admire the things (...) she has been working there. Mari Maasilta here, she is has a background in media and communication studies at Tampere University. We have studied together there some years ago. She has done an academic career. She is now a university lecturer in media education at the University of Lapland. She s got knowledge on the role of media in minority imprison issues, democracy, human rights. She s also got experience on living in the most northern parts of Finland and in Africa and combined many different things including the critical media education. And Yrsa Grüne, the editorial writing of Hufvudstadsbladet, the Swedish speaking daily office in Helsinki. She is one of the very few journalists in Finland who really follows what is going on in the Arctic and understand the big picture in that. The arctic may have been quite common in news items recently but really there are not so many journalists who are following it with any continuity and Yrsa is in the forefront of all that. So what we do now is that we have prepared one or two common questions for everybody and then we open the floor and we ( ) for what has been said. And Bruce takes the first round. (07.41min) ( ) we just studied these questions some weeks ago and hopefully our panel had some time to think about it and we ll probably give some 5 minutes each in the first round and then we have a second question. So we go the first one, which is *WHEN YOU USE THE WORD MEDIA IN THE CONTEXT OF THIS PANEL WHAT MEDIA ARE YOU THINKING OF. IS THERE A DIFFERENCE IN REGIONAL MEDIA IN ARCTIC COUNTRIES, NATIONAL MEDIA AND ARCTIC COUNTRIES AND INTERNATIONAL MEDIA?* (Question 1) (08.18min) Yrsa Grüne: Can you hear me? Great, great to be here. I have put down some notes because I already warned that I am a talker so you have to interrupt me when I get carried away which I usually do. I think that speaking about media, what you mean, I think social media the whole range of media; social media, print media, digital media. Whatever form it comes, that is all media. Then, talking about what is in the content of different media you get down to the source and the facts and those are not always as okay as one would wish. When it comes to I wouldn t like to make a different between regional and local and international and so one, I would like to divide it more like; according to topics. I think that the first my wake-up cal;, I started over in Latin America somewhere south and I promised I would never go north but so I did and I think my wakeup call came sometimes in the nineties. When they started talking about the new sea routes that opened the possibility to I like to turn the map a little bit upside down, sideways and so on. And if you turn it in a certain way you actually see what those sea routes mean one thing led to another and then I realized that if I would have compiled a PowerPoint it would have been about topics from different papers. If you look at the Financial Times, if you look at the New York Times or our Nordic papers what you see there is actually on the business page you see the oil and you see the gas and you see the sea routes. Then you look at the lifestyle page, you know those fancy trips to very exotic places in the world and you find the arctic there. You go the Svalbard. When you go the Svalbard I think that my show actually was that when you went into the university the first thing you saw where rifles. Because all the students would have learned how to shoot in case there would be an icebear coming on. So you get some cultural shocks as well. I think what is lacking very much is the humanitarian aspect I mean you have it in all the politicians speeches. Last time I heard it the foreign minister was talking about the indigenous people they have to be involved otherwise they don t have a sustainable development in the north that was in the Arctic frontiers which I had the possibility to participate in. And I think that the humanitarian aspect of the indigenous people what it really means it came up during the previous ( ) I think. Many of the aspects we never hear about or talk about, so what can we do about it? The only way I see actually is that is that trying to keep it somewhere high on the agenda, that it is not only a talk in the ivory tower or whatever it

5 was expressed as previously here, but try to talk it out but try not the make too many issues at the same time. Trying to make them public, but try to take one thing at the time because once you start to throw all the balls up in the air nobody catches any of them. (12.04min) Mari Maasilta: Thank you and thank you for inviting me here. They question was which media I would like to think of speak about and I have to say that as a former trainer of journalists I still think about quite a lot of national news media when I speak about media. As a researcher, because I have this double position, I have been practicing journalism and have been studying it. As a researcher I have to think more and more about social media and how to use it to promote my own work. So these two are my perspectives. But also my background as someone coming from the south, I mean south of Finland, but as someone who has been living at the very north of Lapland for some years ( ) and also for some years in Africa. What I have noticed is that there is very little interest in these kind of marginal areas in the national or global media and when there is there is always this question of exotics. When you happen to say that oh, I used to work in Inari and with the local reindeer herders there. I told it to my journalist students that is just exotic, but it is never just as a career. Same as you are working as a media researcher what on earth are you doing in the north of Finland, in the Arctic. Or why on earth are you going to you empirical work in the south of Africa. So this is something that I always meet in my work with journalists. You have to be in the mainstream you have to be interested in what is going on in the main cities and the central areas. (14.22min) Pirita Näkkäläjärvi: Thank you. I like to argue that everyone and anyone can be a media now a days in our digital world and I have to apologies today when presenting myself. I must have done this unconsciously. I have worn my silk scarf inside out. I am sorry, I was in such a rush in the morning. In our world, wearing our costumes inside out means a protest and I am not protesting. At least not consciously. So hopefully this representation of myself today is not taking as a statement of any kind. But it ties nicely into what I am saying in the digital world anyone with a good story can be media. And everyone with a good story can has the opportunity to spread it around the world without digital means. The background is that, I see this I run the Sami speaking newsgroup in this country. I see in our internet figures that they are starting to decline a bit. And I think the reason is that people live under such information overflow. There are notifications, news everywhere, on very website, you have subscribed to all sort of services, and we are bombarded with all sorts of messages all the time. With facts, with news, with terrible news. Sometimes you feel you want to shut down all radios and internet and everything. But have you noticed when you hear a good story, whether it is bad news or a piece of good news, you stop what you are doing and you start listening. And I experienced that many times today when I was listening to the Fulbright scholars here. So anyone with a good story and anyone who can tell this story in an interesting way can be a media nowadays, I think. And I like to take a practical approach today and come back to this. I am not sure what your second question is but I got the answer already. So I what thinking that I would talk from a very practical point of view and reflect on what you did here. I saw some really good examples that as a journalist I would have hooked on if I had been working. I would have been working but my battery died, so therefore unfortunately you are not on twitter. (17.11min) Laura Tauriainen: Hello. As the student representative in this panel I have already learned so much. First thing is I should have brought a pen and paper. All of your introductions I don t have anything to write them on but I will try to rely on my memory. This is cooperation in the Arctic areas, yes. For me media is the social media, I mean I live and breathe it and everything I do is digital. I mean I am just entering from this digital world to the more traditional media side and study now here in Oulu University the science communications program and I am now learning how to write newspaper news and I have

6 already been writing to social media for years and years and that is where I am coming from to this day. And I think that social media is a platform for very local and very regional things and it is also a platform for regional things to become global things so that is why I am so enthusiastic about it is a platform for almost anything, the sky is the limit. If you use it right and I am actually doing my master thesis on how sciences can use social media as a tool for their own benefit so in a few years I ll be the expert on that. I am actually, as one of my jobs a freelance journalist slash social media expert. Today, of course I am still studying, one of my jobs is to be digital producer on this online local media called ( ). I feel like that local medias don t necessarily have to be so like global news medias but they are very important to our own to who we are. I mean Arctic people embraces our feeling of who we are as Arctic people. I mean, I think that is very important that we have that. Of course it is very important that our words can be spread across the globe because of social media. (20.25min) Can you hear me? Yes. So we heard quite an evolution there from New York Times to well when I heard New York Times I was thinking print media. I grew up with the New York Times and when I actually moved here in 1994 ( ) the internet was still very young and then Laura and Pirita are citing digital media. Anybody can be a blogger and get a message out there. As an old dog this is still a trick that I have to learn because I grew up in a different era of media and I mentioned this ( ) project where we have had a trial by fire because of that time in Lapland we talked to Lapin ( ) our regional newspaper or if you were lucky ( ). I had this privilege to be in this energy group yesterday with our ( ) team solving the most complex problem by the way, and this point came up about, oh have you seen this source? And it is all in Finnish and Greg said oh, you know, how are we going to access that? And that captures perfectly the media world I came into here 22 years ago, the language barriers were so strong. Now, tweeting, digital media and things like the Barents Observer collecting things in all of the languages, including Sami and Russian, Finnish. All these articles and then there is all these abstracts in English to help you enter and understand what is going on and it is so fast pace now. And I learned this in Russia, also trial by fire, where we had a project of oil and gas impacts, social environmental impacts. And when we went there we were just starting the project and Florian Stammler and I stepped out of the helicopter and suddenly there was a TV camera right in our face. What are you foreigners going tell us about social environmental impacts in oil and gas developments? Well, come back to us in 4 years we are just starting up. You can t say that of course on TV so. This is a steep learning curve for researchers but as we see in this room we are not all we have a focus on scholarship because of Fulbright but within that we see things like arts, we have an exhibition here so there is many ways of. Media is not just news is also media as in things you mold and ways you can get messages across. So we have to get out of the box and media is only just, media is also art to news to dance to music. I was most impressed by PERSON when he said that the air guitar champion of his home town and in Rovaniemi where I lived I am known as DJ Tundra. It kind of a separate life and you can have separate audiences. People who know me digitally as DJ Tundra. When I went to Canada and Arctic Social Sciences Congress 2 years ago I was DJ there. Then I ran into someone else at an academic conference and hey there, weren t you the DJ at that thing. I saw you playing records as some conference. And I said; Yes, that was me. But you are a professor to. How can you mix those? I said, well, in this digital age you can move around and you can take that and you can tweet that to the world because what happened there, there was some picture of me spinning records out there that you don t have control over necessarily. And I think what the last two points are; anybody can be media transmitter but to control the message once it goes out there I think is something that gets into a next question. So maybe Markku could you ( ). (24.57min) Rather commenting on that I think could move to discussing the role of scholars and the media. So I am interested about your experience in working with scholars translating science to the public that

7 relates to several things one of them is general challenges of speaking the common language and science language in journalism those are two different things and then there is a concrete question of languages. So language is English to science to social media in the Arctic regions is ( ). Does anyone here how many journalists are working in the Barents or arctic region? Anybody? - silence It is about 3000, in the northern most parts of Europe. And to my knowledge 3 of them are working in English, one in the Independent Barents Observer and because they are working in English they are cited everywhere in this communities but those rest, 3000 you can never find anything that you can cite in English from their work. So I would like to ask your comments on this question of languages. *WHAT KIND OF EXPERIENCES DO YOU HAVE IN TRANSLATING SCIENCE TO THE PUBLIC AND WTH TRANSLATING WE MEAN TWO THINGS; WHAT LANGUAGE ITSELF AND WHAT LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE?* (question 2). What kind of challenges have you faced and are those challenges similar in different levels: local, regional, national and international. And do you have any solutions for this? Who wants to start? (26.51min) Yrsa Grüne: Ah, they are passing it on to me. Okay, thank you very much. About translating. I usually use the example of a lawyer, because I lawyer speaks in a way that you cannot actually quote exactly and directly to the public. You have to somehow explain what it is all about and it is a little bit the same comes to scholars. I mean you have to because they also get carried away so you have to pin it down to what it actually means to the different person but I don t find it very I mean the way to try to get out what it is actually all about one thing is of course that you always ask stupid questions when you are a journalist, you are entitled to it in order because you have to understand what it is all about but you also have to understand how to explain it. But you also have a you are not working like in a small bubble when you are a journalist. You usually have a network. And me being a Swedish speaking Finn I have a network which is very Nordic. And I have a few colleagues in Sweden especially and in Denmark who are actually very much, when it comes to the Arctic, they are very skillful. They have been working with it much longer then I have. So I usually link up with them and check so that I get it right and that I get it out in the right way. (28.38min). Mari Maasilta: Maybe I can continue about the language and in a little bit more abstract way not about the words which I used but as a researcher I have sometimes been bothered when I have been interviewed by journalists of simplification. When I have been studying a topic which I see as a very very multisided issue and then I have to reply to questions which make it just so simple and also black and white and I feel that I can t reply to these questions because of this simplifications. This maybe because of that I have been recently interested in migration to arctic areas and already the language of migration is quite topical and problematic at the moment and when you get questions where long words are used you become too suspicious that you can just rely on them on those journalist who make these questions. And that already creates this tension, you feel that you have given too much space in fact maybe I stop here. (30.35min). Pirita Näkkäläjärvi: So many things to talk about I don t know where to start. Maybe I start with words. I was thinking about that today when I listened to some of the presentations here and looked at some of the slides. How you look at the words that are there on the slides and you kind of understand them but you can t grasp. Why have they put those words there and what do they mean by them. There are so many of these concepts and isms and phenomena that we talk about. And probably you arctic guys, arctic scholars, the words that you are using in the arctic context; they are so obvious to you but for someone who isn t inside the discussion yet comes in and looks at the words they maybe don t understand what is going on. Then when you spend some time with the topic, for example listening to you today, you slowly getting into what is going on and what is happening. But when

8 you are trying to talk to journalists and media people they are really busy and sometimes they are really lazy as well because they are busy so they need to be able to grasp what is the news and what is the point. What is the new thing in that press release or in that speech quickly? So you can use some tricks, if we go back to the practical things. So for example there were some great examples here today. So giving an example; pictures that are close to those people or the journalists interests. So they can quickly understand what is going on. Or they can, or you can get them interested in the topic. And then another trick is of course, if you are willing to, use your own personality. We saw some great examples of that here today. And I was thinking of that today that you don t always as a scientist to open up your life and talk about your love stories and past experiences from you childhood or whatever in the media. It is not always that you have to speak as your real you it can be kind of an invented role that you use to stand out among all the different scientists and all the messages out there. Having said that there were so many good examples here today of creative, using your personality. Giving an example: actually someone was giving their ordinary scientific talk started to stand out. That is also something to think about. And then one thing I want to throw here, because I would probably forget it before or afterwards we were talking about talking to media and journalists here. But who are you really talking to when you are talking to a journalist. Don t think that you are just talking to the journalists you are actually talking to the people out there but it is just happening through the journalists. And if your objective is to tell people what you are working on, what your results are, or what you want people to know to anticipate or so on there are so many other ways of doing it rather than talking to the media. And I thought that would come here and tell you a great example that I actually picked up from someone I met in Helsinki in the weekend whose is working on a research project in the University of Lapland but I see you guys also doing it; being in dialogue with people, with the community out there. Whether it is by blogs or whether it is by these, what was it called? I wrote it down but I don t find it - searches talking circle. Or whatever the means, or the local press maybe you can get contact with local people as well or the local press or whatever the way of being in dialogue with the community. That is actually maybe a way of making your message familiar to the people, little by little. And then when they see it in the media they will be like Ah! I have heard about this. This is about this and this and this and it is easier to understand. That is especially true with the really big topics like what we were talking about here; climate change and all of these things. And it was true what Doctor Terry Callaghan told in his presentation that when there is a concrete example that is very close to you, for example; every time you were talking about the Sami people I was like Yeah yeah, our things. Of course yes, I feel the same. If you can find that angle how to get under the skin of the audiences you want to reach then that is a really good way. Okay I stop here now. (35.56min) Laura Tauriainen: For me, as I said I am just entering from the social media and I am also entering from the very practical person to the science world here in Oulu University and as a student I haven t had the change to have so many experiences in translating the science to the general public but I feel like that one of the reasons probably why I am in this master s program is that I am the general public. I am the stupid practical person who doesn t understand anything about science. Well, I used to be of course but now I am very smart because I am a student. But I feel like that is why that is my strength probably to ask the stupid questions. ( ) of us were saying; I want to know what I don t understand so I ask stupid questions. And probably you will get the answer that I am looking for; that I understand. And for me I feel like when I am translating science to the general public it is always about that fact that, because people nowadays are so busy with their own lives so consumed with everything what is going on. They want to know; why this concerns me? How does this affect my life? So to be able to tell you, tell that person the why and the how. Why you should read this article. This article actually concerns you because of this and that. And that it comes to

9 the right message and to the right media so that the right person finds it. That is the challenge I think that I am taking on here and you are all taking on here. Thank you. (38.16min) ( ) And before you comment I just want to say that if anybody of you audiences have questions or comments, please raise your hands because ( ) Yes, please Yrsa Grüne: Yes, I think that it is ( ) figure is who is actually, whom do you want to reach? Who is the target group that very much defines the message as well? If it is the local one, well that is one way of doing it. ( ) of international concern that like I to think that the arctic actually is, then it is another way to go about it. There is also one thing I want to say. It is not always enough that you have understood something and that you explain it. You also need some kind of push note in another form. I give you one example; I wrote an editorial about the ILO agreement 169. It was a long text, it was 3300 marks. It was on a Monday. And then briefly after that there was the Finland Independence Day. And the reception as the presidential palace. There were two ladies who had 169 written on their head. Part of a hair shave and ( ) everybody started to ask; what does it mean? Nobody cared about the editorial I had written. So I wrote a new one. And I used this as a hook. I mean this was actually what it was all about. It never made its way into the print because I was so impatient I wanted it to go out like that. *snaps fingers* and it was only digital. On the Hufvudstadsbladet website. It was something like 450 people who had shared it. Only digital. And only because of these two ladies. Sometimes you need a hook to get your message through. And the real art is to find that hook in the right time. (40.42min). Markku Heikkila: Right now we take two questions in a row from the audience and try to be brief because I can see ( ) two hours for this but we have 15 minutes left. Introduce yourself, because remember we are streaming here. (41.00min) Commentor one: Yeah. My name is Tom ( ) and I am one of the Fulbright scholars. But I have a mixed background and as an associate professor I worked 10 years in media and I worked in the government. But now I work for an NGO. So I have gone through the old stuff, even the camera ( ). Now I am working with telephones and satellites. What we forget here is, in the media, is that we have contact. But in the Arctic, in the high Arctic you have no way to get contact by mobile or internet. So you have to think differently if you want to do stories from there. Especially if you want to do it live. But there are ways to do it. Very small satellites transmitters which you can have in your pocket and connect to your telephone. So there are new stories but I would like to ( ) to what you said. Images, you can have a really good text but if you don t have an image on facebook, you are gone. (42.05min) So, we have another one right here. Commentor two: I just have a comment. When I was listening to you it is just so clear that you are all coming from such easy, beautiful, nice, slow country where it is hard to really attract media attention. For example in Russia I was contacted by media more than 60 times and it is not so safe and we need to ( ) it out of them. Just because for example if I talk about research things which I was talking

10 today about Benefit Sharing, it can be that they not change your citation. They will say; Maria say benefit sharing. But then they comment; Maria wants change of mind of Russian economy. Harm will come to oil companies and promote Western values. And she is acting as a foreign agent. laughter- (43.02min) There is question from twitter as well. Maybe we can take that and then you can comment what you can. Commentor three: Thank you, yes. I have been monitoring the twitter ( ) and international relations. There is a comment here. I think it is a question and a comment; Why science journalists can t rely on press releases. It seems to be a journalist here commenting on the issue. With a link to stats with news reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine because they are claimed to be and why you can t trust press releases from scientist to scientific organizations they are often inaccurate. I wonder what the panel wants to reply on this comment of this twitter user ( ) (43.59min) Alright, we run out of time anyways, but try to answer what you can, Mari Maasilta? You can start. Mari Maasilta: I like to comment on what you said; safety of researchers in contact with media. And I have to take one topic out which is also current in Finland. That we have quite a lot of hate speech against researchers. For example those who are dealing with ethnic issues, nature issues which are topical for arctic areas as well ( ) of course. That is something that is going on behind the scenes and it has already made some researcher worry about what they can say in public. And this is really a serious issue. (45.00min) Yrsa Grüne: I just want that there are some hate speeches against journalists as well because of the same things. (45.10min). You have any comment on these questions? Pirita Näkkäläjärvi: I don t think I understood the twitter question at all. So I can t comment on that. But I want to thank Maria for bringing up Russia and the Russian side. And I want to say, this is a bit off topic, but we were discussing this with some colleagues here at the break; it is a huge shame that in the Finnish media we have hardly anything from the Russian Arctic. For example ask ULA and ULA Lapland and Sapmi. We don t have journalist who regularly go to Russia to the Kola Peninsula and we should! We absolutely should. We rely a lot on the independent Barents Observer, they bring us a lot of stories from the Russian Arctic and the Barents region. But this is something that would even be an opportunity for someone to start bringing us reliable information from Russia. It is something that we need to bring to the Finnish media and especially here in the North. I think that is something that the science community and even the Fulbright arctic network and all you here can help us media to bring reliable information. Bring sources, bring what is happening in Russia and in the Barents region to us. Then it is easier for us to start working on it and picking up on the issues. This is clearly a white spot in the Finnish in the Northern Finnish media industries so to speak and this is a real shame. (46:56min)

11 Markku Heikkilä; Okay, next two questions, Lise and ( ), please start. Commentor 3: I don t have a question I have a comment about the example of the Sami media. It is in our Sami society we had a Sami radio and it was very slow and very sort of But then Pirita came 2 years, 3 years, 4 years ago. So the whole media, the Sami media, went to the internet. So you can get immediately what is happening, where in Sapmi. So you know all the time, on time it is also changed our society. It changes so it is more open it is more like so you get your message through. And then the young people they are there. They are involved because before our young people they were in the back row and now they are in front so you can make miracles with the media also and this is a very good example, thank you Pirita. (Applause) Markku Heikkilä; We can take a couple more questions. You got one? Commentor 4: (Terry Callaghan) Thank you. I would like give an anecdote, if I may. And then ask for advice. And the anecdote is; I give a lot of public talks. I give reach 3 or 4 thousand people a year. From boarding schools to old men s clubs. The hardest question that I have ever had in my live and that includes from scientists, was from a 6 year old child who asked me; what is the hardest thing you ever had to do in your career? And he though: meeting polar bears or sailing past icebergs and all of those exciting things. But the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my career is going to a school like his, talk to children like he, talk about the problems of climate change and not being able to tell about the answers. That is the hardest thing I do. So my question for advice is; how do I give public outreach, on a topic like climate change and give hope at the end of the message? (49.42min) Any of our panel like to tackle that? ( ) I am like Terry I have the same issue. I don t know and I don t know if I can answer that. I have a four year old son right now and I am going to talk in his class. And I have a daughter of six and I am going to talk in her class later this month so this is something I am thinking about right now and it is good you ask that but I don t know if we have an answer. Maybe Mari would like to try? Mari Maasilta: One thing that comes to my mind, not sure if it replies to your question. But one problem deal with especially with news media is that the new genre wants the news to be negative. And if you don t want to bring out this problems all the time you won t get news. Pirita Näkkäläjärvi: Well constructive media is actually a fashion that you hear about that everyone ( ) when you go to media conferences and in your seminars. And that is something that we re also trying to starting to do and trying to do at the Finnish broadcasting company. Actually one of the headlines of our 2020 strategy is; making Finland a better place to live in. And constructive journalism is one of the ways of doing that. And, what does it mean? For example when there is a big news story that comes out instead of sending the news crew to the area where there is a huge issue or problem with that particular topic; send the news crew with the camera to an area with the people solved

12 that issue and present that as an example. And there you can help us because you are solving things not just spotting the issues and the difficulties. Bring us examples and then we bring the camera crews and the radio crews and our reporters. And then we record those solutions, no matter how small they are. Because good examples can then always inspire others to find other solutions. (52.24min) Thanks. That is some really good advice here. Laura Tauriainen: I was thinking that about the hate speech that was mentioned earlier is a reaction to something of course in what is going on in society. And I feel like that in social media especially there is becoming a counter reaction to hate speech. I feel like there is coming up these phenomena that are emphasizing on the hope and on the good news and people are wanting to read the good news more. And I just a week ago I was at the social media award show that was in Finland and one of the winners was this phenomenon called NAME. Which is in Finland the facebook page that tells the click news with the actual news revealed in the on the ( ). So that people don t have to click the ( ) and get a news link to read the news. But it actually tells you what it is all about. And I think that is one of the signs that people are going to be wanting more hope and positive news in the future. I at least hope so (53.54min) Yrsa Grüne: I of course disagree. I think that there are positive stories I think there are positive stories to tell. I don t think the news has to be bad news. I am not writing news myself. I am writing opinion and editorials so I try to understand and explain. But I take an example from a totally different organization which is the international Red Cross. I used to work as a media delegate after the tsunami in Atje. I was the only Fin actually there. In January. And I don t know how many crews I brought to place were you could actually have a good story. I mean good stories are there and the good stories are also there to be told. But you have to focus on it and it somehow gets expected, like I said earlier, you cannot throw all the balls in the air because no one will catch them if you have a lot of messages. You have to pick one which serves as a possible story. And I don t I don t know if it connects to the press releases as such but the problem with press releases is that you can t ask additional questions, you can t actually get the story out of them. You have to ( ) of facts or something. And I don t really want to read them if you are a journalist, you really don t want to. (55.25min) Okay, thanks. We are getting close the end of our time. We are going to thank to panel. I have one last comment that was raised by Pirita. It taught us a lot, I think, and one thing she mentioned that journalists can seem busy or that they are busy and some they seem lazy and they haven t done their homework perhaps before they get to the camera and radio and speaking personally. This is kind of the Holy Grail for scientists if when you get an informed journalists on the other end of the phone ( ). Personally my wife is a media studies student ( ) and when she was Lapland when I was visiting her from London I had some bad experiences with media on to that point and ( ) I got a phone call; This is Andrew SURNAME from the New York Times. And he says; Do you have a few minutes to chat on, you know, on ( ) I can barely hear you but And he rattled of a list of very informed questions. And I thought; Wow. That really changed my mind that you can get somebody that informed and the opposite ends and you sit with somebody and asks; Tell me about climate change. You don t know where to begin so I think you pointed out a lot of good tricks I think I heard here. But that tricks are ideas that we can use. We have to thank the panel and Markku and close it down. (56.55min)

13 Yes before I close down I want to ask if there is something very urgent. Something you want to say perhaps? Pirita Näkkäläjärvi: Yeah, one point I wrote down and I forgot the say; this is a message to the universities, so if you are here any of the big bosses of the universities; please let your scientists and your researchers speak directly to the media. Because I hear that in some places, I don t say were, that the researchers have to go through the media part of the university. So, okay it is good to use those and send any official press releases and so on but please let them also blog and do whatever they like. Whatever the way they want to reach people. (57.59min) Mari Maasilta: And if I continue this; please to those who decide about the money for researchers please also appreciate those researchers who deal with the media. Who are not only writing for scientific journals but also speak to big audiences and for common people. Because the problem of researchers is that you have to produce scientific articles and you get paid for that. But if you are dealing with the media you are just in a way wasting your time because you are not paid for that. (58.39min) Okay, thank you Pirita for mentioning that and I can promise that at least in our institute we try to speak as directly as possible to media and communication related activities. But I want to thank the organizers of having this team in the program it is really very seldom that this kind of items are discuss on arctic conferences. Actually I don t know ( ) so I think that good that you came to this idea and wanted to have this panel. I want to thank the audience and our very excellent panelists your input in this discussion ( ) but thank you very much! (Applause). -*END*-