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2. Curating, transforming, constructing science news: The newsmaking routines of Science Media Center Germany
Summary
This study examines how Science Media Center Germany selects and frames scientific topics before distributing them to journalists. The organization bridges science and media by negotiating both explicit and implicit knowledge norms, influencing which scientific issues receive public coverage and how they are presented.
Science Media Center (SMC) Germany contributes to the construction of science news with routines of curation, selection, framing, and broadcasting that bridge the norms of science and journalism. These include restricting the scope of scientific topics and sources; assigning scientific topics with contextual scientific, social, and journalistic relevance criteria; enhancing content with external expertise; and timing broadcasts with the intention of promoting, altering, or preventing coverage of science issues. In collective sense-making processes, editors negotiate both explicit and implicit knowledge about science and journalism, informed by input from scientific actors invested with explanatory power. Based on criteria of knowledge production from both science and journalism, these routines grant epistemic authority to the science content curated by SMC Germany.
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