When the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent pandemic occurred, the science was fast enough to create the vaccine. But the storytelling wasn't fast enough to tell us what was happening.

For Emma Bloomfield, an associate professor of communication studies at UNLV’s Greenspun College of Urban Affairs, the pandemic became one of the reasons to write her book, Science v. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators. (2024, University of California Press). 

Bloomfield is a researcher with expertise in science and environmental communication and strategies for combating misinformation. She is also the director of the college’s Public Communication Lab.

Science news is complicated and hard to digest, so scientists need to employ newer storytelling strategies. Watching the COVID-19 pandemic unfold, Bloomfield noticed that a storytelling war was occurring between the public, media, and politicians.

In her book, Bloomfield tackles key topics of the 21st century, including climate change, evolution, vaccinations, and COVID-19.

Changing the ways we receive and understand science must change in order to tamp down misinformation and disinformation, she argues in her book.

Issues such as mask wearing, gathering in crowds, and the efficacy of the vaccine for COVID-19 dominated the airways, social media platforms, and became a frequent topic among friends, families, and colleagues. 

“I just felt like people were always turning to stories — and sometimes not always the best stories — in order to make sense of COVID-19 because it was scary,” Bloomfield said. “We were all trapped in our homes. We didn't know whether we should be wearing masks or wiping down our groceries with Lysol wipes. It was just a lot of confusing information.”

She advocates for changes in academia so that scientists gain training in communicating — subjects like media training, public speaking, and writing for a variety of audiences.

Bloomfield suggests higher education institutions provide funds and grants for scientists specifically in public communication.

A science communicator is not limited to other scientists

A science communicator isn’t just someone with a petri dish and pipettes. 

Bloomfield defines science communicators broadly. They can be writers in fields such as government and policy, higher education, research labs, and scientific institutes.

“Anyone who is sharing information, building relationships, and making connections around scientific topics. There are bridges, policymakers, educators, journalists, and media experts who naturally live in that space between science and public understanding,” Bloomfield said. 

In Science v. Story, she explains how the public’s perspective of who they get their news from is still evolving. Not only that, the scientific community can still incur gender and racial bias in valuing science scholars and people of color. 

“I think it's really important to acknowledge that a lot of these systems are embedded with racism and sexism and ableism,” Bloomfield said. “We need to be challenging that by celebrating and championing more diverse storytellers and cutting down on racism and sexism when it appears on certain platforms.”

Why are stories impactful in communicating science?

Stories resonate with the public based upon a few things: who's telling the story, what topics are they talking about, and how they are connecting it to you as an individual, and if the storyteller is making it personal.

“Some people don't like the idea of using stories because they think it dilutes the power of science, but I wholeheartedly disagree and think that science and stories can work together to really strengthen our science communication,” Bloomfield said.

Technology such as social media, graphic design, advertising, and podcasts are platforms science storytellers should embrace, Bloomfield said. 

Her book includes visual guides called narrative webs, which offer a how-to guide on plotting a story to explain science for non-experts. 

“The more stories the better, because there's not going to be one story that's ideal for everyone,” she said. 

For instance, a story could be a personal narrative or a TikTok video or an infographic with specific takeaways from a journal article. 

“Board games and video games are things that can also communicate information about science in ways that are engaging and interactive,” Bloomfield said. “The more stories we have that are coming from scientific perspectives, the more we can kind of drown out or compete with those stories of misinformation and disinformation.”

Keeping up with technology

The way society finds and consumes news has evolved. Influencers on social media become experts in a wide variety of topics like science, and artificial intelligence and programs like Chat GPT feed information from the internet that could be factual or not.

“I think part of the problem is our expectations of the internet,” Bloomfield explains. “I think, in its origins, we hoped it would be this democratizing platform where everyone could go in and find the information that they needed. But when it becomes a business, people are incentivized to change the algorithms, change the interactions, and change how people use it in order to make money.”

Bloomfield suggested solutions to help individuals become savvier consumers of news and information by starting at earlier ages in school.

“I think it is bottom up. We should definitely be teaching folks to be more news literate, how to sift through information on different social media platforms, and how to distinguish credible sources from non-credible sources. But I also think we can work top down and put more restrictions and regulations on certain platforms, especially ones like Twitter and Facebook,” she said. 

For example, Bloomfield suggested social media platforms have stop gaps and identifiable tags that inform people about a topic, its dateline, or ways to learn more.

“These issues are not insignificant," Bloomfield writes in her book. "They can directly result in suffering, death, and societal instability."