I often hear earnest researchers bemoaning the fact that there is insufficient funding for their research. Objectively this is true: a point we made in our submission to the recent Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment consultation Te Ara Paerangi.  But there is a part of me that wishes we, the scientists and engineers who lead innovative change in New Zealand, would put more effort into simply telling our stories.
The public responds to great stories, but they need to be told in an interesting way. Our training makes us cautious, pedantic, precise. But there is no scientific rule that prevents us from trying to be inspirational at the same time.
A simple rule of thumb is to explain how this new thing we have discovered or invented will contribute to good change.  Why else should the listener care about what I am saying?
What problem are we solving, or what opportunity is opening up? Who will benefit, and is the change sustainable?
We all have access to social media, but we need to get better at using it. We need to consider the audience we want to reach with each communication.
For science and industry colleagues, LinkedIn or Twitter can be effective professional tools. If our intended audience is the general public or politicians, then we probably need the weight of our employer’s communications team to get our stories to the attention of a TV, radio or print journalist.
There are excellent well-researched blog sites like The Conversation and widely read long-form journalism in the Listener or North and South.
It is easy to criticize the stream of misinformation that makes its way to those glossy pages.  It is much harder to generate gripping human-interest stories based on accurate science to displace the drivel.
My age is a factor in the fact that I have not yet worked out how to use the massive reach of TikTok to generate clever, witty material that will attract young people into agricultural science, but I’m sure it can be done, if we put our minds to it. And the challenge is that if we fail to get our stories heard, then our passionate opponents, suspicious of technology and critical of past environmental failures, will dominate the public’s mind.
We already know that each piece of our scientific endeavour is not finished until the refereed publications come out making our work available for peer critique, but somehow we then need to go a step further and make the outcomes of our endeavour known to our science investors and the general public. Only then will we begin to see increased science investment, and reverse the trend away from STEM subjects in our schools.
So, c’mon NZIAHS members – in the words of the unlovely Francis Urquhart in the British political drama ‘House of Cards’ to the aspiring journalist Mattie,  “You have to put yourself about a bit!”

Prof Julian Heyes
President, NZIAHS

Welcome

The NZIAHS has great pleasure in welcoming the University of Otago as a new corporate member.