Unwriteable discourse? Co-crafting the language of science news

Of the many sorts of language workers proudly selling their verbal craftsmanship these days, public relations (PR) officers find themselves perhaps in the single most challenging position as they are trying to discursively mediate between those who traditionally make the news and those who want to manage it. Business and politics have received some scholarly attention as key arenas where these PR officers show off their ways with words. In contrast, the complex interactions of the news with the world of science have remained largely undocumented. This chapter sets out to contribute to the study of the – at times uneasy – exchange of professional practices between the worlds of science and news and of the unwriteable discourse it seems to be leading to. In particular, it presents linguistic ethnographic work on one of the key linkages between the news media and the scientific community at large, namely that between university researchers and science journalists, and on how it is negotiated by university press officers