My summer as a media fellow: Reflections on science, place and storytelling
Risa Aria Schnebly (left) accompanies a local crew removing wood pilings covered with a toxic chemical preservative from beaches around the Salish Sea. Schnebly spent the summer working as a science journalist with a local newsroom in Bellingham, Washington. Photo by Santiago Ochoa
Editor’s note: Risa Aria Schnebly, a graduate student in the School of Life Sciences and ASU News science writer, was the recipient of an AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship. She spent 10 weeks this summer covering scientific topics for a Washington state paper; here is her experience.
Wearing cargo shorts and rubber boots, the research director I was interviewing strolled easily out onto the mudflats. At first, it wasn’t too hard to follow him across the squelching surface. But after a couple of minutes, the floor started sucking me in with each step. I sunk down to my shins, then my knees, remembering scenes of characters disappearing into quicksand in all those movies I watched as a kid.
Once I nearly sank to my waist, the research director had to turn around and pull me out as I laughed wildly and flailed in the mud, losing any last semblance of professionalism. That served as a big reminder that this wet and cloudy place was much different than the dry heat of Arizona. If I was going to write about this new place, I had to learn to step with more caution.
That was the end of my first week as a Mass Media Fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a program that matches early-career scientists with newsrooms around the country interested in hosting them.
The point of the program is to help scientists gain communication skills that STEM programs rarely provide training for –– skills I believe are essential to restoring trust and curiosity in science among the public.
I was matched with Cascadia Daily News, a hyper-local startup newsroom in northwest Washington state reporting on issues across two counties. With under 20 people, my newsroom was a lot smaller than those of other fellows, some of whom were in newsrooms with national readership and hundreds of staff.
In some ways, that made my job more challenging and rewarding: Rather than reporting on any newly published study, I had to connect science with people’s everyday lives. My first week, I went looking for it in the mudflats of Padilla Bay.
Padilla Bay is home to a massive bed of eelgrass, which prevents shoreline erosion, provides habitat for culturally important species like salmon and sequesters a whole bunch of carbon. In my first enterprise story, I covered the efforts of Washington researchers to stop the spread of non-native European green crabs, which uproot and gobble up eelgrass, and communicated the importance of protecting a species that easily fades into the background.
Of the 23 stories I wrote for Cascadia Daily News, many felt similar to the eelgrass and green crab story: they focused on familiar issues, like the spread of invasive species, pollution and climate change, but zoomed in on how that issue specifically manifested in the northwest corner of Washington.
As I wrote more of those stories, I was particularly struck by the urgency that Washingtonians had when talking about issues I’m used to hearing about in Arizona, like drought and extreme heat. Compared to the desert, it’s almost easy to dismiss those as real issues in such a green and rainy place –– the same way desert-dwellers dismiss any temperature under 100 degrees with a casual, “this is nothing compared to Arizona.”
But as I researched those stories further, I quickly learned how the effects of climate change are already being felt in the Pacific Northwest, too.
For example, rising temperatures in Washington are leading to more dangerous flooding in the winter and droughts in the summer. That’s because more precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow in the winter, meaning the waterways are getting more water than they can handle. Then in the summer, with less snowmelt, the region’s rivers are lower and hotter than they should be.
Though that won’t pose a water quantity issue to human residents for some time, species like salmon –– which are incredibly culturally, ecologically and economically important in the region –– are struggling to make it.
Extreme heat (or Washington’s version of it) is also posing safety risks to northwest residents, many of whom don’t have air conditioning in their homes because they historically haven’t needed it.
The risks are even more dire for laborers like farmworkers, who often wear pants, long sleeves and face masks to reduce the risk of pesticide exposure. Dressed like that and doing manual labor in 80-degree heat can be life threatening; farmworkers, many of whom are migrants, have the lowest life expectancy of any laborer at 49 years.
These issues are just as dire, if not more so, in Arizona.
Arizona gets its water from rivers like the Salt, Verde and Colorado, the last of which is a water source for seven Southwest states. All those rivers are also fed by an increasingly dwindling supply of snowmelt, already causing water shortages. And the risks of extreme heat have been felt for years, especially among unhoused and unsheltered people. 2025 isn't even over, and Maricopa County is already investigating over 400 deaths to discern if they were heat related after another summer of record-breaking temperatures.
With all of this on my mind, being back in the dry heat of Arizona feels even more jarring than usual. Choosing to live here, let alone build a sprawling network of cities as big as the Phoenix metro area, feels ridiculous. But Native people have lived in and cared for this desert for tens of thousands of years –– long before there was air conditioning. I hope that Arizonans can not only find ways to keep making a way of life in our desert but learn to better care for the desert in the process.
I believe science can help make that possible. But what science needs now is support from the public.
To do that, scientists need to do better at building relationships with communities outside of academia, doing research that serves people and telling stories that invite people into the scientific process, rather than exclude them further.
I hope to join the many people who’ve been working to push science in those directions and talk about it in new ways.
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