media | James Keirstead

I was recently invited to speak on a microgeneration panel at the Science Media Centre. The idea of these briefings is to provide the media with an opportunity to ask experts about scientific issues making the news. There’s been a lot of interest in microgeneration recently and so this particular briefing was well-attended with representatives from the Times, Mirror, Daily Mail, New Scientist, Guardian, Reuters and BBC (one each from radio, TV and online – don’t they check first to see whether someone else is going too?).

The briefing started with each of the four panel members giving a 5 minute talk on our particular areas of expertise. The follow-up questions then went on for about half an hour and focused mainly on the performance of individual microgeneration technologies, particularly microwind.

Overall I think everyone was pleased with how things turned out and the next day, articles were published in the Mail, Mirror and Times. Two things struck me about the experience:

There was very little advocacy from the panel and we agreed that microgeneration is not a solution by itself but an important step towards a low-carbon future to be taken in conjunction with other easier and cheapier efficiency measures. Most of the articles communicated this well: the Times headline for example was “Want to save the planet? It’s your little changes that mean the most”.
The Times also managed to condense my research accurately into one sentence: “Main effect of solar panels is in making residents more conscious of their consumption of electricity, encouraging them to alter their lifestyles”. To think that I spent the better part of two months writing an academic paper that will likely be read by a dozen people, when those 22 words will reach over 600,000 with almost the same message.

So I guess my faith in the media has been partially restored. Though incidentally when I picked up the Times I noticed that, like the Guardian, it claims to be “newspaper of the year”. Near as I can tell the Times hasn’t won in the past 12 years!

After realizing yesterday that microgeneration is starting to move up in the online world, I thought I’d take a look at traditional media sources. With the Tories’ recent interest in microgen, the fuss about the microgeneration strategy and It’s Not Easy Being Green on the telly, maybe the wider world is starting to become aware of microgeneration too.

I decided to investigate using a completely scientific method. No not Google, LexisNexis. I searched for the word “microgeneration” in UK publications over the past twenty years and found a couple interesting things among the 199 results.

First, here’s the overall trend:
Media coverage of microgeneration in the UK
There are four things going on here.

There’s very little coverage of microgeneration prior to May 2005 and most of that early writing is not in newspapers
Microgeneration started to appear on the public radar last May. At this time, EST was promoting its last year of PV grant money, the REA had a conference on microgeneration issues, and there was generally more talk about what the UK’s microgen strategy might entail.
Next you’ve got the debut of Green Dave during the Tory leadership contest in autumn 2005 and lots of fuss about the microgeneration consultation and LCBP in the winter.
The microgen strategy and budget caused the recent spike in March.

In this last wave of microgeneration interest, only 53% of the publications were newspapers. The next figure shows that this trend holds overall as well, with magazines and trade publications outweighing newspaper coverage. In other words, most of the chat about microgen so far has been within expert circles.
Media coverage of microgeneration in the UK (by media type)

A breakdown of the newspaper figures shows a good mix of broadsheet and other papers (see below) . Looking at the detailed headlines, it seems that newspapers approach microgeneration from a number of different angles including the novelty of the technology, the cost issues, the climate change and policy aspects or – in the case of some local papers – human interest profiles of specific installations.
Newspaper coverage of microgeneration in the UK

Although the method’s not perfect (for example, the search missed this well-titled opinion piece from 2000), I think these graphs do show that microgeneration is gaining prominence in the UK media. Most promisingly, the variety of mass media stories suggests that microgeneration has a diverse appeal and hence promoting the uptake of microgen might be encouraged from more than one angle.

I’ll keep tracking the figures for a bit and provide an update later on. For now, though here are some of the punnier headlines from the data set.

Rooftop generation to give power – and cash – to the people
Saving on electricity bills can be a breeze
Renewables; ‘Saving the planet’ vs. reality
How green is Brown?; Scotland should be encouraged to lead in efficiency
Microgeneration in the UK should take off…in 2009

Like that last one. I’ll mark it in my diary.

James Keirstead

Tag Archives: media

Getting the word out

Microgeneration in the news