EMS Journalist Award 2017 for Astrid Rommetveit

Astrid Rommetveit is a Journalist with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK.
As a journalist, she specializes on weather and climate, committing herself to tell important stories to a broad public. She is striving to make complex issues accessible, relevant and understandable to the readers. ‘I wan’t to show the big picture by telling “small” stories, often focusing on single persons’.

Astrid Rommetveit was nominated for the Journalist Award on the basis of three recent articles published on the popular Norwegian websites Yr.no and NRK.no. Yr is a cooperation between NRK and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, and NRK has the full editorial responsibility.

• Oddvar has devoted his life to the rain (29.11.2015)
• Preparing the world’s largest experiment (19.03.2017)
• Battling the contrails (02.04.2017)

Astrid Rommetveit receives the EMS Journalist Award for her very important work in helping to bridge the gap in understanding between experts and non-experts; she covers complex topics and presents them in an understandable and accessible way, without oversimplifying them. Rommetveit takes seriously one of the most important missions of journalists, which is to give the reader the full capacity to understand a complex topic.

Her articles have a strong human touch combined with science, which makes them interesting to the general public. They address successfully different aspects and facts, focusing on “small” stories and single persons, using people’s statements. She provides a lively account by developing stories using people’s statements to present facts and different points of view in sometimes controversial stories.

Her chemtrails article makes it clear that the intention of the journalist is to discuss and discover, rather than pre-judge or condescend. It is of great importance to have journalists, such as Rommetveit, who is willing to cope with the facts without using false balance to give a misleading impression of objectivity.

All articles are well-structured, well-written, easy to read, with relevant images, and well-documented with scientific facts. They help bridging the communication gap between scientific achievements and research results and the public, presenting different points of view for complex topics.

Climate researchers do need more of these bridge builders like Astrid Rommetveit, helping the society to understand different points of view on topics like in the article Astrid wrote about artificial clouds. It is an example of great scientific journalism in the field of meteorology and climate science.

The Award will be presented to Astrid Rommetveit at the EMS Annual Meeting in Dublin, on 5 September 2017.