CHICAGO--Alarming stories about stranded polar bears and swamped coasts are bound to stay in the headlines, but journalists covering the climate crisis are starting to write less about dramatic research findings and more about the impacts of climate change, according to speakers in a seminar at the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting.

The new stories  require a healthy dose of political and economic reporting, but that doesn't mean that science journalists should be willing to turn over their beat to less specialized reporters, the panelists agreed.

"Science journalists shouldn't give up their hold on the issue...because the policy solutions will also have to be critically tested," by the scientific community, said Pallab Ghosh, a  science correspondent for BBC News.

When general beat reporters are assigned to climate change stories, they often bring a "political style, kind of a Ph.D. A  versus Ph.D. B style" to their coverage, which can lead to "massive distortion" of nuanced climate findings, said Steven Schneider, Ph.D., a Stanford University climatologist who has worked extensively on climate policy and public outreach.

The participants in the symposium, "Hot and Hotter: Media Coverage of Climate-Change Impacts, Policies, and Politics," agreed that climate change reporting may be challenging in the near future, as public interest shifts toward the economic crisis and the news industry itself experiences its own sea change.

Climate change reporting "made the hit parade" in 2007 with the release of the fourth assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but has since  "evened out" said Cristine Russell, a senior fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs.

In an era of shrinking circulation and plagarism scandals in traditional media,  "it's not clear whether we can regain respect at a time when we most need it to report on a critical issue like climate change," said veteran science journalist Bud Ward of the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media.

The dismantling of traditional news platforms in favor of blogs and Twitter means that journalists "are going to need expert mentors" from the science community as they write their stories, since seasoned science reporters are becoming scarce in the newsroom, Ward cautioned.

Ward and his colleague Peter Spotts of the Christian Science Monitor agreed that climate reporting will follow the same "hyper-local" focus adopted by newspapers across the country.

"Journalists need to be writing about how much, how fast, and how will it affect me--not just the global average 'me,' but the me in Phoenix, in London, in New Delhi, and in South Africa,"
 said Spotts.

"The challenge, frankly, is to avoid becoming so bummed by the science that you become cynical about the policy objectives," Spotts joked.

But he also noted that several of the political analysts he had talked to since the election of U.S. President Barack Obama "are more hopeful now that major climate climate legislation will move through at least the U.S. House of Representatives" by the end of the year.