Pampa García Molina

Pampa García Molina (@pampanilla) is a science journalist and the editor in chief of the SINC Agency, the first public agency at national level specializing in information about science technology and innovation in Spanish. She is Vice-president of the Spanish Association of Science Communication (AECC). She has been editor of Muy Interesante magazine and of the science communication company Divulga. She is editor of science and technology in SM and works habitually with a number of news media, including El Mundo and La Razón. In 2010 she won the Accenture prize for journalism. Her first degree was in Physics, and she has a Master’s in science journalism from the Carlos III University, Madrid.

INVITED TALK: "Science journalism, from paper to news"

The motto of the SINC Agency is “Science is news”. Our goal is to make science reach the media, and to do that it is not enough to create catchy titles with a varnish of science. To inform about the results of science it is essential to put them in context, because none of them are isolated facts, but the product of many people and cultures working over the years, even centuries.

Nor would it be correct to give information only about successes. Society is also entitled to know the failures, doubts, controversies, and stories which lie behind every news item. In order not to transmit science as knowledge which is distant from the interest of the general public, it is necessary to show its relation from everyday reality, and its power to bring about change in the world, to produce problems as well as solutions. All of this must be amenable and stimulating to ordinary people without loss of rigour.

This is the day to day challenge of SINC which started its activities in 2008 as a project of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) to promote scientific culture. The objective of the SINC agency is to facilitate the presence of quality information about science in the news media so that via the journalists it can finally reach the citizens.

Using the Creative Commons licence the agency distributes news, reporting, interview, photographs, and videos produced by the SINC team and by our collaborators, all of them journalists specializing in science. SINC is today the web agency of reference for science news in Spanish, and pioneer in in the use of the Creative Commons licence in Spanish scientific journalism. This licence allows any medium or blog to reproduce content generated by the agency, completely or partially, with the condition that the source of information be citede. In this way SINC has multiplied the impact of science in newspapers, magazines, television, radio and web-based media.

After almos seven years of existence SINC receives more than 500.000 visits per month from Spain and Latin America, and achieves some 1.200 hits per month in communications media. All the principal Spanish media, whether local or national, specialized or generalist, and a large number of international media above all from Latin America, use the contents of SINC as a source of information. Rigour and the creation of science culture are our trademarks. SINC was awarded the Prismas Casa de las Ciencias Prize for 2014 for the best website of science popularization. The work of SINC was worthy also of the Boehringer Ingelheim Prize in Medicine and the Journalism Prize of the Roche Institute.