A growth medium for the message: Online science journalism affordances for exploring public discourse of science and ethics

Little attention has been paid to how new media foster public discussion of science-related issues. In this exploratory study, we examine discussions generated by articles on the most popular daily news website in Israel. All articles dealt with research studies that involved animal experimentation, a topic often linked to deep ethical conflicts. Based on analysis of 10 articles and more than 600 reader comments, we found that topics in both science and ethics are initiated both by the original article and in the linked discussion threads. The most fruitful topics (measured by number of comments) were initiated in the discussion threads, not in the articles themselves. We suggest that discourse in new media can be understood by thinking of the audience as a 'growth medium' in which seeds planted by individual stories can grow (through the affordances of new media) into both knowledge of the sort imagined by the story writers and new branches nurtured by the community itself.