BOX 3. GETTING OCEAN NEWS STORIES ASSIGNED TO A REPORTER

摘要

"Out of sight, out of mind" remains the biggest challenge in getting ocean stories into television news. "Once you scuba dive," said famed ocean advocate Jean Michel Cousteau in a recent TV interview, "you become an ambassador of the seas." But the challenge remains to excite all those people who haven't yet seen the ocean from under the waves. And that, in turn, becomes the big challenge for television reporters who want to air more ocean-related stories. As a reporter based in Miami and surrounded on three sides by ocean, marine issues are literally all around me. Yet news managers or the "gatekeepers of the news" hold on to the misperception that, given the vastness of the ocean, there couldn't possibly be a real crisis. To be sure, it is a parallel to the challenge scientists face with the general public.