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I haven’t gotten the chance to blog it til now, but my latest Science Progress column is up. It’s a profile of my recent Seattle host, Tom Paulson, pictured at right. For 22 years, Tom was the staff science writer of the Post Intelligencer, which is now no longer a newspaper but merely a website.
Yup, that’s right: Paulson is yet another science journalist casualty of the current economic and technological scene. After 22 years at the Post Intelligencer, Tom is now freelancing, and also going back to part-time carpentry and building contracting.
Such is the story of science writing in our times–although as you’ll see if you read past the jump, there is still reason for hope, at least in a comedic, irreverent, don’t-let-the-bastards-get-you-down kind of way.
In my piece, I begin by describing some of the highlights from Tom’s two decades at the Post Intelligencer:
Paulson took the lead on a number of important stories, including raising awareness about Seattle’s serious earthquake risk (now common knowledge, but barely recognized a few decades ago) and covering the 1993 Jack-in-the-Box E. coli outbreak, in which three children died in the Pacific Northwest and 450 were sickened. In the aftermath, Paulson tailed CDC investigators as they tried to figure out how the bad meat got into the system. “I traveled all around the country, went to meatpacking plants, got chased off by guys with guns,” he remembers. “It was sort of breaking-news detective science, and I was trying to explain to people how with a bug like this, we wouldn’t have known about it if not for a public surveillance system.”
But then, something changed at the paper:
His editors, [Paulson] says, grew less interested in stories that were “too complicated or in depth.” Paulson wanted to really dig into covering the Seattle-based Gates Foundation and its work on global health, but he was instead pushed into writing what he labels “entertainment science” stories. The science of chocolate. Back-in-time research. That kind of thing. “Everything was being driven by web hits,” Paulson observes. “And if they didn’t think a story was going to get a lot of web hits, they didn’t want me to write about it.” Seattle is a very important research hub, with scientists at the top of their fields in a number of areas, such as the study of the genome. The region is also, of course, a hub for numerous software, microchip, and biotech companies, as well the aerospace industry. Yet Paulson found it harder and harder to sneak real science into the paper.
And then, of course, the Post Intelligencer went belly up entirely. My article closes with Paulson’s own words on what has been lost as Seattle goes to a one newspaper town, with one fewer established science writer:
I’d say the media in general here is more subject to spin. Fewer stories are being told through the mainstream media, and if you talk to the press officers at the institutions, they’re very frustrated with the fact that they will send out releases, and they’ll have something that’s a pretty big deal, and it won’t even show up in Seattle media. Because if the Seattle Times science reporter is already busy, it isn’t even going to get out there. So it sounds self-serving, but I think there’s less science news getting out now in Seattle.
You can read more about Tom’s story, and what it means, here. It includes a memorable anecdote about Paulson’s prior career in public relations, which he wasn’t very good at–too much of the journalistic instinct. Too good at, as he puts it, “pissing people off.”
Luckily, Tom is a fun and irascible guy, and I’m confident he will eventually find some other means of continuing his unique form of journalistic trouble-making. So to him I say: Screw the man! Long live science journalism, even if nobody is willing to pay for it!
(Full column here.)
May 22nd, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Sad, but does anyone read pulp papers anymore? Other then people, like my father, who do not know how to use the Internet.
May 23rd, 2009 at 4:30 am
Actually digging up facts, tracking down experts (and verifying their credentials), getting interviews – that all takes a LOT of time and money; you can easily spend over a week doing work to write a 300 word story. The MBA mantra is “screw the facts, put something out to get people’s attention and bring in the advertising dollars”. I’ve noticed that in the past 10 years or so many papers don’t bother with work; they pick up whatever press releases have been put out by various groups and run those press releases, often verbatim, as news.
May 25th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
[...] press release science writing that is taking the place of professional science writing these days, since no one will pay for us to do it full time anymore (Science Daily, a major source of internet science news, is made almost entirely of press [...]
May 26th, 2009 at 9:01 am
Chris,
As a fromer Seattlite, I am sad Tom is out of a regular gig. What he wrote fo rthe P.I. when I was there was good stuff, even if it floated to much on fluffy air. I miss him, and the P.I.
And Danimal, yes, many of us still do read pulp papers. I get my Sunday WaPo that way, and I read the local paper of any town I travel to. I laos read the Wall Street Journal in print once a month or so, and since i live in D.C. I manage to pick up a copy of El Pais once in a while to keep up with my other home in Spain. The internet may well mean I can get my information faster, but there is still nothing like the smell of fresh news print.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
[...] press release science writing that is taking the place of professional science writing these days, since no one will pay for us to do it full time anymore (Science Daily, a major source of internet science news, is made almost entirely of press releases [...]