There will always be a place for science journalism, but there is no harm in highlighting the (many) poor articles, and poor writing that sensationalise, distory and, yes, even lie about the evidence. Blogging can do a lot of good in that respect certainly, but I do want to read well crafted articles by science journlaists who can elucidate things I cannot get from even a good ‘basic’ blog, and will have put in the time and effort and craft to produce something both interesting and informative.

I thought I’d add a brief comment as someone who was quoted in the Nature piece — accurately but incompletely — admitting to the occasional use of press releases.

I’m broadly in agreement that journalism by press release is a bad thing — especially when it is *all* that a reporter or news outlet produces. However, they do have a place, and it isn’t always unjustified to rely occasionally on well-written releases as a short-cut.

The reason is that they free up so much more time to spend on other things. If I were to report everything with the thoroughness I would like, I would need a 20-day week — not least because of editors’ demands for coverage of stories I don’t particularly rate, and their tendency to want to cover themselves in case something that’s heavily done elsewhere is missed. Deadlines can also be extremely tight — especially when reporting for a UK newspaper on papers with West Coast authors. That’s an 8 hour time change, leaving little or no opportunity to speak to a scientist on the same day.

By using a good press release in these circumstances (backed up at least by reading the published paper, and usually with a call to the lead author too), it becomes possible to get them out of the way quickly and accurately (if with little added value). That means I still have time to concentrate on the core of the job — chasing down exclusives, writing explanatory pieces that really add value, and reporting fully and forensically on the items that really matter. If used properly and selectively, good press releases can help a conscientious reporter who wants to break stories and write original material to do the job.

It’s too simplistic to see every press-release rewrite as the same. If it’s all that people do, it’s a fair cop. But if the reporter in question is also producing a lot of good original work, it’s a different matter.

For any new research, the publishing journal and the researchers both have an obvious interest in pushing the significance of their findings – and there are known publishing biases to worsen that issue. A responsible journalist should be going further than merely regurgitating the conclusions of the paper by placing the research in a broader context, finding out whether it is really representative of the state of the science, and so on – something that Carl does routinely but that was not explored in that research (although the authors do actually highlight these potential problems at the end of the paper).

There’s definitely space for (even need for) professional, competent science journalism. The question is whether and to what extent traditional media are actually fostering such journalists – and the very fact that a leading prefessional like Carl is evidently feeling the pinch suggests that there is a big problem. If bloggers are stepping into any gap, it’s one the media are cheerfully creating themselves.

I believe I mentioned to you that Science Writers In New York recently held a panel program on Social Media for Science Writers. Everything you’ve said here was brought up in this program. Among our distinguished panelists was Jay Rosen, a thought leader in the way journalism is changing in these times. He and Bora Zivkovic are pretty tight, actually. Based on what I learned from the panel and from Jay and Bora, the field of science journalism is evolving, but it’s not the end of science journalism. Only time will tell the effect of the internet on the future of science journalism.

There’s a book that Google had all of its employees read called “The Long Tail”, by Chris Anderson, and I think the principles of this book apply very well to the current state of science journalism and how its changing. The main principle of the book is that the few macro-markets of the past (newspapers) are becoming less common, and making way for more micro-markets (blogs, etc). New business models for science journalism and science writing will come into being.

The piece from Darcy Frey was amazing. You are right that a great deal of money is required for something like this. I believe that new sources for the money will arise. Just don’t ask me how.

I think I’ve just reiterated what you said in this post.

David Swensen & Michael Schmidt wrote an interesting op-ed piece for the NY Times on creating an endowment for newspapers. I wonder if a similar model might be applied to science writing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/opinion/28swensen.html

I’ve got no idea how something like this would come into existence, but it seems like the right model to me….

I would also want to read more pieces like Darcy Frey’s. I would read a non-science outlet in which these appear on a regular basis. (I do subscribe to American Scientist.) If I took the time away from conducting science enough to write anything of remotely similar merit, and I did it on a regular basis, I would style myself as a science journalist. Perhaps freelance. But no longer only as a blogger.

So, no, science blogging is not going to replace science journalism. The latter can masquerade as the former, though. Perhaps there is a place for an editor-type, perhaps from a traditional journal, who can “commission” pieces through themed blog carnivals, though, in which working scientists can take part?

Certainly I’ve never heard anyone saying science reporting per se is redundant, just that there is now less wiggle room for lazy and incompetent science reporting by journalists who simply do not (in fact often cannot) do their jobs. Newspapers axing their science staff only exacerbates the problem: a decent science story needs to be researched and fact-checked by someone who can understand what they’re doing, not by some general-purpose hack who wouldn’t be able to identify a base-rate fallacy if it bit them in the burro.

There’s a difference between journalists who report on science and science journalists.

The real conflict is not between bloggers and journalists, but between bloggers and the gatekeepers of journalism, the editors and publishers who decide what gets published, and how much emphasis to give it. It’s not the journalists who decide what story gets printed on page A3 when it’s current, and what story gets relegated to page G13, sometime in the next six months, if and when it’s convenient. Bloggers, I think, are wrong when they focus on the author of the odd piece-of-crap journalism that is occasionally commited to newsprint.

The real demon — the enemy of my enemy, if you will — is the publishers and managing editors who have no idea what stories are newsworthy and why. This is not a new phenomenon. I think it was back in the 1940s that I.F. Stone said something like, “It’s easy to find the most important story in the New York Times. Just look at page B18 below the fold.”

I get all my news via blogs these days, and have for the last several years. It’s not because the bloggers are better writers (they’re not), or because I no longer read journalists (I do, but only because someone has linked to a story from a blog). No, the reason I go to blogs for news (whether science news or politics or whatever), is that the blogs do a much better job of filtering out the noise and showing me the stories that actually matter. I think that if it were up to MEs and publishers, newspapers would contain no actual content at all. And yet they wonder why readership is down.

Newspapers today are suffering, it’s true, but not because of any lack on the part of journalists. Newspapers are suffering because their managers and publishers are idiots — idiots who live in a bubble where idiots are rewarded and anyone with minimal competence is laughed at.