Visions of the Crash | The Loom | Discover Magazine

Will we be without science journalism soon? Science writing as we’ve known it is certainly changing, and for those of us who do it for a living, some of the latest changes have been scary. CNN recently shut down its science, technology, environment and weather unit. The Boston Globe just stopped running its weekly science and health section. I recently wrote a couple articles for a magazine called Best Life, a men’s lifestyle magazine. I wasn’t sure what it would be like to write for a magazine like that at first, but I was pretty pleased to discover that they didn’t want me to shy away from the science of my stories, such as this one on aging. But I won’t be writing for Best Life any more: they just went belly up.

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But the disaster for any individual science writer may not be so bad for the person on the other end–the one reading about science. Twenty-five years ago, a reader who wanted to keep up with developments in science didn’t have much choice beyond the coverage in the local paper. But now it’s possible to read stories online from all over the world.

This change in technology, from paper to Internet, may mean that our collective hunger for news about science can be met by fewer science writers. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be a demand for good local science writing–a demand that will come from both local and international audiences. But the precise number of science writers left in 10 years will not be decided by a technocrat at the National Science Foundation.

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The rise of blogs about science has brought me many pleasures. I’ve particularly liked the astringent criticism of bad science journalism. As soon as a piece is published, scientists who know the lot about the subject can, if necessary, rip a journalist a new one. I personally have been very influenced by Mark Liberman, a linguist at Penn, who has time and again shown how important it is for reporters to pay attention to the statistics in science. What seems at first like stark results–like the difference between the male and female brain–can melt away if you look at the actual data

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I personally have been very influenced by Mark Liberman, a linguist at Penn, who has time and again shown how important it is for reporters to pay attention to the statistics in science. What seems at first like stark results–like the difference between the male and female brain–can melt away if you look at the actual data.

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If a blogger sits down in the morning and reads ten stories in a newspaper’s science section and notices that one that makes a howler of a mistake, you know what that blogger will be writing about. Blogs are an outlet for righteous fury.

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The judgment you find in blogs is not just incomplete. It doesn’t even add up to a coherent picture

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There are certainly some dark forces at work in the science media ecosystem these days. Brumfiel rightly points out that journalism-by-press-release is on the rise. In fact, there are some web sites that churn out these press releases as their sole form of “news.” I find this pretty vile. Any outlet that presents a press release as news is making no independent attempt to explain the research involved or to find other scientists who might help create a more objective picture of it. It’s sad that there isn’t any effective backlash that is forcing newspapers or web sites to abandon this practice

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I don’t know what answer you’d get. There are certainly some dark forces at work in the science media ecosystem these days. Brumfiel rightly points out that journalism-by-press-release is on the rise.

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Blogging has certainly opened up a valuable new way for people to point out the errors in science journalism. But we don’t know how good or bad science journalism is overall. And the quality of science journalism doesn’t have that much to do with the quandary of the business right now. You can write as accurately about quantum physics as you want, but if your company just took out $8 billion in loans they can’t pay back,  you and your accuracy may still get fired.

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Let’s imagine that indeed all science journalists around the world spontaneously combusted, leaving behind the bloggers to write about science. Instead of people who research and report articles on a range of subjects, a network of experts would collaborate do the job. Advances in climate research handled by climatologists; advances in studies on spiders handled by arachnologists; and so on.

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Let’s imagine that indeed all science journalists around the world spontaneously combusted, leaving behind the bloggers to write about science. Instead of people who research and report articles on a range of subjects, a network of experts would collaborate do the job. Advances in climate research handled by climatologists; advances in studies on spiders handled by arachnologists; and so on.

Will

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A more realistic question is this: how many of the millions of people who read about science in magazines and newspapers will shift their attention over to blogs written by scientists?

I think there could be a modest shift at best. We can’t know for sure what a world of science bloggers would look like. But we do know what a world of proto-bloggers looks like. Before scientists could blog, they wrote reviews for magazines like Scientific American. Scientific American has since moved to a mix of stories–some written by journalists, and some written by scientists but then edited by non-scientists and then illustrated and designed by professionals. Today, there are still some magazines that capture that proto-blogger spirit. But they have very modest readerships. American Scientist, for example, has a circulation of 144,000.

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A more realistic question is this: how many of the millions of people who read about science in magazines and newspapers will shift their attention over to blogs written by scientists?

I think there could be a modest shift at best. We can’t know for sure what a world of science bloggers would look like.

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But I doubt that the detail-rich, lecture-like blog posts that a lot of scientists tend to write will reach millions, no matter how many journalists end up out of work.

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Let’s say you read Ben Goldacre. On which side of the blog-MSM divide does that put you? It’s hard to say. If you read Bad Science at badscience.net, I guess you get your information from blogs. But you may read the exact same posts from Goldacre every week in the Guardian. Myers has joined Goldacre there as well. Maybe there was a divide once, but now it’s about as impermeable as a cheesecloth

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You can’t write a story like this with a bit of embedded code. You can’t write it after spending half an hour reading over a paper in Geophysical Research Letters. You have to go to Cooper Island and stay there, you have to read and talk, you have to write and rewrite.

Frey couldn’t have written the story without back-up: an organization that paid for his plane tickets, that employed editors who helped him make the story better and fact-checkers to search for errors and photographers to add arresting images. The story benefited from being printed in ink on paper–a medium that lets you read several thousand words without feeling as if your eyes are going to fall out of your head. To get the ink on millions of pages, Frey also depended on people running massive printing presses. He depended on the people who sold subscriptions to the paper and wooed advertisers into buying ads. An army stood behind him.

I for one want to read stories like “George Divoky’s Planet” in the future. I wouldn’t mind writing a few of them myself. But if we must say goodbye to the old networks that made these stories possible, we won’t get to read them unless new networks rise to take their place. I don’t know what a new network would look like. They might be slightly retooled versions of the newspapers and magazines we see on the newsstand and online today. Or perhaps writers will end up working as entrepreneurs, selling their stories for all to read on Kindles

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