Science After Sunclipse

Well, this is a cheerful development. According to Cristine Russell at the Columbia Journalism Review, the Boston Globe has dissolved its weekly Health/Science section, and is now running content in those fields in the business section and its lifestyle tabloid.

"I don't see it as a serious retreat," said [health and science editor Gideon] Gil. "The content is all running in the paper, but going in different places. ... It's entirely occasioned by the need to cut costs. We have found a way to continue to provide essentially the same level of coverage while saving money. To me that shows a continuing commitment to covering health and science in a major way out of recognition that those are crucial topics for our community, areas that make Boston distinctive."

But, Gil acknowledged, some hard sciences such as physics or astronomy — which don't neatly fit into personal health or business innovation — could suffer with the disappearance of Monday's dedicated Health/Science section. "It was nice to have our own sandbox to play in, the freedom to stretch," he said. "Science is quirky sometimes, so a bit of serendipity is lost when we have to fit into different niches in the paper."

Science is more than just "quirky": it's ill-suited for the news cycle in a deep way. New discoveries are getting trumpeted all the time, but it takes a lengthy process of ongoing research to confirm new findings, to flesh them out and set them in context. The bulk of the scientific knowledge base — the stuff we're really confident in — hardly gets coverage at all, because it's not new.

We have here the old "All the news that fits, we print" problem.

"It will definitely put a crimp in the amount of science and health coverage in the paper," said former Globe science editor Nils Bruzelius. "It will continue to be high-quality, but this can't help but dim the overall breadth and scope of coverage when you're fighting for space every day and defining what you do in a more narrowly focused way."

Still, fortunately, it looks like some people know exactly the right thing to do:

[Bruzelius] flew to Boston last week to join about twenty of his former Globe health and science colleagues in an Irish wake for the dearly departed Health/Science section at Donovan's, a local pub in the Savin Hill section of Boston.

I wonder if we could persuade the Digital Cuttlefish, poet laureate of the Scientific Blogohedron, to write a drinking song for the occasion.