Journalism
edyong | March 24, 2010
To tie in with this week's Research Blogging Awards announcement, I spent an enjoyable half-hour on Monday being interviewed by Dave Munger, who organised the awards. The interview is now up on the SEED website, with a title that made me smile. In it, I talk to Dave about winning the award, why and how I blog, and interactions between blogging and mainstream media.
Here's an excerpt with the question that I get asked most frequently:
Munger: You've got a full-time job in addition to being a blogger--and you're one of the most prolific bloggers on ResearchBlogging.org. How do you manage to…
bioephemera | March 22, 2010I was reading through some back issues of Harper's and came upon an article by Rivka Galchen about climate change and meteorological engineering. I'm sick to death of reading about climate change, but I was immediately hooked by this article - her perspective is fascinating, and she is an excellent writer who draws on a wide range of interdisciplinary elements. Equal parts science writing, memoir, self-reflection, tongue-in-cheek mockery, and elegy to her late father, meteorologist Tzvi Gal-Chen, this is a hell of a good article.
[F]unding far-fetched projects can be justified for reasons…
bioephemera | March 19, 2010A slight science journalism FAIL in a story at iO9, originally from the New Scientist:
the Title: "First Quantum Effects Seen in Visible Object"
the Lede: "Does Schrödinger's cat really exist? You bet. The first ever quantum superposition in an object visible to the naked eye has been observed."
the Discovery: "[researchers showed] that a tiny resonating strip of metal - only 60 micrometres long, but big enough to be seen without a microscope - can both oscillate and not oscillate at the same time."
the Wait, what?: "Alas, you couldn't actually see the effect happening, because that very…
ddobbs | March 17, 2010BoingBoing loves The Open Laboratory: The Best in Science Writing on Blogs 2009, founded/published by the ever-present Bora Zivkovic and edited by scicurious. Nice pointer to four entires on weightlessness, major medical troubles, vampires v zombies, and how poverty affects brain development.
Slate's Sarah Wideman reports that Insurance companies deny fertility treatment coverage to unmarried women.
The Bay State's AG finds that Massachusetts Hospital Costs Not Connected To Quality Of Care
Ezra Klein asks a good question: Was Medicare popular when it passed? Apparently not.
Jeff Jarvis…
bioephemera | March 17, 2010While I was on blogcation, I got an email from the watchdog group Stinky Journalism, complaining that prominent science author and professor Jared Diamond (Collapse, Guns, Germs and Steel) was in the hot seat again. (You may remember that Stinky Journalism broke the story about the lawsuit against Diamond arising from his New Yorker piece on tribal violence in New Guinea; I blogged about the fallout of the controversy here and here.)
Really? I thought; what has Diamond supposedly done this time? Here's the scoop from Stinky Journalism:
[In] the February 18 issue of the journal Nature . . .…
ddobbs | March 17, 2010I'll try doing this now and then, maybe regularly, to gather the more notable tweets I get in my twitter feed.
Darwin2009: Population-level traits that affect, and do not affect, invasion success http://ow.ly/1mMUp
jayrosen_nyu: "The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company." <--- Bill Keller http://jr.ly/2pfz
dhayton: âH-Madnessâ is a new blog on the history of psychiatry, madness, etc. For and by scholars: http://historypsychiatry.wordpress.com/
stevesilberman: The brains of psychopaths may be hypersensitive to dopamine rewards - http://bit.ly/daP9Go…
ddobbs | March 16, 2010
image Bill Waterson
Ed Yong, responding to a run of recent rumination about the nature and role of science journalism, ponders the value of the "This is cool" science story:
None of this is intended to suggest that "this-is-cool" stories are somehow superior to those explaining the interaction between science, policy and society, or what David Dobbs calls the "smells funny" stories. They are simply the stories that I prefer to tell. Individual journalists can specialise in one or more of these areas but across the science writing population, we ultimately need a mix of approaches.
Two points…
edyong | March 16, 2010A couple of nights ago, I discovered a blog by Canadian science journalist Colin Schultz, who is doing a series of interviews with eminent science journalists including Carl Zimmer, Nicola Jones, David Dobbs and Jay Ingram. They're great reads and I especially liked the stark differences in the answers from Nicola Jones and Carl Zimmer, particularly about the sorts of stories they like to tell.
Jones says, "The really fulfilling stories are the ones that come, I think, spinning out of real world events." She is interested in how science "relates to policy developments" or "to things that are…
ddobbs | March 15, 2010
We'll start with the science, cruise through J school, and end with healthcare reform or bust.
Genetic material
Willful ignorance is not an effective argument against personal genomics : Genetic Future Mr. McDonald spanks the frightened.
The American Scientist, meanwhile, takes a shot at Putting Genes in Perspective
Culture and the human genome From the excellent A Replicated Typo. (That's gene humor, is 'replicated typo.')
Going to J School
State of the Media, By the Numbers : CJR A review of a review: Columbia Journalism reviews Pew's "State of the Media" report. Eye-popping numbers and…
grrlscientist | March 15, 2010tags: embargoed science, embargoes, publishing, MSM, journalism, science writing
Image: Orphaned?
Embargoes: you either love them or hate them, and I hate them. No, let me rephrase: I despise embargoes. In fact, science story embargoes have been my daily rant for literally years. No, really. Every f*cking day. Well, except maybe for Sundays, which is devoted to ranting about all those religious wackaloons who have been trying to recruit visiting the previous week and preaching at me when I was absent-minded enough to open the door. But until a few months ago when I finally managed to…
ddobbs | March 11, 2010Chicago Tribune recently banned (sensibly, it seems) the use of 119 cliched words or phrases in Tribune story. NPR blogger Ian Chillag, who apparently either did not get or badly misread the memo, promptly set about using all 119 in a single sentence . Jump the break ('read more") to revel in the whole thing:
In other news, stay tuned, because in our top story tonight, some really good (or bad) news: as expected, in a surprise move yesterday, informed sources say, a world class icon, diva, mother of all motorists, and famed undocumented alien, lauded for putting area residents at risk and…
edyong | March 10, 2010If anyone's in London or thereabouts on the 31st of March, come and see me and a few other science journalists discuss the state of science in the media at City University. The discussion follows a recent government report, entitled Science in the Media: Securing the Future. The report declared that science coverage (in the UK, at least) was in "rude health", while is somewhat different to the picture that others have painted.
I'll be discussing the report as well as, presumably, other matters about science journalism along with a panel of veteran UK journalists. I assume that I have been…
jstemwedel | March 4, 2010Let's say you're a book review editor for a large circulation science periodical. You receive books from publishers and you look for scientists with the relevant expertise to write reviews that really engage the content of the books they are reviewing.
The thing with having the relevant expertise, though, is that it may put you right in the middle of a controversy that the book you've been asked to review is probing or advancing.
In other words, it may be tricky to find a reviewer who is conversant in the scientific issues the book raises and simultaneously reasonably objective about those…
bioephemera | March 2, 2010
Jesse ("Jess3") Thomas's brand-new clip, like a slimmed-down, retro-styled, updated cousin of that ubiquitous "Right here, right now" video, is the perfect appetizer to complement the Pew's brand-new report on participatory news. Enjoy.
edyong | February 18, 2010
This post is written by a special guest - Ivan Oransky, executive editor at Reuters Health, who I had the pleasure of meeting in person at Science Online 2010. I was delighted when Ivan accepted my invitation to follow up a recent Twitter exchange with a guest-post, and shocked that he even turned down my generous honorarium of some magic beans. Here, he expounds on the tricky issues of journalistic balance and how journalists can choose their sources to avoid "he-said-she-said" journalism. Over to him:
The other day, a tweet by Maggie Koerth-Baker, a freelance science journalist in…
hrynyshyn | February 16, 2010Covering climatology may not be the biggest challenge facing today's mainstream news outlets and the journalists they employ, but it certainly has exposed a serious weakness in conventional news reporting. That weakness, as I implied in my previous post, is a pathological fear of taking sides, even then the "sides" in question are reality and fantasy.
Part of the problem is endemic to much of what passes for science journalism, which is too often practiced by journalists who know so little about the subject they're covering that they can't properly evaluate the reliability or trustworthiness…
hrynyshyn | February 12, 2010David Roberts at Grist, riffing on This American Life's Ira Glass, nails it on the head:
"...news reporting is declining in part because of just this phenomenon: reporters do not react like human beings. The audience doesn't see or hear themselves in most news reporting. When covering something amazing, reporters are not allowed express awe. When covering something unexpected, they're not allowed to express surprise. And when faced with conservatives celebrating and reinforcing one another's ignorance, they're not allowed to show gall or outrage. Or mock.
People reading these stories get "the…
bioephemera | February 8, 2010Well, not quite. I got an intriguing abstract in my inbox earlier today, to this new paper from BMC Neuroscience:
Here using a new conditioned suppression paradigm, we investigated whether the ability of a foot-shockpaired conditioned stimulus to suppress chocolate-seeking behavior was antagonized by previous exposure to a chronic stressful experience, thus modeling aberrant chocolate seeking in sated mice. Our findings demonstrate that while Control (non-food deprived) animals showed a profound conditioned suppression of chocolate seeking during presentation of conditioned stimulus,…
milhayser | February 5, 2010
Vaccines have guarded health and life for centuries, relegating once devastating diseases to near total obscurity. But many people now take vaccines for granted, and some blame vaccines for autism and other disorders. On Respectful Insolence, Orac reports the downfall of 1998 research which first tied MMR vaccines to the occurrence of autism in children. As Orac writes, "hearing that the man whose bad science launched a thousand quackeries had finally been declared unethical and dishonest [...] brought joy to my heart, the joy that comes with seeing justice done." ERV jumps on other news…
jstemwedel | February 3, 2010Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
Among other things, this panel took up the article panelist Lindsey Hoshaw wrote about the garbage patch for the New York Times and some of the reaction to it (including from panelist Miriam Goldstein).
Lindsey's article was interesting because of the process. To get a spot on the ship going out to the North Pacific gyre, where the garbage patch is, she had to come up with funding. (We learned during the session that ship time on some of…