When Janet Raloff couldn't get her employer to ante up $15,000 for a reporting trip to Antarctica, they turned to Kickstarter and soon raised the needed money via donations. That seems to trouble Paul Raeburn at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker: "Is this a good model for journalism? Should players like Science News step aside and let freelancers and others with smaller budgets take advantage of Kickstarter? Or is this simply a bad idea? I'm not sure what I think."

In a provocative post at Alternet, Karthika Muthukumaraswamy lays the blame squarely on science writers who feed the public's thirst for easy answers: "They combine decades of scientific research with hearsay and speculation, metaphysical analysis and societal trends, and offer it to the audience in bite-size palatable pieces,” with “hip, new phrases” like Lehrer’s “bias blind spot” serving “as proxies for real explanation.”

A new drug appears to halt Alzheimer's disease in its tracks, at least for some patients. Is it a "breakthrough?" Judith Graham says no on the Association of Health Care Journalists' site, and calls out journalists who suggest otherwise: "Especially on a topic like Alzheimer’s, so fraught with emotion and hopelessness, the responsibility for getting it right – not too dewy-eyed, not too jaundiced, carefully balanced and hewing closely to the facts – is a heavy one."