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Science writing news
Felix Salmon imparts a bleak view of journalism's future to hopeful neophytes: "Life is not good for journalists. And while a couple of years ago I harbored hopes that things might improve, those hopes have now pretty much evaporated. Things are not only bad; they’re going to get worse." Ezra Klein rebuts: "The Death of Journalism is really a kind of disruptive change in journalism, and that's bad for incumbents, but you're not an incumbent."
Joel Achenbach writes about why some educated people reject science on everything from fluoridation to climate change: "The 'science communication problem,' as it’s blandly called by the scientists who study it, has yielded abundant new research into how people decide what to believe — and why they so often don’t accept the scientific consensus." One factor: "People tend to use scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that have already been shaped by their worldview."
News that a sequel will be published prompts Roy Peter Clark to analyze the tense wait for the jury's verdict in To Kill A Mockingbird: "Just when it feels the waiting will go on forever the clerk says, '"This court will come to order," in a voice that rang with authority, and the heads below us jerked up.' The suspense that expands over six pages is dispelled by action that occurs in less than two, in storytelling that is among the most powerful in American history."
The European Space Agency has now officially walked back last March's claim that the BICEP2 telescope had found evidence of the universe's early, rapid expansion, but Tabitha M. Powledge warns against making too much of that news: "It is crucial, essential, mandatory to understand that the new analysis does NOT show that the inflation idea is wrong, despite some headlines to that effect. Only that the BICEP2 data didn’t prove it. Inflation theory is still alive and well."
Michael Roston of the New York Times social media staff discusses some lessons learned, many of which boil down to "less is more." For example, Roston writes, the team of Times tweeters often tries different approaches to attracting readers from social media, "but there are also a significant number of instances where we shouldn’t try too hard to write a great tweet when other skilled journalists in our newsroom have already written one in the form of a headline."
The last we heard from Scott Carney, he was saying freelance writers in aggregate earn less than one college football coach. His math on that was challenged, but now he's back anyway with a post proposing that writers for major magazines should get $20 per word: "So how did I come up with $20 per word? Multiplication. If we were to make just 10% of the gross revenues of a given magazine then we would earn at least $20 for every word we publish."
The Newspaper Guild changed its name to NewsGuild, but that won't make web journalists sign up, Lydia DePillis writes. She cites two reasons: "One is the loss of leverage, with more aspiring journalists than there are jobs and an environment in which content is becoming increasingly commoditized. The other is a shift in identity, with a generation of younger workers less familiar with unions who’ve built personal brands that they can transfer to other media companies."
The Des Moines Register writes about a researcher’s plea deal for faking the results of his AIDS vaccine research. The Boston Globe reports on a Harvard researcher who published false data in Nature. Anna Clark compliments both but laments that no one connects the dots in these stories: "In classic newspaper tradition, they are covering them as local stories rather than as data points in a national narrative, even though they cumulatively point to a larger issue."