This morning, as you can also see one post down in Paul Raeburn‘s take on a “science writing renaissance” discussion on line (to which I also plan to post a thought or two), finds a flurry of introspection among science writers re our craft. Here is more.
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First brightener for the day is a droll look by Richard A. Kerr at a NASA public affairs effort to be subtle and calm. It concerns results pertinent to the old Viking Landers and to the reliability of their tools for detecting biology on Mars 34 years ago. Kerr, a staffer at Science Magazine, has it at AAAS’s ScienceInsider, a haven for “Breaking news and analysis from the world of science policy.” It’s about a spurt of “news” over the weekend on discovery that the chemical analysis set-up on those old landers had a weakness. If given certain perchlorate-rich soils the system may have been blind to any life in it. For 
instance, a re-run of the same analytic procedure recently missed entirely the microbes in soil from Chile’s Atacama Desert. For the tracker’s part, I have to say I glossed past these stories that Kerr addresses yesterday. I’d seen press release first and thought ho hum, let’s look for something more lively than this. Kerr’s look at it is sly. Quite crafty is his observation about NASA’s effort to distribute the test results while explaining they provide no reason to think there is life on Mars after all. Any such hope was torpedoed, he write, by a simple mistake: the release “had ‘Mars’ and ‘life’ in its first sentence.” Need one point out the irony of NASA’s public relations establishment, for decades among the most effective boosters (occasionally hypersonically so) of achievements, however small, by people in NASA or only remotely associated with it, now stymied by a story that it could not tamp DOWN?
UPDATE: I am forwarded at least one outlet’s story that commendably cleaves to the sensible.
- Science News – Ron Cowen: Mars organics get new lease on life;
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In a way, Kerr went upstream from the news to look at the process that led to its going public. Which leads us to a proposal made at a UK meeting, Science Online London on how the web is changing science. Participant Alice Bell posted, at her blog, her contribution to a panel session that included the likes of Ed Yong, commandant of the popular blogsite Not Exactly Rocket Science. Bell’s idea is to foster, in new media and old, more attention to the way science occurs and to its internal politics and tensions – “upstream” from the published results and tidy-seeming conclusions that are more commonly all that the public sees of it. She notes that long-form traditional journalism has always taken readers and viewers into the process of science, but there’s never been a whole lot of that. One wonders whether there is much audience for more upstream engagement by the public – it’s hard enough to get the wider public to pay attention to dramatic scientific outcomes – but public advocacy groups and other narrow audiences could do us all good if they had more windows on the headwaters of science. For that matter, Bell would like a more public upstream exposure of science journalism itself. A wiki newsroom?
For one thoughtful reaction to Bell’s post: science communications professor and pundit Matthew Nisbet uses it as a launching pad for ideas on how the new science journalism might effectively go upstream. His thoughts are serious, and one ventures to say, that makes them particularly challenging in journalism. Which is to say, when one is dead serious one may seem, to most of the public, a bit, uh, boring.
It is unclear what public would devour a heavy diet of such insights as are to be netted upstream. He describes standard news fodder and form as the “individual hero scientist (or team) struggling against the complexity and uncertainty of a problem.” To augment and enrich the stew, he yearns for “a broader, more thematic view of science not as a collection of a few individuals and personalities, but as an institution … embedded within a social and cultural context that is shaped by norms, economic factors, ideology, and culture.” Well, yes, that’d be great. It could be a syllabus for a fine upper division or graduate semester-long seminar in sociology. And there is a small if elite audience of movers and shakers (eg, congressional staffers and NGOs) that would look at such reports keenly. But it hardly seems stout competition for sports, murder, war, celebrity nonsense, corruption in private and gov’t agencies, cures for vile illnesses, and such science sensations as occasional hints of life on other planets that already scrap for the attention of the average citizen.
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Meanwhile, the convergence of media continues. At The Guardian, a bastion of legacy news reporting including serious science coverage, its writer Alok Jha a week ago introduced a “new Guardian science blogs network” and announced a science blogging festival to boot. The newspaper’s science writers have in essence opened their existing sci blog site to selected outsiders. Contributors are to include, with the parenthetical remarks added by me, Brian Switek (a paleontology whiz), Jenny Rohn (cell biologist and night-owl netizen), Ed Yong (prolific sci writer, crazy-curious, hits to all fields), Deborah Blum (Pulitzer winner, prof. at Wisconsin, twittermaniacally swell person interested in yucks and yuks), Dorothy Bishop (neuroscientist and foe of idiocy in journalism), and Vaughan Bell (psychology mega-twitterer). A week in, it is clear from the site that it has a good deal more contributors than that.
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To wind this up, Jha in his intro to the Guardian’s new site highlights a most impressive statistic that I for one had missed (or don’t remember from) when it first came out in May. According to a Pew Research Center study, science news fills only 1 percent or so of the news hole in traditional press. But a whopping 10 percent of blogs are largely or all about science. That’s remarkable. It doesn’t say what the collective audience is for them, but the number of postings and the verbiage (and work by myriad science writers of many stripes, paid and unpaid) is large.
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– Charlie Petit
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