NBC science correspondent Robert Bazell is leaving the network after 38 years, TVNewser reports.
In an email to the staff, he wrote,...
Paul Raeburn's Tracker
NBC science correspondent Robert Bazell is leaving the network after 38 years, TVNewser reports.
In an email to the staff, he wrote, "The best thing about television journalism is that you never do it alone. Everything is a cooperative effort. To all of you who have shared your wisdom, your talent, your hard work, all the good times and adventures and above all your friendship, I cannot begin to express enough gratitude."
Bazell will be joining Yale University as an adjunct professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology.
I have run into Bazell often, at scientific meetings and elsewhere, and I know him to be a smart and hard-working reporter. Television isn't always kind to science stories that require intelligent and sometimes lengthy...
Michael Calderone at The Huffington Post is reporting that Lenny Bernstein, a sports editor at The Washington Post, has...
Michael Calderone at The Huffington Post is reporting that Lenny Bernstein, a sports editor at The Washington Post, has been assigned to the environment beat at the paper.
The Columbia Journalism Review and others raised concern earlier this month when Bernstein's predecessor on the beat, Juliet Eilperin, was reassigned to the White House. The move was particularly disturbing because it came just after The New York Times had canceled its Green blog, a signal to many that the Times would devote fewer resources to environmental coverage. (Times officials said that was not the case, and that...
A new report on the state of American journalism found "a continued erosion of news reporting resources," and " a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into...
A new report on the state of American journalism found "a continued erosion of news reporting resources," and " a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands."
Those were among the many disturbing conclusions from the latest annual report on American journalism by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report was released earlier this week.
I wasn't inclined to make too much of the report, because it seemed a bit irrelevant to the news industry that I write about. In my opinion, there has never been as much science writing, or as much good science writing, as there is now. And I think that's true of the media generally, not just science journalism. I haven't been this excited about the news business since I was trying to claw my way...
An apparently despondent Julie Rovner of NPR posted the following on Facebook this afternoon:
The ...
An apparently despondent Julie Rovner of NPR posted the following on Facebook this afternoon:
The story she links to, which she wrote for NPR's shots blog, explains her despair.
Despite her efforts and those by a lot of others, the public, she wrote, "actually knows less about the law now than when it passed in 2010. Oh, and a lot of what people think they know just isn't so." Tough medicine for her and for the others who've been covering Obamacare.
I'm afraid we can't provide much help for Rovner here; we're not entirely sure what the law will do either. Perhaps she can take some comfort...
NOVA has an unparalleled reputation and track record for excellence in science journalism on television; no other organization can come close. Yet its attempt to extend its brand to a new science news website--if brand extension is what this is--seems to be off to a very soft start.
NOVA Next...
NOVA has an unparalleled reputation and track record for excellence in science journalism on television; no other organization can come close. Yet its attempt to extend its brand to a new science news website--if brand extension is what this is--seems to be off to a very soft start.
NOVA Next, as the site is called, invited me to review it. On Feb. 28, Tim De Chant, the editor of NOVA Next, welcomed readers by saying NOVA would bring to the web the expertise and passion displayed it displays in its television show. This is how he described the venture:
NOVA Next will be focused on big stories, the sort you’re used to hearing from NOVA. We’ll have some of the biggest names in science, technology, and engineering giving us the inside scoop on...
If you were as impressed and enlightened as I was by Steven Brill's article on American healthcare in Time magazine, you should take a look at...
If you were as impressed and enlightened as I was by Steven Brill's article on American healthcare in Time magazine, you should take a look at the conversation he had on March 7th with reporters and editors at ProPublica about the origins of the story, how he put it together, and how it came to be published in Time. It's a short course in the practice of journalism at the highest level.
The conversation--which you can listen to or read a transcript of--begins with ProPublica spokesman Mike Webb complaining, mildly, that Brill got a story that ProPublica would dearly like to have had. "We were a little jealous," he said. "After all, longform journalism is our bread and butter at...
[Update: Includes mention of Carl Zimmer's excellent cover story in the current National Geographic, which I missed on my first go-around. Also, see Zimmer's Twitter stream, @carlzimmer, for a lot of discussion.]
An interesting day-long conference Friday with...
[Update: Includes mention of Carl Zimmer's excellent cover story in the current National Geographic, which I missed on my first go-around. Also, see Zimmer's Twitter stream, @carlzimmer, for a lot of discussion.]
An interesting day-long conference Friday with a lot of glittering scientific and environmental presenters got only a smattering of coverage, as far as I can tell. I was surprised; the conference promised not only to include a lot of interesting science, but also to raise a lot of tricky scientific and ethical issues. And it was webcast live all day Friday by its host, National Geographic, meaning reporters could have easily covered from anywhere.
Some might have been put off by the name, as I was. "TEDxDeExtinction," with its speed-bump capitals and slashing x's, works better as a graphic...
Reporters who cover science and medicine often make the mistake, early in their careers, of reporting that somebody who has responded to a treatment has been "cured," or that some medical advance or other is a "breakthrough." After we've made a mistake such as that, or more than one, we...
Reporters who cover science and medicine often make the mistake, early in their careers, of reporting that somebody who has responded to a treatment has been "cured," or that some medical advance or other is a "breakthrough." After we've made a mistake such as that, or more than one, we generally learn that many, many things called "cures" or "breakthroughs" are anything but.
Medicine generally advances in incremental steps, not breakthroughs. And there are many treatments that improve the lives of patients but don't wipe out illness in the way that we might call a cure.
So it's notable that scientists have used the word "cure" twice in recent weeks in regard to treatments for AIDS, something we've generally been told is likely to be, at best, a chronic, manageable disease--but not one that can be cured. Many people with AIDS are now living reasonably healthy lives thanks to a cocktail of...
[Note: Emily Anthes and Dan Fagin are friends of mine, and Anthes and I share the same book editor. That would disqualify me as a reviewer, so please consider this merely a notice of books you might find interesting--not a review.]
GloFish, transgenic goats that secrete drugs in their milk, and an...
[Note: Emily Anthes and Dan Fagin are friends of mine, and Anthes and I share the same book editor. That would disqualify me as a reviewer, so please consider this merely a notice of books you might find interesting--not a review.]
GloFish, transgenic goats that secrete drugs in their milk, and an FDA that doesn't seem quite sure what it should do about a new Noah's Ark of exotic, genetically engineered animals are all characters in the new book by Emily Anthes entitled Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts.
Anthes catalogues the wide variety of beasts that might soon become commonplace if the government, animal activists, and the public can somehow decide what should be allowed and what shouldn't. Using monkeys and apes to supply organs for humans is taboo, Anthes writes, but what about pigs? Genetically engineered pigs can be sources of donor organs from which chemical "pig"...
A writer working with John Belushi's widow on a biography of Belushi says he can demonstrate that reporting by the legendary Bob Woodward of The Washington Post might get the facts right, but it distorts their meaning.
"How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve...
A writer working with John Belushi's widow on a biography of Belushi says he can demonstrate that reporting by the legendary Bob Woodward of The Washington Post might get the facts right, but it distorts their meaning.
"How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status? I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions," Tanner Colby writes in Slate. Colby says his work on the new Belushi biography put him in the position of essentially re-reporting Woodward's 1984 book ...
When a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis was accused by federal officials of falsifying data, Blythe Bernhard...
When a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis was accused by federal officials of falsifying data, Blythe Bernhard wrote a story for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch outlining the accusations. The student, Adam Savine, who "admitted to investigators that he exaggerated his findings," would not comment, and at first she could not get comment from the professor who supervised him. The university did not release its investigation of the student. So Bernhard didn't have a lot to go on. She covered the who, what, when, where, and why, and that was about all she could do.
But when she got in touch with the student's mentor, a Washington University psychology professor named Todd Braver, he...
The cover story on last Sunday's New York Times Magazine is the latest in a rather remarkable string of medical and psychology stories, including two covers, since the beginning of the year. I don't normally think of medical and science stories as regular fare for the Times magazine,...
The cover story on last Sunday's New York Times Magazine is the latest in a rather remarkable string of medical and psychology stories, including two covers, since the beginning of the year. I don't normally think of medical and science stories as regular fare for the Times magazine, but lately they have been. And that's not counting the columns by the food writer Mark Bittman, which often deal with science and nutrition.
Here's a quick review of recent stories:
Mar. 10: The Allergy Buster (cover).
Feb. 24: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food (cover).
Feb. 10: Why...
[Corrects that victim of apparent suicide was lead author, not lab director.]
Peter Whoriskey's...
[Corrects that victim of apparent suicide was lead author, not lab director.]
Peter Whoriskey's tale of a whistleblower who was fired by Johns Hopkins Medical School drew me in right from the start.
The story, published on the front page of The Washington Post, began:
The numbers didn’t add up.
Over and over, Daniel Yuan, a medical doctor and statistician, couldn’t understand the results coming out of the lab, a prestigious facility at Johns Hopkins Medical School funded by millions from the National Institutes of Health.
I love stories like this, and Whoriskey's lede promised a fascinating and disturbing mystery tale that I was looking forward to. I was...
I posted my thoughts on the long Steven Brill healthcare story in Time, and now Tabitha M. Powledge at On Science Blogs has put...
I posted my thoughts on the long Steven Brill healthcare story in Time, and now Tabitha M. Powledge at On Science Blogs has put together a nice roundup of comments from other bloggers and pundits, where you can see a range of opinions. Powledge summarizes Brill's 26,000-word article as a tale of "greed, oligopoly, greed, monopoly, and greed."
Health policy expert Uwe Reinhardt is surprised that Americans are "shocked, just shocked" to learn that health care squeezes middle- and upper-middle-class patients "for every penny of savings or assets" they can get. But that misses the point: We might know that, but Brill made clear that the problem is even worse than many of us...
The American College of Cardiology has a story it doesn't want you to cover.
Last week, in anticipation of its annual meeting, it put out a press release that began, "Drinking grape juice improves heart health!" And then it immediately backed off:
Does this seem too good to...
The American College of Cardiology has a story it doesn't want you to cover.
Last week, in anticipation of its annual meeting, it put out a press release that began, "Drinking grape juice improves heart health!" And then it immediately backed off:
Does this seem too good to be true—maybe it is. Results of medical research, especially research that finds health benefits in common foods or activities, can be big news and highly publicized. But not all medical research is as simple as a headline makes it seem. The American College of Cardiology encourages consumers to be proactive in researching medical claims they hear about in the news and discuss such findings with their doctors before making drastic changes.
The release said that a presentation at the meeting "found that 'healthy' smokers who drink Concord grape juice have improved endothelial function." The endothelium is a lining inside blood...
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