science journalism Archives - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Usha Lee McFarling / November 17th 2025 / Alumni News, Announcements, Guest Posts

The State of Science Journalism: A Note From the New KSJ Director

“It’s worse than Covid.” Those weren’t words I expected to hear about the current climate for science writing, especially not from an emergency room physician. The comment came from Jeremy Faust, MD, who in addition to being a physician is the editor-in-chief of MedPage Today and the author of the popular Substack newsletter “Inside Medicine,” where he writes about the toll current policies are taking on science, research, and public health.

Faust was speaking at an event KSJ convened earlier this month called “Covering Crisis: Science Reporting in an Age of Turmoil, Fear, and Data Erasure,” held to discuss the extreme and difficult environment science writers are navigating as they struggle to cover the rush of news coming out of the new administration and personally process the devastating effects some new policies and cuts are having.

“It’s draining. It’s incredibly sad … We know people are dying right now,” Sara Reardon, a current KSJ fellow who covered the administration for Science, said at the event about cuts to U.S. AID and HIV programs in Africa.

In addition to serious discussions about challenges facing science journalists, panelists at “Covering Crisis” shared in moments of camaraderie as they discussed the absurdity of some of their shared experiences.

Reardon was among speakers, including former KSJ fellow Anil Oza of STAT and Katherine J. Wu of the Atlantic, who said the cognitive load of working as they saw institutions and programs they had covered dismantled was dispiriting, and more onerous than Covid, because conversations today are far more divisive and politicized. Many also said the work load had been relentless.

“Until recently, I had been working all the time,” Boston Globe Health and Science Editor and former KSJ fellow Anna Kuchment said. “If I wasn’t editing a story, I was reading. I was obsessed with what we were covering and not covering.”

We raced to pull this event together because I thought it was important for our community to gather and discuss this singular moment in time, when research and science are under attack and covering science is extremely politicized and demanding in new and complex ways. I’d asked six people to speak, thinking only half of them would be available on short notice. But everyone said yes, indicating this was a conversation that people wanted, and maybe even needed, to have.

It is clear to me from this conversation that the passion to keep doing the work of science journalism remains strong. No one is backing down, despite challenges like the opacity of federal agencies and more sources insisting on remaining anonymous.

It is also clear to me that science reporters have to take care of themselves and their mental health, take breaks, and sometimes tune out the news. Because this work is not letting up and the impact that funding and personnel cuts are having on science and public health must continue to be covered rigorously.

In a panel discussion following the Victor K. McElheny Award ceremony, Mcfarling connected with Quinn Glabicki, lead reporter and photojournalist for “EQT’S Gas Play,” over the importance of local reporting.

Another important event we held this month — the Victor K. McElheny Award ceremony — left me feeling extremely optimistic. This award, to honor outstanding local or regional science reporting, was given this year to Pittsburgh-based PublicSource, which produced a powerful investigative series on the effect fracking operations have had on families in rural West Virginia.

It was fascinating to hear lead reporter and photojournalist Quinn Glabicki describe how he found the story, gained the trust of the families involved over time, and reported the project — even sleeping on one family’s couch one night so he could join an early morning deer hunting trip. Hearing from PublicSource Editor-in-Chief Halle Stockton, who is using innovative methods, like focusing on empathy and teaming with local influencers to tell stories on social media, was truly inspiring.

We very much missed the presence of Victor and Ruth McElheny in the audience at his namesake event. I continue to think of him daily as I begin to lead the program he founded more than four decades ago.

Mcfarling joined KSJ fellows and staff in an annual immersive experience in Woods Hole, Mass.

As Victor would wish, the fellowship year is off and running, and as busy as ever with seminars, field trips, and a new Friday luncheon series for fellows we started to discuss the craft and practice of journalism. We just returned from our annual trip to Woods Hole, where we had a timely discussion about communicating science in crisis from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute scientist Chris Reddy, and saw a breathtakingly beautiful presentation on research into butterfly wing evolution and genetics from Marine Biological Laboratory director Nipam Patel — who showed us just a fraction of the remarkable butterfly collection he has been building since age eight.

This year’s fellowship class is extraordinary, and off to a great start. They are not to be messed with: The class includes a former professional fencer, a Black Belt in karate, someone who tracks ocelots, and someone who once ate an entire bird. I can’t wait to see what they’ll do during their year at MIT.

I’m thrilled to be taking the reins from the incredible Deb Blum to build on her work, and that of associate director Ashley Smart, to help steer KSJ into the future — as challenging as that future may be.

UPDATE: A previous version of this piece gave an incorrect affiliation for Jeremy Faust. He is editor-in-chief of MedPage Today.

by Knight Science Journalism / March 18th 2025

Special Lecture Series: Who Tells the Story of Science? The Power and Peril of Science and Technology Journalism in 2025

Science and technology journalism faces a pivotal moment. Our most pressing challenges—climate crisis, global pandemics, the transformative potential of artificial intelligence—demand vigorous, deeply-informed, and thoughtful coverage by independent journalists.

As questions about science, technology, health, and the environment become ever more central to our political lives across many scales, from local to national to global, science and technology journalism is pivotal to safeguarding the democratic process. Science and technology journalists must balance multiple, often competing, imperatives: to translate and explain hard-won scientific knowledge, while also holding scientific institutions to account; to report on the social effects of technological change, while subjecting claims of technological hype (and doom) up to independent scrutiny. They must do so at a time when seismic shifts in the media landscape, from the rise of social media to the hollowing out of newsrooms, have created new threats (and perhaps opportunities) for the journalistic enterprise. This lecture series brings together four visionary leaders in the field to reflect on the state of science and technology journalism today—and to chart a path for its future.

All talks will take place from 5:15 to 6:45 pm ET and are open to members of the MIT community.

Wednesday, March 19: Bina Venkataraman, Editor-at-large for Strategy and Innovation, The Washington Post

Location: E51-395

Monday, March 31: Hillary Rosner, Assistant Director, Center for Environmental Journalism, University of Colorado-Boulder

Location: E51-145

Wednesday, April 2: Usha Lee McFarling, National Correspondent, STAT

Location: E51-145

Monday, April 7: Ashley Smart, Associate Director, Knight Science Journalism Program, MIT

Location: E51-145

by Shafaq Zia / December 9th 2021 / Fellowship Life

For Filmmaker Asha Stuart, Journalism Is a Means for Social Justice

Growing up around her grandparents in Old Fourth Ward — a historic Atlanta neighborhood with deep ties to the civil rights movement — Asha Stuart found herself drawn to issues of race and equity at a young age. Her family, she says, was the embodiment of social justice.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that, today, Stuart’s work as a freelance documentary filmmaker and photographer is driven by the same passion: shedding light on the lives of people who are living in marginalized communities and facing racial, economic, and gender inequality, social exclusion, or environmental racism.

This year, as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, Stuart is producing a documentary film that will investigate environmental injustice faced by African American communities in the deep south. This project is rooted in the same values that have guided Stuart throughout her career: Whether she’s covering climate migration in Bangladesh or gender based violence in southern Africa, she has a deep commitment to understanding the nuances around complex issues and a desire to report them empathetically.

It is a style that Stuart credits largely to her time as a cultural anthropology major at the University of Cincinnati. “It gave me the ability to be with people longer, investigate deeper, and break outside the practices of parachute journalism,” she said. In a 2015 internship with CNN’s documentary film unit, she learned to pitch a story, develop the vision for a video journalism project, and even bounce back from rejection. A couple years later, she received a grant from National Geographic Explorers, a program that offers training and support to young science storytellers, and that’s when she got her “big break.”

On her first international reporting trip as an Explorer, Stuart traveled to India to cover the Siddi tribe, a group whose heritage can be traced back to the Bantu tribes of East Africa. The Siddis have historically been marginalized because of their darker skin. Stuart felt she could relate to the community’s struggle, and she was compelled to capture their history and cultural diversity in a video documentary for National Geographic.

“I know what it feels like to be Black in America — consistently feeling like you’re out of place,” said Stuart. “In India, Black people feel the same way. It’s like that connection of being from the African diaspora.”

Asha Stuart and Gullah native Kenneth Hodges look at a map to locate Gullah communities in Beaufort, South Carolina.

Stuart’s documentary, “Inside a Lost African Tribe Living in India Today,” has over 2 million views on YouTube and was selected to be a part of the National Geographic Short Film Showcase, which highlights exceptional short video pieces from around the world. Following the success of this documentary, Stuart has gone on to cover both national and international stories for Time, Politico, PBS, and CIRCA, among other outlets.

In her upcoming documentary, Stuart will explore how African American communities in Alabama, South Carolina, and Louisiana continue to be adversely impacted by policies from the Jim Crow era, including housing policies that led to Black communities disproportionately being situated near refineries, chemical plants, and superfund sites. Today, Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” has some of the highest death rates due to cancer and other respiratory diseases.

To Stuart, environmental injustice is one of the most important stories of our time — an issue that will impact history. Some of the communities that are being documented in Stuart’s work will be displaced in the coming decades, she says. “There’s a whole migration that’s happening in Cancer Alley…. I mean, it’s wiping out the whole community, and it is our duty as journalists to reflect the significance of the current moment.”

Stuart’s documentary project is informed not only by years of reporting on marginalized communities around the world, but by her personal experiences as an African American woman in the U.S. Over the course of her career, she has found herself turning down many opportunities because of the pressure to portray marginalized communities as stereotypically poor, welfare dependent, or criminal.

Today, Stuart is a strong advocate of minority-led projects and is leading by example with her all -Black production team. To her, it’s critical that African Americans have a platform to tell their own stories, with their own unique voice and perspective. “If not us,” she said, “then who?”

by Knight Science Journalism / May 6th 2019 / Announcements, KSJ News & Events

Knight Science Journalism Program Announces 2019-20 Fellows

The fellows will come to Cambridge to explore science, technology, and the craft of journalism at some of the top research universities in the world.

The Knight Science Journalism program at MIT, an internationally renowned mid-career fellowship program, is proud to announce that ten elite science journalists representing seven countries and four continents will make up its class of 2019-20.

The fellows, selected from more than 120 applicants, are an award-winning and diverse group. They include accomplished reporters from the Des Moines Register and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, veteran editors of international outlets like the BBC and New Scientist, and a freelance journalist who was recently named the European Science Writer of the Year.

The fellows will come to Cambridge for a ten-month fellowship that allows them to explore science, technology, and the craft of journalism in depth, to concentrate on a specialty in science, and to learn at some of the top research universities in the world.

“This is a tremendous group of journalists doing work that has real impact,” said KSJ director Deborah Blum. “I think they’ll find that Cambridge is really a unique and inspiring place to learn and grow as a science journalist.”

The Knight Science Journalism program, supported by a generous endowment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is recognized around the world as the premier mid-career fellowship program for science writers, editors, and multimedia journalists. With support from the program, fellows pursue an academic year of independent study, augmented by twice-weekly seminars taught by some of the world’s leading scientists and storytellers, as well as a variety of rotating, skills-focused master classes and workshops. The goal: fostering professional growth among the world’s small but essential community of journalists covering science and technology, and encouraging them to pursue that mission, first and foremost, in the public interest.

Since its founding in 1983, the program has hosted more than 350 fellows representing media outlets from The New York Times to Le Monde, from CNN to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and more.

In addition to the fellowship program, KSJ publishes the award-winning digital magazine Undark and administers a national journalism prize, the Victor K. McElheny Award. KSJ’s academic home at MIT is the Department of Science, Technology and Society, which is part of the School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences.

Here are the 2019-20 KSJ fellows:

Anil Ananthaswamy is a freelance journalist and former staﬀ writer and deputy news editor for New Scientist. He also writes for Nature, Scientific American, Quanta, and PNAS’s Front Matter, among others. In 2013, he won the Association of British Science Writers’ Best Investigative Journalism award. He has authored three books: “The Edge of Physics,” “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” which was longlisted for the 2016 Pen/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and most recently, “Through Two Doors at Once.” He teaches an annual science journalism workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India.

Bethany Brookshire is a staff writer for Science News for Students, a digital magazine that covers the latest in scientific research for children ages 9 to 14. She is also a contributor to Science News magazine, and a host of the independent podcast Science for the People. She edited “Science Blogging: The Essential Guide,” published in 2016, and has contributed freelance work to Scientific American, Slate, The Guardian, and many other leading publications. She has a B.S. in Biology, a B.A. in Philosophy, and a Ph.D. in Physiology and Pharmacology.

John Fauber is an investigative medical reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the USA Today Network. His stories also appear in MedPage Today. Since 2009, Fauber’s work has focused on conflicts of interest in medicine. He has won more than 25 national journalism awards, leading to a special commendation for his consistent excellence from the Columbia Journalism Review. Fauber also was a major contributor to a series of stories on prion diseases in humans and animals that was selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2003.

Andrada Fiscutean is a science and technology journalist based in Romania. She has written about Eastern European hackers, journalists attacked with malware, and North Korean scientists. Her work has been featured in Nature, Ars Technica, Wired, Vice Motherboard, and ZDNet. She’s also editor-in-chief of ProFM radio, where she assembled a team of journalists who cover local news. In 2017, she won Best Feature Story at SuperScrieri, the highest award in Romanian journalism. Passionate about the history of technology, Fiscutean owns several home computers made in Eastern Europe during the 1980s.

Richard Fisher is managing editor of BBC.com features in London and editor of BBC Future, a science, health and technology features website aimed at international audiences. Through evidence-based analysis, original ideas, and human stories, BBC Future is dedicated to exploring how our world is changing. The site won a 2019 Webby award for “best writing (editorial).” Fisher also oversees the teams behind BBC Culture, the BBC’s global arts site, and BBC Reel, which features short-form factual video stories. Before that, he was a senior news editor and feature editor at New Scientist in London.

Tony Leys has worked at the Des Moines Register as an editor and reporter since 1988. He has been the newspaper’s main health care reporter since 2000, with a strong focus on mental health and health care policy. He also helps cover politics, including Iowa’s presidential caucus campaigns. Leys grew up in the Milwaukee area and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a national board member of the Association of Health Care Journalists.

Thiago Medaglia is an independent reporter for National Geographic Brazil, where he was previously an editor. Medaglia is also the founder of Ambiental Media, a Brazilian startup that transforms scientific content into accessible, compelling and innovative journalism products. An award-winning reporter and writer, he has published stories in several media outlets, such as ESPN Brazil, Mother Jones, Estadão, Folha de São Paulo, and others. He is coauthor of six books on environmental topics and was a 2015 fellow at the International Center for Journalists.

Sonali Prasad has degrees in both computer science and journalism. In 2016, she was a Google News Lab fellow and won a grant from the Brown Institute of Media Innovation to study coral reef health. She has reported on science and environment issues for publications such as the Guardian, Washington Post, Quartz, Mongabay, and Hakai Magazine. She was hired as an investigative reporter at the Columbia Journalism School’s Energy and Environment Project and her team’s work on the U.S. Export-Import Bank’s dirty fossil fuel investments won an ‘Honorable Mention’ at the Society of Environmental Journalist awards.

Molly Segal is an independent radio journalist based in Canada’s Rocky Mountains. Her documentaries and reports on environment and science air on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s national radio programs — including Quirks & Quarks, Ideas, Tapestry, and The World This Weekend — as well as WHYY’s The Pulse and WBUR/NPR’s Here & Now. Molly has worked for CBC Radio/TV, stationed across Canada. Her work takes her to remote mountains looking for grizzlies, counting miniscule snails in ancient hot springs, and observing paleontologists looking for 500-million-year-old fossils. Molly is the host and producer of The Narwhal’s upcoming inaugural podcast, Undercurrent: Bear 148.

Eva Wolfangel is a German science journalist, focusing on future technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality, computer science, data journalism, interaction between digital and real worlds, and space travel. She writes for major magazines and newspapers in Germany and Switzerland — including ZEIT, Geo, Spiegel, and NZZ — and produces radio features. As a VR reporter, she reports from virtual worlds as part of the journalistic cooperative RiffReporter. After several years as an editor, she became a freelance journalist in 2008. Eva’s specialty is to combine creative writing and technical topics in order to reach a broad audience. In 2018 she was named European Science Writer of the Year by the Association of British Science Writers. (Photo by Helena Ebel.)

by KSJ@MIT / December 1st 2018 / Announcements, KSJ News & Events

Victor K. McElheny Award Now Accepting Entries

The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT is pleased to announce that we are now accepting submissions for the 2019 Victor K. McElheny Award for local and regional science journalism. The award will recognize one outstanding work of journalism — print, digital, or broadcast — with a $5,000 prize. Submissions will be accepted through January 31, 2019.

The McElheny Award was established to honor outstanding coverage of science, public-health, technology, and environmental issues at the local or regional level. Entries may be standalone works or series, and must have been published during the 2018 calendar year. Emphasis will be put on investigative, community-service, and compelling narrative journalism that breaks new ground and makes a difference. There is no entry fee.

For answers to frequently asked questions, visit our FAQ page. To review the submission guidelines and begin a submission, click here. For more information, contact us at mcelhenyaward@mit.edu.

The Victor K. McElheny award was made possible by the generous support of Victor K. McElheny, the founder of the Knight Science Journalism Program, his wife, Ruth McElheny, and the Rita Allen Foundation.

by KSJ Staff / September 12th 2018 / KSJ News & Events

Checking in on Fact Checking in Science Journalism

The Knight Science Journalism program at MIT took a close look at one of the profession’s most underappreciated practices — and uncovered a few surprises.

At some science news publications, a fact checker could get fired for reading a quote verbatim to a source. At others, it’s standard practice. Still other publications have no formal fact checkers at all. So reports a new study coordinated by the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, “The State of Fact Checking in Science Journalism,” one of the first industry-wide looks at how science news publications go about ensuring the trustworthiness of their reporting. A key takeaway: Different outlets approach the task in vastly different ways.

The study was funded by a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The project was overseen by Knight Science Journalism Program director Deborah Blum, and spearheaded by Brooke Borel, a freelance journalist and editor. Borel notes that, although fact-checking is widely regarded as an essential part of science journalism, “we didn’t have hard data showing how it typically works or what sorts of resources journalists and outlets wish they had in order to improve it. The point of the report was to pull that data together through surveys and interviews.”

Borel and her team conducted more than 300 surveys and more than 90 interviews of editors, journalists, fact-checkers, and journalism-school faculty to gather various perspectives on fact-checking policies and procedures. The study focused not on the watchdog efforts of political fact-checkers like PolitiFact or FactCheck.org, but rather on the in-house quality control that publications do before a story goes to print — a practice known as editorial fact checking. Survey questions ranged from who does the fact-checking to how much are they paid. The study encompassed nearly 80 English language publications, including some outlets from African, Asian, and European countries.

So, what is the state of fact checking? The report seems to confirm at least one long-held suspicion: that support for fact-checking is waning. Only about a third of the publications in the study employ independent fact checkers. About 15% said they rely on copy editors for fact checking. Others place the onus on journalists and editors, and about a third have no formal fact-checking procedures in place at all.

But the study also produced some surprises. For instance, digital publications were just as likely as print outlets to use formal fact checking, a finding that runs counter to the popular narrative that the decline of fact-checking is linked to the rise of digital publishing. The study suggests that the divide is not so much between print and digital, but between news and longform: Publications seem more willing to invest in thorough fact checks for long narrative features than they are for short, breaking-news dispatches.

Borel says she was also struck to learn that “the hourly rate for fact-checkers is all over the place.” Some fact checkers reported earning $19 an hour; others four times that much. Some outlets paid as little as $15 an hour. On average, fact-checkers who participated in the study earned about $30.

The report lists several recommendations for improving and standardizing fact-checking across the profession, including:

encouraging all outlets to put in place formal processes to catch errors before they print;
encouraging publications to provide regular training and refresher courses for new and longtime staff;
prioritizing fact checking of longform journalism at outlets where it would be impractical to independently fact check all stories; and
creating a fact-checking cooperative, where outlets that can’t afford to pay full-time fact-checkers could hire checkers on a subscription or per-project basis.

The Gordon and Betty Moore foundation sees the study as especially timely, given the current climate of heightened media scrutiny. “Science journalists are not only tasked with delivering relevant stories to readers, but they face the added challenge of decoding and translating dense, jargon-filled research,” reads a statement from the foundation. “Increased resources and processes to ensure accuracy of science stories would be immensely helpful to the field.”

Read the entire report here.

“The State of Fact-Checking in Science Journalism” was produced by Brooke Borel (author and project coordinator), Knvul Sheikh (researcher), Fatima Husain (researcher), Ashley Junger (researcher), Erin Biba (fact-checker), and Deborah Blum and Bettina Urcuioli of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. The report was made possible by a generous grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. Particular thanks are due to Holly Potter, Chief Communications Office at the Moore Foundation, for her support of both the project and her commitment to accuracy in reporting on science.