Science journalism here to stay

The mainstream issues of our time centrally involve science. Climate change, HIV/AIDS, healthcare provision, child health, viral pandemics, sustainable development, environmental pollution, alternative energy–all newsworthy topics with vast potential human consequences, which need to be covered by skilled and knowledgeable reporters.

Double Pulitzer Prize-winner Jon Franklin in 1997 wrote a lecture titled, The End of Science Writing.

He argued that journalists covering health, science and environmental issues should move on from their historical role of translating or transmitting uncritically scientific findings from specialists to non-experts.

Professor Declan Fahy. Photo courtesy of American UniversityInstead, Franklin said reporters should address the social, cultural, historical, financial and–crucially–political dimensions of science.

He concluded: “Today, science is the vital principle of our civilization. To do science is critical, to defend it the kernel of political realism. To define it in words is to be, quite simply, a writer, working the historical mainstream of literature.”

The mainstream issues of our time centrally involve science. Climate change, HIV/AIDS, healthcare provision, child health, viral pandemics, sustainable development, environmental pollution, alternative energy–all newsworthy topics with vast potential human consequences, which need to be covered by skilled and knowledgeable reporters.

But science writing appears to be coming to a more tangible end. The science journal Nature noted last year that newspapers, magazines and broadcasters were shedding their science reporting staffs. Nature reported that The Boston Globe shut down its science section, while CNN closed its science, technology, environment and weather unit.

And yet, health and environmental reporting is flourishing.

Monday’s Washington Post had on its front page two stories that could be classified as science stories. The first reported the NFL’s vow to clamp down on dangerous tackles to prevent head injuries to athletes. The second described a new initiative by Washington, D.C., schools to serve early dinners in an effort to improve childhood nutrition.

(In addition, the paper’s Health & Science section had a three-page dissection of healthcare reform as a midterm election issue.)

Tuesday’s Washington Post featured a story about how women taking a hormone replacement drug after menopause increased their chances of getting breast cancer. Another article described the lives of shrimpers and the health of the Gulf Coast six months after the BP oil spill.

This mainstream coverage is in addition to the rapidly expanding amount of science news available online about sometimes specialized areas for particular audiences. There are, for example, the vast online science sections of traditional media such as the New York Times or the U.K.’s The Guardian; the online expansion of Discover and Scientific American; and the digital news communities of scientific journals, including Nature and Science.

Much of this journalism is now issue-based. For instance, for news on the environment and climate change, try The Climate Desk, a collaboration among several publications, including The Atlantic, Wired, Slate and Mother Jones. Or seek out Environmental Health News, Dot Earth (run by former New York Times environment reporter Andrew Revkin), the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media.  There is also advocacy journalism like Grist or Treehugger, and the Big Think blog, Age of Engagement, edited by American University's Professor Matt Nisbet.

Although these are specialized sites, they cut across science, technology, politics, advocacy, business, culture and lifestyle–and often reach influential audiences. Even though he made it in 1997, Franklin still has a strong case: science writing, in a sense, is ending, but it is also moving on–in all directions.

And the best science writing embeds science in society, telling compelling human stories about the lives and careers of scientists, ordinary people whose daily work–as these insightful profiles demonstrate–takes them to the heart of politics, the pulse of history and the edge of knowledge.

Professor Declan Fahy teaches the Health, Science and Environmental Reporting class in the School of Communication.