8 ms·

A friend of mine worked for a mainstream European science news website. Most journalists had no science background, and were pressured into writing 4 articles

• permo-w 4y ago
  the news industry needs public investment from all angles. right now the incentives are completely wrong
  • refurb 4y ago
    I mean we have public broadcasters like Canada’s CBC and they still do the same thing. Why? Because they need to justify their budget. If nobody reads/views your reports, why should the government pay for it. The real answer is: the public doesn’t want science reporting unless it’s punchy, simple and exciting.
    • marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Sometimes it's not about what the public wants, but what it needs.
      • refurb 4y ago
        Do you force the public to read it? Or just live with the fact you get dozens of views for news that took hours and thousands of dollars to create.
        • marginalia_nu 4y ago
          Well, if you've made dozens of people learn something, then that's surely better than filling millions of peoples heads with nothing but vapid nonsense, isn't it?
          • refurb 4y ago
            Sure it better. But instead of making dozens of people learning something you paid for school lunches for 200 students each month? It’s a limit pot of tax payer money and it needs to be used on the highest impact things.
            • marginalia_nu 4y ago
              How can you tell what has impact, though? What's the point in paying for school lunches for kids who have no interest in learning?
              • refurb 4y ago
                The impact is they aren’t malnourished? Seems like a good goal. Edit: we prioritize feeding people over giving them educational science articles; seems appropriate
                • marginalia_nu 4y ago
                  Many things are noble goals. Why is one to be preferred over another?
                  • Spooky23 4y ago
                    It’s easier to talk about feeding children to ignore stuff like out of control military acquisition or allowing oil companies to pillage public lands for peanuts.
                    • marginalia_nu 4y ago
                      The question is, given a sum of money and a goal to further the education of the people, what is the best way of spending that money. What other people are doing that is wrong is rarely particularly useful to think about when working toward a goal of your own.
                • 4y ago
      • ekianjo 4y ago
        what do you know about the public needs?
        • marginalia_nu 4y ago
          I don't claim to, but I do think it's pretty trivial to demonstrate that what one wants and what one needs is not necessarily the same.
    • pclmulqdq 4y ago
      Sorry, but news organizations aren't out there doing what the public wants. Most of them are doing what will get attention. That is very different. The public doesn't want to have to give them attention, but when they say things like "X cures cancer" or "X is a threat to your children" it makes people listen. When the article turns out to be nothing, a small fraction of the people you fooled turn off your channel forever, and the rest just say "this was a waste" and go on to read the next piece of clickbait. This behavior needs to be called out and there needs to be accountability. However, there is none. Even when the stories are completely fabricated, as happened at USA Today recently. What the public wants and what tricks people into giving you attention are different things. Journalists today go for the latter, which is why we have all of these "alternative" news sources now.
      • robonerd 4y ago
        > This behavior needs to be called out and there needs to be accountability. However, there is none. Even when the stories are completely fabricated, as happened at USA Today recently. I'd love a browser extension that shows me a crowd-sourced batting average for the author of any article I'm reading online. Something that tells me "Oh, you're reading an article written by journalist Joe Schmoe? Joe has previously written 400 breathless articles about scientists discovering space aliens" I know I know, technical solution to a social problem. And curating these crowdsourced article tags and statistics would probably be an intractable nightmare. It probably can't hurt much to try though. I think the fundamental problem is there are too many journalists for many individual journalists to develop a reputation in the minds of readers. I read several hundred, maybe a few thousand articles a year, but I could only tell you the names of a handful of journalists at best. There must be some way for technology to help bridge this gap.
        • pclmulqdq 4y ago
          I've heard of newsguard and ground news. Both are biased in favor of "reputable" sources who should have been punished for fake news and haven't (USA Today, NY Times).
        • CWuestefeld 4y ago
    • bawolff 4y ago
      I would say quanta magazine is a counterexample
      • spaetzleesser 4y ago
        How do they finance themselves?
        • evanpw 4y ago
          A finance billionaire with a background in math and physics (Jim Simons)
      • jelliclesfarm 4y ago
        Also: Nautilus https://nautil.us/ https://nautil.us/
        • openknot 4y ago
          Nautilus is actually an example that supports how in-depth science reporting can be difficult to monetize. I really like many of their articles in the publication, but there was a major incident a while back when they were severely (many months, even longer than a year) behind on paying their writers. I actually happened to meet a writer who had this happen to them, but this incident was also publicized in an open letter (source: https://nwu.org/an-open-letter-from-freelancers-at-nautilus-magazine/ https://nwu.org/an-open-letter-from-freelancers-at-nautilus-..., with discussion about this on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/aznfusion/status/941051077922869248 https://twitter.com/aznfusion/status/941051077922869248). This happened in 2017, and I'm not sure how long it took to get resolved.
          • jelliclesfarm 4y ago
            That’s very sad. There is go fund me and crows funding for all kinds of weird causes and 50k isn’t such a huge amount either. The future seems bleak. ETA: Oh!! The link re: the Twitter thread is gnarly! I hope this got resolved and the freelancers got something out of this.
    • BeFlatXIII 4y ago
      It's the difference between the government justifying the funding and politicians (who control the budget) justifying funding. The government could easily justify funding as its own in-house journalism team that processes raw scientific publications into information usable by various government agencies. Politicians, instead, pander to voters with their cost/benefit metrics.
• bsenftner 4y ago
  The behavior we see due to the private ownership of media and news publishers betrays the colossal failure it is for the public and nations at large to have our society's self-reporting undermined by profit motives. News and media need to be treated as protected speech, with more formalization and more regulation. Leaving the governance of our society's self reporting to greedy Capitalists is a clear and active recipe for doublespeak and fascism.
  • CWuestefeld 4y ago
    On the contrary, letting the government determine what comes through the media is the recipe for fascism. As evidence, consider that the first thing that any authoritarian regime does is to take control of the media. The first test you've got to do for any proposal like yours is to consider what the impact of it will be when your political opponents are at the reins. Are you comfortable with Donald Trump (or really, anyone of his faction) having this power?
    • bsenftner 4y ago
      Who said "government control"? I said more regulation. Of course letting any one power source control society's self conversation is bad. We need to accept the concept that regulation exists because the alternative is worse, and that includes regulation of how the news is delivered and the rights of those collecting information for news reporting. As it stands, society expects "good journalists" to give their lives to report the truth the public needs to understand how far our lack of regulation has allowed things to become.
      • barry-cotter 4y ago
        > Who said "government control"? I said more regulation. You do realize government control and regulation are synonymous, right?
        • bsenftner 4y ago
          Yes, they are, and in practice regulations exist not because some evil bureaucrat wants to oppress free enterprise; regulations exist because one or more parties abused a freedom to the degree their behavior's impacts harmed others enough for laws to be written.
• snarf21 4y ago
  Exactly this. It is all about click bait to drive digital advertising. It is largely our own fault. We (by and large) don't want to pay good journalism. We want it to be free which means ads. NPR/PBS tends to have better and more balanced news but it is largely because of their donor/patron model. But to be clear, they are surely not immune. They are still run by people who are judged by views and reach and other eyeball metrics. We don't really want news anymore. We want our preconceived notions affirmed (we like to be "right") and we want to be entertained. Unfortunately, we get what we've asked for.
  • mike_hock 4y ago
    I agree except for the implication that it used to be different.
  • timr 4y ago
    NPR's science reporting has been abysmal for the past few years. Maybe they don't have the click-bait problem (debatable), but they routinely report everything one side of the political spectrum says as scientific fact. They also fall victim to the "experts say..." and "scientific consensus is..." tropes. Their "scientific expert" source list looks suspiciously like a group of the loudest voices on Twitter. I say this as someone on that side of the political spectrum.
    • zenithd 4y ago
      Twitter influence is now a not-insignificant leg up in faculty hiring and academic politics. It’s becoming really hard to take academic science seriously.
    • openknot 4y ago
      >"Their "scientific expert" source list looks suspiciously like a group of the loudest voices on Twitter." That's probably where the journalists find people to interview, likely because a large majority of journalists are active on Twitter. This definitely isn't the only place, because there are free services like SciLine by the AAAS (source: https://www.sciline.org https://www.sciline.org) and many others for connecting journalists to researchers. Many universities also have their own expert directories set up, and journalists can also find papers and contact their authors. However, for many journalists on deadline, it's just far less effort to message vocal professors on Twitter, so this may be a reason for this effect if it's true. The people who market their research more on Twitter may be more likely to get covered in the press, and thus interviewed.
• yunohn 4y ago
  > I don't blame the journalists, but the work conditions and economical situation of the media industry. Why wouldn’t you blame people who voluntarily took a job writing science articles while having zero credentials? They could be normal news journos, nobody forced them to report on science specifically.
  • openknot 4y ago
    I once went to a journalism conference, and there was a panel where a professional science journalist strongly pushed for the view along the lines of, "you don't need a science background to be a science writer," instead of encouraging aspiring journalists to study the relevant background over the years. I'm sure a view against credentials isn't shared by all journalists (for example, many publications do require a relevant background), but that experience was personally disheartening because it seemed to be supported in the room. I was also disheartened by the focus on self-marketing and self-promotion in general over doing quality, accurate journalism, and a much bigger focus on having a good "narrative" and writing engagingly versus having a discussion on ethics. To some extent, I get it, because the advice likely works in helping someone succeed in their career. But there are clearly problems in science news related to precision and accuracy, and not much drive in many publications to fix it.
• walrus01 4y ago
  > I don't blame the journalists, writing and publishing four articles a day with only cursory review/editorial oversight, if any, isn't journalism at all, it's a content mill
• beloch 4y ago
  >"Another problem with sources is that science news also frequently just repeats press releases without actually saying where they got their information from. It’s a problem because university press releases aren’t exactly unbiased." This is probably why exaggerated claims from press releases usually just get passed on and, frequently, exaggerated. Even someone educated in the field doesn't have time to dig into 3 or 4 new sub-fields a day and actually understand the papers that press releases are talking about. e.g. A physicist with a background in optics is better situated than most to understand an experimental quantum cryptography paper, but they're still going to have to bang their heads against several walls to figure out what's going on. Head-banging takes time. Copying from a press release doesn't.
  • duskwuff 4y ago
    And those press releases are often written by university PR offices without a clear understanding of the research they're promoting, and the articles repeating those press releases frequently get copied poorly by other science publications. It's a game of telephone all the way down.
• BeetleB 4y ago
  > They believed everything corporations said, because they had no time to check. I remember a story from a famous freelance investigative journalist who found evidence of disenfranchisement of black voters in the 2000 election. He collected a huge amount of evidence and testimony, and sent it to news outlets across the US. Most of them came back with: "Uh, we contacted the <person/group accused>, and they're denying this. We're not going to run the story." Who'd have thought people accused of nefarious, potentially illegal activities would deny doing them?
• charlieyu1 4y ago
  I blame the journalists. They know what they are doing. They are part of the problem.
  • m463 4y ago
    I wonder about this because allocation of money in the world is uneven, and people get paid LOTS of money to work for wall street, but very little for worthy journalism. I think good scientific journalism might be something where funding is not proportional to benefit to society. Also things like investigating regulatory capture.
• RedWarrior 4y ago
  You blame the corporation and not the journalist? How is this going to work out in the long run?