Why I spoofed science journalism, and how to fix it - 0 views
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The formula I outlined – using a few randomly picked BBC science articles as a guide – isn't necessarily an example of bad journalism; butscience reporting is predictable enough that you can write a formula for it that everyone recognises, and once the formula has been seen it's very hard to un-see, like a faint watermark at the edge of your vision.
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A science journalist should be capable of, at a minimum, reading a scientific paper and being able to venture a decent opinion.
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If you are not actually providing any analysis, if you're not effectively 'taking a side', then you are just a messenger, a middleman, a megaphone with ears. If that's your idea of journalism, then my RSS reader is a journalist.
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thanks to the BBC's multi-platform publishing guidelines, the first few paragraphs of any news story need to be written in such a way that they can be cut and pasted into a Ceefax page.
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Another issue affecting style is the need to reach a diverse audience. This puts pressure on commercial media groups who need to secure page views to generate advertising revenue
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As a writer, word limits are both a blessing and a curse. Many bloggers would have their writing immeasurably improved if they stuck to a word limit – doing that forces you to plan, to organise your thoughts, and to avoid redundancy and repetition. On the other hand, some stories need more time to tell, and sticking dogmatically to an arbitrary 800-word limit for stuff that's published on the internet doesn't make a lot of sense. The internet is not running out of space.
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Science is all about process, context and community, but reporting concentrates on single people, projects and events.
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Hundreds of interesting things happen in science every week, and yet journalists from all over the media seem driven by a herd mentality that ensures only a handful of stories are covered. And they're not even the most interesting stories in many cases.
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Members of the public could be forgiven for believing that science involves occasional discoveries interspersed with long periods of 'not very much happening right now'. The reality of science is almost the complete opposite of this.
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One of the biggest failures of science reporting is the media's belief that a scientific paper or research finding represents a conclusion of some kind. Scientists know that this simply isn't true. A new paper is the start or continuance of a discussion or debate that will often rumble on for years or even decades.