The Observatory
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June 20, 2012 10:45 AM
How creativity works? Not like that.
Science writer Jonah Lehrer accused of self-plagiarism
The author of a recent book about how creativity works is finding out the hard way that the answer is more elusive than he imagined.
Jonah Lehrer, one of science journalism’s brightest young stars, was accused of self-plagiarism on Tuesday after critics revealed that he had reused parts of old stories he wrote for other publications in blog...
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June 18, 2012 05:45 PM
Rio+20 roundup
Coverage of the UN sustainable development summit revs up, or not
Big, international summits geared toward protecting the environment and promoting sustainability just don’t have the cachet that they used to.
“Expectations are low for Rio+20,” Reuters reported on Monday morning, reflecting the dominant theme in coverage leading up to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which starts Wednesday in Brazil. The event is...
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June 15, 2012 03:00 PM
Adrift in a sea of (no) coverage
For two years, little in the news about battle over National Ocean Policy
Last October, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar called on the press to pay more attention to the Obama administration’s achievements in environmental conservation.
In response, The Miami Herald’s Carl Hiaasen suggested that the government give journalists more to write about, and he had a point. On Sunday, The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin had a revealing...
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June 14, 2012 03:00 PM
Covering the animal within
Zoobiquity promotion belies activity in comparative medicine
The promo machine for an upcoming book, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing, by UCLA cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and science writer Kathryn Bowers, has been in high gear all week.
It started with a 4,100-word excerpt in The New York Times Sunday Review, and continued with spots on
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June 8, 2012 03:00 PM
NSF invests in literary science journalism
Creative nonfiction program seeks emerging writers
The National Science Foundation (NSF) doubled down on literary science journalism this year. Actually, it quintupled down.
In 2010, NSF gave $50,000 to faculty members at Arizona State University to lead a course on covering science and innovation policy with “creative nonfiction” for 12 writers/communicators and 12 scholars/researchers. This year, the foundation gave the project $250,000...
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June 7, 2012 11:00 AM
An eye on environmental justice
EHN series focuses on an under-covered angle on toxics
A number of media reports in last year have examined the impacts of toxic pollution on communities, but few have emphasized, let alone focused on, the fact that low-income, minority neighborhoods tend to bear the brunt of the burden.
That changed on Monday, when the website Environmental Health News (EHN) launched a special series,
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June 6, 2012 03:10 PM
Salt Lake Tribune takes Grantham Prize
$75,000 award goes to series about threatened forests for second year in a row
For the second year in a row “the world’s richest journalism prize” went to a series of articles about threatened forests.
Last year, the The Economist’s James Astill took home the $75,000 Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment for “The World’s Lungs,” a broad survey of the plight of forests around the globe. This year,...
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June 4, 2012 06:50 AM
How to improve environmental coverage?
Project sets broad goals, learns to adapt
Fixing the news is a tall order, or so the Project for Improved Environmental Coverage is learning.
The effort launched in late February with a “vision” statement that called on media organizations to “integrate the environmental angle into other stories and make that connection explicit, make environmental stories appealing to...
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June 1, 2012 06:50 AM
CBS News hires M. Sanjayan
Lead scientist at The Nature Conservancy to cover science, environment
Network news got a little better this month.
CBS News announced in early May that it had hired M. Sanjayan, lead scientist at The Nature Conservancy, as its science and environmental contributor, filling a slot that’s been vacant for almost two and a half years. Sanjayan will cover a broad range of topics across multiple platforms...
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May 29, 2012 01:25 PM
From SOS to SMS
Mobile journalism service aims to protect Indonesian forests, connect villages
WEST KALIMANTAN PROVINCE, INDONESIA—Alim, the chief of news for Ruai TV, remembers when the area didn’t have a privately operated station to serve as a voice for the province’s indigenous people; it didn’t have the infrastructure to support one.
“When I was growing up in my village, we didn’t even have electricity,” says Alim, 31, who goes by...
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May 25, 2012 02:21 PM
Evolved for exhibitionism?
Wired column makes weak claims about human behavior, psychology
“Sound the evo-psych bullshit klaxon!” British science journalist Ed Yong tweeted on Thursday. He was right to be concerned.
Yong’s warning pertained to an op-ed at Wired Science by Ogi Ogas. Jumping off from the string of celebrities who’ve taken naughty pictures of themselves only to have those images leaked from their cellphones and shared publicly, Ogas argues...
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May 23, 2012 05:20 PM
Reparative journalism
Reporter sinks a controversial paper on “ex-gay” therapy
It’s not often that a journalist convinces a prominent scientist to recant a controversial study that he has tenaciously defended for 11 years, but that’s just what Gabriel Arana did last month.
While working on an article for The American Prospect about his experience undergoing so-called sexual reorientation, or reparative therapy, as a teenager in the late 1990s,...
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May 21, 2012 11:00 AM
The western frontier
KQED Quest, Pacific Standard keep their eyes on the other coast
American media may cluster in the east, but the west is still the land of pioneers, even in the domains of multimedia and long-form science journalism.
Two young trailblazers—Quest, a multimedia science and environment series created in 2007 by KQED, a public radio and TV station serving northern California, and Pacific Standard, a research-oriented, bimonthly magazine...
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May 17, 2012 06:50 AM
USA Today’s oily, gassy rainbow
Detailed cover story a bit too rosy about ‘energy independence’
USA Today sees an oily, gassy rainbow on America’s energy horizon.
“Energy independence isn’t just a pipe dream,” read a large, bold headline on Wednesday’s front. It was draped over an image of oil drums stamped “Made in USA,” laid out like bowling pins in front the US flag.
The nearly 2,000-word cover story, by Tim Mullaney,...
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Science Picture of the Day
Mark Theissen/National Geographic via AP
On March 26, filmmaker James Cameron made the first trip to the deepest part of the world's oceans since two explorers visited over 50 years ago, and became the first person to make the journey alone. The historic dive received plenty of media attention.
Riding in a lime-green sub that he helped design, Cameron descended 35,576 feet to Challenger Deep, the deepest section of the Mariana Trench, about 200 miles southwest of the island of Guam. The image above, which accompanied an AP story describing the "desolate, foreboding" landscape he found there, shows Cameron emerging from the sub following a two-and-half-hour descent, three hours along the seafloor, and a 70-minute ascent to the surface.
The trip was part of the Deepsea Challenge project, a partnership with the National Geographic Society and Rolex, to film and collect samples from the trench. Unlike the bathyscaphe used in 1960 by Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard, the first and only other men to reach Challenger Deep (two remotely operated vehicles made the trip after they did), Cameron's sub is equipped with multiple cameras to shoot a feature-length documentary and a mechanical arm for scooping up rocks and animals.
A hydraulic fluid leak cut short the trip and rendered the arm inoperable, but Cameron and "sub co-designer Ron Allum, managing director of the Australia-based Acheron Project research and design company, already have more dives planned in the coming weeks," reported National Geographic News.
In the meantime, the National Geographic Society, where Cameron is an explorer-in-residence, released a two-minute video clip of the footage that he brought back from the Mariana Trench, whose bottom he described as barren, bleak, and lunar. The society also shared a photo gallery of Cameron's sub, including an incredible shot of the steel pilot sphere glowing molten red shortly after it was cast (there's also a short, historical video about how such spheres were developed over time to protect Cameron and other divers).
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The Observatory critiques science, environment, and medical journalism. Our goal is to encourage clarity, accuracy, and accountability in the coverage all things technical and complex.
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The Audit Business
- Audit Radio: Cleveland edition Dean Starkman joins a panel of Ohio journalists on the future of newspapers
- Audit Notes: The U-6ers, Jamie’s corporate welfare, The Guardian’s future The NYT looks at those with not enough work
The Observatory Science
- How creativity works? Not like that. Science writer Jonah Lehrer accused of self-plagiarism
- Rio+20 roundup Coverage of the UN sustainable development summit revs up, or not
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Embracing the myth of the campaign wizard, again The Jim Messina profile industry is part of a long tradition
- Harrisburg’s Patriot-News sits down with Romney There are lessons here for campaign reporters and editors along future bus tour routes