The Observatory
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December 12, 2012 06:50 AM
Flight of the bloggers
Despite recent departures, Discover is rebuilding fast
Amidst a move from New York to Wisconsin, Discover magazine has lost some of its most popular science bloggers in recent weeks, but the publisher says that the outlet is as committed to its brand as ever.
In mid November, Phil Plait took his blog, Bad Astronomy, to Slate. Last week, Sean Carroll announced that he was leaving Cosmic Variance,...
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December 6, 2012 02:45 PM
‘Synbio’ coverage on the rise
Articles focus on ethics and biosafety, study says
You know an urban neighborhood is up and coming when it gets an abbreviation like “SoMa,” for the district south of Market Street in San Francisco. So it goes, apparently, with emerging sciences like synthetic biology, which Eleonore Pauwels, a public policy expert who studies the subject, often refers to as “synbio.”
Buzzwords are not all, however.
In a...
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December 4, 2012 11:00 AM
Carney’s conspiracy theory
White House Press Secretary sees GOP operatives in good journalism
Last week, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney blamed GOP operatives for revealing that Susan Rice, President Obama’s presumed favorite to become the next Secretary of State, has significant investments in the Canadian oil industry.
“I would commend Republican opposition researchers for the intellectual bandwidth that is required to read a financial disclosure form,” he said, when asked about Rice’s...
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November 30, 2012 03:29 PM
NY community papers struggle post-Sandy
Small papers were washed away when their readers most needed them, and they're still recovering
The Wave offices, post-Hurricane Sandy. Photo credit: Henry Gass
During Hurricane Sandy, the offices of The Wave, a community newspaper in the Rockaways, Queens, got hit by a five-foot tidal surge.
Now the paper’s general manager, Sanford Bernstein, is figuring out how to publish his weekly newspaper with half the equipment, a bare-bones staff, and almost no advertising to...
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November 28, 2012 03:30 PM
Dull news from Doha
UN climate summit a ho-hum affair for the press
The United Nations climate-change summit that began in Doha, Qatar, on Monday has so far been a ho-hum affair for the press.
Most American news outlets didn’t even bother to send a correspondent, reflecting a general decline in attendance at the annual meeting by North American and European journalists. Coverage may pick up as the two-week confab wears on, but...
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November 20, 2012 12:15 PM
Highway to the danger zone
Following Sandy, HuffPo and NYT dig into the folly of coastal development
Hurricane Sandy renewed the media’s interest in the many foolish ways that we increase our vulnerability to extreme weather. There’s climate change, of course. That came up right away.
But carbon pollution isn’t the only, or even the most immediate, thing that we’re doing to imperil ourselves. There’s also relentless, right-up-to-the-water’s-edge-in-a-floodplain coastal development.
After focusing on global warming in the...
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November 16, 2012 11:00 AM
Climate roller coaster back on track
With Obama talking global warming, media see ups and downs
At his first post-election press conference on Wednesday, President Obama talked about his current position on climate change in greater detail than he’s done in two years. News outlets’ attempts to interpret the meaning of his remarks produced bewilderingly disparate takes, however, whether that involved Obama’s personal commitment to addressing the issue:
“Obama vows to take personal charge...
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November 15, 2012 03:30 PM
What’s the MATTER?
A Kickstarter-funded longform narrative science journalism site launches
MATTER, a Kickstarter-funded longform science journalism project, launched on Wednesday with its first article, written by prominent science writer Anil Ananthaswamy. Just shy of 7,800 words, it tells the story of a man, "David," and his struggle with Body Integrity Identity Disorder. Basically, David desperately wants to cut one of his legs off. He's helped on his quest by a...
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November 14, 2012 12:00 PM
Salazar threatens to ‘punch out’ reporter
Interior Secretary angered by tough questions at Obama campaign event
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar threatened to “punch out” a journalist for having the temerity to ask him questions about public policy at an Election-Day event in Colorado last week.
Salazar was at an Obama campaign office in Fountain, CO, as part of a tour through the state to support the president and encourage voter turnout. Dave Philipps, a...
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November 12, 2012 03:00 PM
Take a beat
Media pump too much news from heart association meeting, critic says
More than 10,000 stories came out of the annual meeting of the American Heart Association (AHA), which took place in Los Angeles last week, but it was the media’s ticker that was beating too fast and too hard, according to the media criticism website HealthNewsReview.org.
The cardiac confab is always a big draw for journalists, and as with other scientific...
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November 8, 2012 03:00 PM
Obama and the environment
Media react to the election with speculation, some insights
Journalists didn’t leave energy and the environment out of post-election speculation about what President Obama’s second term might look like.
A lot of the commentary was a recitation of the ups and downs of Obama’s record during the first four years—from tightening vehicle fuel-efficiency standards to dropping a plan to reduce smog—and prognosticating about what the next four years could...
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November 6, 2012 11:00 AM
Lemmings like us
Businessweek’s climate-change broadside is powerful, but ignores the allure of waterfront property
Hurricane Sandy finally got the media talking about climate change last week, but Bloomberg Businessweek spoke the loudest with a bold, red cover that featured a picture of a flooded New York City street and the words, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” in big, black letters above it.
As the cyclone spun up the eastern seaboard, I warned against making overstatements...
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November 1, 2012 01:00 PM
Bad hippie!
Is it wrong to ‘scold’ exaggerations about climate and weather?
David Roberts has a long essay over at Grist complaining about "scolds" (The New York Times’s Andrew Revkin, in particular) who criticize others for making too much of the link between climate change and extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy.
Roberts’s commentary jumps off from a self-reflective post by Revkin about whether he is guilty of what one of his...
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October 30, 2012 04:15 PM
Sandy’s climate context
Why generalizing about extreme weather helps no one
It should come as no surprise that as Hurricane Sandy spiraled up the eastern seaboard, a variety of media outlets sought to explain the so-called super storm’s relationship to climate change. A few did well, but generalizations about extreme weather continue to mar this type of coverage.
Take Rebecca Leber’s attempt to bash the press for ignoring climate change at...
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Science Picture of the Day
NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
The media went "nuts" over the first images from NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed successfully in a Martian crater on August 6 following an eight-month journey through space. The one above, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which shows the rover descending by parachute toward the surface, became an "instant classic," the Knight Science Journalism Tracker observed.
Press coverage focused primarily on the jubilation surrounding the landing. Weighing one ton, Curiosity was NASA heaviest and most fully loaded rover yet and the touchdown employed a sophisticated new landing system. The incredible image from the reconnaissance orbiter clearly fed the media frenzy, though.
As The New York Times reported, "NASA followed up its picture-perfect landing of a plutonium-powered rover with a picture of the picture-perfect landing."
After touchdown, the Mini Cooper-sized rover beamed back its first color photo of the ancient crater in which it landed, as well as "a video showing the last 2.5 minutes of tis white-knuckle dive through the Martian atmosphere," according to The Associated Press. The images will undoubtedly continue to drive coverage as the rovers sets out to study the local geology and tries to determine if Mars could ever have supported life. For the avid shutterbugs, Wired produced a useful "Photo-Geek's Guide" to Curiosity's 17 cameras.
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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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Science News Aggregators, Critics
- Knight Science Journalism Tracker
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Desks
The Audit Business
- The transparent DealBook conference When access journalism is valuable, in more ways than one
- Audit Notes: Amazon’s shell company, The Lens, Plain Dealer cuts Reuters unwinds how the online retail giant avoided taxes via Luxembourg
The Observatory Science
- Flight of the bloggers Despite recent departures, Discover is rebuilding fast
- ‘Synbio’ coverage on the rise Articles focus on ethics and biosafety, study says
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- The making of a meme Journos get on board the Let’s-Whack-Entitlements train
- Cracking open Congress We need better insider reporting about the “fiscal cliff”
