Traffic to The Conversation — that written-by-academics-for-everyone-else site that’s always been a port of last resort for expert opinion content — is way up since the beginning of the pandemic, says Columbia Journalism Review.
“Way up” = 81 million page views in April for all The Conversation sites plus republication by other sites — double that of April 2019.…
Like most of you, I’m horrified, ashamed and frustrated by many of the events of the last eight days — much less the last three months — in the United States.
Is this a turning point? we might ask.
Not if the last 50 years — Watts 1965, Newark 1967, Miami 1980, LA 1992, Cincinnati 2001, Ferguson 2014, Baltimore 2015, Charlotte 2016, etc.,…
Take a look at these eye-popping stats, from journalist and technologist Frederic Filloux’s recent essay, “COVID-19’s General Blindness is Also a Journalistic Failure”:
In a crisis, it’s not enough to disseminate accurate information about what is already known and should be universally understood. (Example: during the COVID-19 epidemic, wash your hands.)
It’s also crucial to disseminate the best evidence-based knowledge about what might come next, along with the level of uncertainty about that knowledge.…
I’m fascinated by the recent study in Science that argues the medieval Roman Catholic Church’s prohibitions against incest were crucial in laying the foundation for “individualism, nonconformity, and the inclination to trust and help strangers,” traits the authors associate with the evolution of “WEIRD” societies — western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.…
Science covered in the news is “pretty likely to be overturned,” according to a 2017 PLoS ONE study (which, admittedly, was covered in STAT.)
So a new article in WIRED won’t surprise anyone: the findings of a big-journal, splashy-headline, lots-of-coverage recent study are in dispute.…
My blood runs cold every time I hear researchers say: “We hope our study won’t be interpreted as saying (insert horrible unintended conclusion not warranted by the study’s findings).”
Because it means a) they don’t have clear messaging for their study, b) they’ve overframed their study, or c) they have clear messaging but haven’t enforced it.…
I haven’t paid much attention to astronomy since the onset of puberty — but of course this piece caught my eye on Friday: BBC science reporter Pallab Ghosh writing for Undark on “Exoplanets, Life, and the Danger of a Single Study,” prompted by the uncritical media coverage (then walked back) of two papers published last month announcing the discovery of water vapor on a exoplanet called K2-18b.…
Ecologist Manu Saunders (who helpfully poked holes in the “insect apocalypse” narrative) now asks: “How damaging is sexy soundbite scicomm?”
Wait: first, what is “sexy soundbite scicomm”? As best I can tell from Saunders’ post, it’s comms or reporting that
Researchers: just passive participants in those terribly misleading media campaigns for their papers?
Michael Schulson writes in Undark about the hyping of that big bird-decline Science magazine study I wrote about last week. In Schulson’s retelling, it was