Getting out of the media straightjacket

I've finally gotten around to reading The Next Big Storm, Can Scientists and Journalists Work Together to Improve Coverage of the Hurricane-Global Warming Controversy? -- the Skeptical Inquirer's monumental review of media coverage of the hurrican-climate change links, by our own Matthew C. Nisbet and Chris Mooney. Wow. So much to chew on, especially for a science journalist who has done a bit of writing on the subject myself.

The nub of their argument is that improving the sorry state of most of the reporting on this hopeless complex subject will:

require getting beyond the tyranny of relying on major new studies, personality conflicts, or overt political conflict as the primary means of defining what counts as newsworthy.

To which I say: Good luck with that.

Chris and Matt have done a stellar job summarizing the problems facing journalists, the rare outstanding examples of excellence and the state of the science. But as anyone who has spent any amount of time working in a newsroom knows, stories have to have a peg. And a peg is defined as something that will interest the reader/listener/viewer. New science papers sell. Personality conflict sells. And political debate sells. Carefully crafted reportage that lays bare the uncertainties and intricacies of an arcane field of research? Not so much.

And that's not about to change.

Former science writer K.C. Cole knows the difference between what science stories should be all about and what gets past an editor. In the latest Columbia Journalism Review, she writes that

readers of science stories don't seem to mind a bit of confusion -- even when the subject matter is difficult or counterintuitive: ten-dimensional space, for example, or fossils of foot-long "bugs" that crawled out of the sea 480 million years ago. Every science writer I know has had the experience of readers coming up to them and saying: "Gee, that was fascinating; I didn't understand it, but I've been thinking about it all day." Readers often inquire about books where they can read further on a subject, or even primary sources.

Which is great. Except those kind of readers are a tiny subset of a newspaper's readership. (If you're writing for Nature or Science, no problem. Most other audiences do mind a bit of confusion.) So what is a poor science journalist to do? K. C. Cole says:

For all these reasons and more, good science journalists know that if they're not dealing with subject matter that makes them dizzy, they're probably not doing their jobs. The best editors understand all this. As for the rest, perhaps Weird Al said it best: sometimes you just need to "dare to be stupid."

I'm not sure that's much better advice than Chris and Matt's utopian hopes for the business. Having said that, though, there's no reason we journalists can't keep trying to convince our editors to let us have a go at a story with a non-conventional peg. We won't succeed most of the time, but it's better than throwing up our hands and going to work as PR flacks, right? And I predict that science section editors will continue to get more savvy to the needs of their narrow slice of their employer's audience. There are so many more science reporters now, and eventually some of them are going to want to sit in the editor's chairs.

Of course, we all know where that road leads: to the fiery pits of management, where all memory of the real world is erased....