Boston Blog

No more science section in the Boston Globe

Things haven’t been so good at our beloved local paper, the Boston Globe. After several rounds of cost-cutting measures (layoffs/buyouts), the paper’s science section finally fell victim. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the Globe cut its weekly science section last week.

The science reporters still get to keep their jobs though. Their stories will appear in other parts of the paper. Still, considering how much good science happens in Beantown, it’s sad to see the section go.

A Nature Network member, Angela Saini (who flagged this up on her blog, thanks, Angela!) has started a discussion here on NN about how to save science journalism. So please post your thoughts there.

My take: I don’t think science journalism per se is being threatened. Newspaper journalism, yes. But science journalism in general I think is still strong. It’s just changing in form, media, style, etc. (as Angela says on her blog post, it’s thriving online). We journalists need to be smart and bold enough to figure out new ways of getting those stories out, while also figuring out how to make money doing this—or at least, cover our costs.

The business of making money from journalism I think is what’s in jeopardy. Maybe there will come a time when journalism will be seen to be a public service, funded by government or philanthropy, and not as a for-profit enterprise. Given that we’ve let the genie out of the bottle by giving away stories online for free for so long now (so that readers don’t feel like they should have to pay for them), maybe going towards a nonprofit model is one way to keep journalism alive.

Comments

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    Samuel Frankel said:

    Sigh. I think we all realize that we’re going through a period of media dispersal, one that’s probably relatively unavoidable given the possibilities of the net. But it’s still a little…daunting…to face a world we have so few media sources that most people in a given city, state, region, country, etc engage with.

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    Oliver Hofmann said:

    Think Shirky’s article describes it rather well — we are seeing a complete change of the landscape, and while we still need journalism a publishing industry might no longer be needed, at least not using the current business model.

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    Angela Saini said:

    Corie, I’ve sadly been inundated with exactly zero responses to my appeal to save science [newspaper] journalism! Somebody suggested to me recently that a lot of scientists don’t actually like mainstream science journalism, which is why you hear so few scientists bemoan the decline of it. This is partly evidenced by the surprising lack of regret shown on the forums when CNN cut its coverage.

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    Corie Lok said:

    Angela, even though a lot of scientists don’t like how science is covered in mainstream media, I think many would say that it’s important for science to be covered at all. I hope that scientists realize that keeping science (a publicly funded activity, for the most part) in the public eye is good for science and for the public understanding of science. The loss of science sections in newspapers should set off alarm bells about how much (or little) science will be covered in the future.

    But you’re right. It’s us journalists who will be the loudest to moan, since these are our jobs that are disappearing.

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