
How science journalism is broken and how can we all fix it - PierredeFermat
http://medium.com/@nukleosome/how-can-we-fix-research-churnalism-668075268680
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notafraudster
I am a little surprised, given the title, that the issue being highlighted is
blogspam and the brokenness is basically that science journalists can't fairly
capitalize their effort. At the risk of hijacking the discussion to talk about
an entirely different issue: science journalism is broken not because spam
blogs copy-paste articles. It's broken because the entire ecosystem has the
wrong incentives.

Researchers, many of whom have inadequate statistical training, are academics
facing publish-or-perish and weird publication barriers (p-value filtering,
premium on sexy new results over well-researched incremental advances). The
more senior authors who have tenure and are safe from some of the incentives
still rely on lab funding, which is similarly competitive, and also tend to
people whose methodological training is substantially out of date. Most
journal reviewers are subject matter experts, some with limited statistical
training.

Universities put out press releases to support authors without being equipped
to evaluate the quality of the work or having an incentive to contextualize
limitations of the work. Science journalists largely breathlessly report the
original press release without reading (or in some cases having access to) the
original article. They tend to have a good understanding of jargon but a poor
understanding of design. There is no notion of including comment from critical
authors, and there is certainly no notion of critiquing the design,
replicating the experiment (either a limited replication using the author's
code / data, or a more thorough replication to obtain the substantive result).
Then the blog-spam people play broken telephone with the initial science
reporting. Well-meaning and interested users post these articles to reddit,
HN, social media, etc. credulously reporting the headline of the article they
read. Most comments in the discussion read the title, skip the article (let
alone the study) and proceed assuming it's true, and normally take the form
"This validates some other belief I have, so it's true" or "Duh why did they
even do this study?", both of which are not useful.

I see very little evidence this process stems from the article's implied
undertone that blog spam is costing legitimate journalists money and starving
them of resources they need to do a good job. Even very well-funded sites
suffer from this. The problem is the incentives. Imagine a science website
that posts only 1/10th the number of posts, but deep-dives all of the ones
they do.

Let me proposal an alternate model: As a user or a journalist, if you aren't
trained enough to read the study, don't post an article about it. Training
does not mean subject matter training (as in you understand whatever the
specific topic at hand is), although that is useful. Training means enough
numeracy to be able to evaluate the work. This should cripple the flow of
science communication but vastly increase its quality.

Posting an article you can't understand and relying on the "system" to ensure
it's true is the same kind of broken process that leads to people circulating
conspiracy theory stuff or stuff we all agree is junk science. This should be
especially followed in disciplines like social psychology, applied economics,
neuroscience, evolutionary anthropology or evolutionary psychology, medical
research, nutrition research, and other fields where experimental or quasi-
experimental design are more difficult.

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jfengel
_if you aren 't trained enough to read the study, don't post an article about
it_

The problem, as I see it, isn't just that the journalists can't read it, but
that their audience don't care about it. The journalists are supposed to serve
as intermediaries between the two, but frequently, proper journalism on the
story would fail to excite the reader. The vast majority of science is
important to other scientists, but science that actually matters even to
scientifically-interested readers is not that large.

The readers want more content that interests them, and science fails to
provide it. No journalist could bridge the gap between the dull progress of
science and the reader's real interest level. The market for "mind-blowing"
science -- sweeping technological and philosophical advances -- is far greater
than the market for incremental improvements and novel but minor insights.

The niche does exist. I find it filled fairly well by Science News, which has
about a dozen pages of real science news every two weeks. I only just got an
issue about the black hole photo, which was fine with me: real discoveries are
still true and important two weeks later. But most readers would find every
other article in that issue terminally dull.

I don't know how to fix that other than to ignore any science "journalism"
that comes out more frequently than that. It exists, and I ignore it. It
doesn't contribute anything: it's peddling effectively-fictional stories to
readers who want sci-fi. I think that the finest science writing promoted well
might attract marginally more eyeballs than it currently gets, but most
readers simply don't actually care about science, and it's not something
journalists can fix.

~~~
PierredeFermat
I don't think the problem should be approached from a "great market"
perspective. The market for Hacker News is quite niche. Yet, it has become a
great community for the curious of us. Almost hardly replaceable by any of the
communities/websites who have great market potential and wider audience. So
niche is probably a good thing here.

Driving a critical discourse (on something like Health or Hacker News) between
scientists, journalists and the general public can potentially create more
appreciation for scientific progress (which might often be dull and slow
indeed) and provide a feedback loop for how science is/should be communicated
or even done.

------
PierredeFermat
The URL to Scripps Research is obviously working now, after the story got its
largest share of public attention from other websites. Truly disappointing.

