Science journalism
One early example dates back to Digdarshan (means showing the direction), which was an educational monthly magazine that started publication in 1818 from Srirampore, Bengal, India.
One of the occasions an article was attributed to a 'scientific correspondent' was "A Gale in the Bay of Biscay" by William Crookes which appeared in The Times on 18 January 1871, page 7.
[4] Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) and John Tyndall (1820–1893) were scientists who were greatly involved in journalism and Peter Chalmers Mitchell (1864–1945) was Scientific Correspondent for The Times from 1918 to 1935.
[10] Similarly, there are currently very few journalists in traditional media outlets that write multiple articles on emerging science, such as nanotechnology.
[11] In January 2012, just a week after The Daily Climate reported that worldwide coverage of climate change continued a three-year slide in 2012[12] and that among the five largest US dailies, the New York Times published the most stories and had the biggest increase in coverage,[13] that newspaper announced that it was dismantling its environmental desk and merging its journalists with other departments.
In April 2012, the New York Times was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes for content published by Politico and The Huffington Post (now HuffPost) both online sources, a sign of the platform shift by the media outlet.
This is a positive finding for science journalism because it shows it is increasingly relevant and is relied upon by the public to make informed decisions.
"The vast majority of non-specialists obtain almost all their knowledge about science from journalists, who serve as the primary gatekeepers for scientific information.
[22] New communication environments provide essentially unlimited information on a large number of issues, which can be obtained anywhere and with relatively limited effort.
"After a lot of hand wringing about the newspaper industry about six years ago, I take a more optimistic view these days," said Cristine Russell, president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.
Survey and experimental research have discovered connections between exposure to cable and talk show radio channels and views on global warming.
However, early subject analyses noticed that U.S. media outlets over exaggerate the dispute that surrounds global warming actually existing.
A majority of Americans view global warming as an outlying issue that will essentially affect future generations of individuals in other countries.
[26] The content of news stories regarding climate change are affected by journalistic norms including balance, impartiality, neutrality and objectivity.
Balanced reporting, which involves giving equal time to each opposing side of a debate over an issue, has had a rather harmful impact on the media coverage of climate science.
[18] In 2015, John Bohannon produced a deliberately bad study to see how a low-quality open access publisher and the media would pick up their findings.
[27] He invented a fake "diet institute" that lacks even a website, used the pen name "Johannes Bohannon" and fabricated a press release.
[29] The 2010 book Merchants of Doubt by historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway argues that in topics like the global warming controversy, tobacco smoking, acid rain, DDT and ozone depletion, contrarian scientists have sought to "keep the controversy alive" in the public arena by demanding that reporters give false balance to the minority side.
Open science, a movement for "free availability and usability of scholarly publications," seeks to counteract the accessibility issues of valuable scientific information.
[42] Science journalism finds itself under a critical eye due to the fact that it combines the necessary tasks of a journalist along with the investigative process of a scientist.
This is a very significant role because it helps "equip non-specialists to draw on scientific information and make decisions that accord with their own values".
Science journalists may choose to highlight the amount of risk that studies have uncovered while others focus more on the benefits depending on audience and framing.
