Science news, business news, bad news
By William M. Hartnett on Mar 29, 2007 in newspapers
Charles Petit over at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker calls our attention to the accumulating anecdotal evidence that “the decline in daily US newspaper science writers seems to be trudging along.”
It’s mental, really, that newspaper science writing is, by all appearances, dying. Aside from The New York Times, scarcely any paper in the country can be relied upon to consistently deliver science news. Quite apart from being incredibly important, science journalism is flat-out fascinating. So much of what we serve up every day is so unbelievably useless, trite or otherwise boring, but we can’t be bothered to deliver interesting science news.
Journalists on the business beat, meanwhile, are sufficiently concerned about their fate in the current newspaper climate that the Society of American Business Editors and Writers distributed this open letter at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention.
The value of business reporting is unquestionable, when it’s done well, anyway. Fine, fine, fine. But can someone tell me why most newspapers of a certain size continue to maintain separate local news and local business news departments? Would anyone designing a newsroom from scratch make this choice?
I’ve read some of the pro-separation arguments, but I still don’t get it. A health reporter on one side of the room and a business of health reporter on the other? Real estate reporters in business, government reporters covering taxes and development policy in metro? Most newspaper people seem to think we’ve cost-cut to the bone, but consider, really consider, all the structural and bureaucratic inefficiencies in our newsrooms that are nothing more than remnants of what I like to call newspapers’ Era of Delusion.
