Award-winning science writer and editor John Carey will visit Virginia Tech on Tuesday, Sept. 21 to give a speech titled, “Why scientists should help stop the decline in journalism.”
Carey has more than 30 years of experience in journalism, including work at Newsweek, Business Week and The Scientist. He is coming to Tech as the College of Engineering Visiting Scholar.
The speech is at 4 p.m. in ICTAS room 310, and is open to the general public. Before coming to campus, Carey took the time to talk with the Collegiate Times about his upcoming lecture.
CT: Your talk is titled, “Why scientists should help stop the decline in journalism.” What do you consider to be the most pressing problems in the journalism industry today?
CAREY: Well, I think you can break it down into several things. The first is just the sheer amount of resources and numbers. You see the number of especially science journalists that have been laid off — CNN laid off its entire science staff. It’s just kind of a bloodbath out there. I recall one year at the AAA Science Writing Awards where both of the newspaper writers who had won the award had been laid off after they won the award. So it’s just a big drop in the number of veteran science writers that are doing this.
And then, at the same time you add the larger secular trend of the decline in traditional mainstream journalism anyway with newspapers getting smaller and magazines folding and things like that. And so there’s been a big loss in expertise. The blogosphere is exploding, and you see an increase in some of the science coverage there, but unfortunately, you can pick it apart and see that much of it is either not credible, or just wrong. So you have this decline in traditional journalism and this rise in new journalism, which I think is just not filling the gap. So there’s this big gap between what’s really out there and what’s been covered.
CT: Why can scientists fix this and how?
CAREY: I’m not completely sure, and I was hoping to put a question mark on my talk.
If you think about this gap that I just mentioned, you could pick a whole bunch of different topics, whether it’s trying to assess whether a drug really works or not, or climate science. And climate science is a good one because there’s so much misinformation out there ,and it’s probably because journalists haven’t been doing their job well or there haven’t been enough journalists to do the job — so I think the only other people that could help fill that gap would be scientists themselves.
And so, in general my advice to scientists is to get involved.
And I’m going to suggest a number of ways that they can do that and show some examples of where it works and where it doesn’t work. There is just so much misinformation and scientists the people that are supposed to have the facts. So there’s a disconnect between getting that information to the public that isn’t happening now and could happen if scientists got more involved.
There’s a whole bunch of ways you can do it, either in developing relationships with reporters, or starting their own blogs — and there are examples of researchers that have done this successfully and come to be seen as experts in their own right — or in having a sort of corrective role where things appear in a paper and the scientists will take the time to point out the error and try to work with the paper to try to fix the error and get the coverage better and things like that.
A version of this article appeared in the Sep 17 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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