Comments on: Writing for an audience, or why science is not like football https://partnews.mit.edu/2013/02/20/writing-about-science-is-or-is-not-like-writing-about-football/ Treating newsgathering as an engineering problem... since 2012! Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:45:23 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2 By: Zen Faulkes https://partnews.mit.edu/2013/02/20/writing-about-science-is-or-is-not-like-writing-about-football/#comment-4201 Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:55:40 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=1899#comment-4201 “A science article and a football article are two totally different kettles of fish. … (M)any seemed to think that the solution to our audience problem was to combine a single kind of high-level content with masterful social media trickery, thus sneaking knowledge into the hands of every member of the unsuspecting public.”

Here might be one reason why.

Football – indeed, sports in general – is never, ever called upon to justify itself. Nobody ever questions the sports segment on every local nightly news show in the country. Nobody worries about the sports section of a newspaper disappearing.

On the other hand, science coverage is CONSTANTLY asked to justify itself. Is it any surprise that science writers want to reach people when they are always given the no-so-subtle message that science has less standing in daily life than politics, sports, or weather?

More on this here: http://neurodojo.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-relevance-double-standard.html

]]> By: mstem https://partnews.mit.edu/2013/02/20/writing-about-science-is-or-is-not-like-writing-about-football/#comment-4173 Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:45:23 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=1899#comment-4173 This is great. I like how you thread together your professional experience, this event, and last week’s assignment. You’ve really landed on the generalist vs. niche content problem so many generalist newspapers have struggled with in an era of niche experts. Richard Gingras of Google News talked about this problem in a talk I went to last year at Nieman (http://civic.mit.edu/blog/mstem/the-head-of-google-news-on-the-future-of-news).

That being said, to go back to your initial discussion about reaching larger audiences with science journalism, I do think there are methods, easy enough to implement, that can help content reach beyond its obvious audience. I’m thinking of employing a good sense of humor, graphics, shareable platforms, and other popular formats to reach people who are not consciously out to read some science today.

Really nice post.

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