The Death and Strangulation of Science Journalism

CJR has the latest, from the Woodrow Wilson Center. Now Peter Dykstra, long at CNN, is writing for an environmental website; and now Seth Borenstein, long at AP, acknowledges that we're in a science journalism crisis (he was at time past a skeptic of this notion). Meanwhile I sometimes worry that the science blogosphere--supposedly centrally involved in and concerned with science communication--doesn't grasp what is happening. Take this post from Jason Rosenhouse--and it's just one recent example. It's entitled "The Trouble with Science Journalism," and critiques something New Scientist put on its cover. Okay, perhaps they sexed things up a little. Glass house, first stone, and all that. What's disturbing, though, is to see a meta-discussion of the "trouble" with the practitioners of science journalism without any discussion of the real "trouble": the economic realities that are killing them off, one by one. Memo to scientists: If you don't like science journalists, you're going to like even less what you get once they're gone.