The ranks ebb further: Columbus Dispatch science writer steps down….while there’s time
The Tracker does not have any hard data here — anecdotes R us! — but the decline in daily US newspaper science writers seems to be trudging along. We just received word from Mike Lafferty, science reporter at the Columbus Dispatch and a linchpin of one of the more industrious mid-pub science sections in the nation, that he has accepted a buyout to those over age 55 with 15 years on the job. (Put “Lafferty” in this site’s search box and get 20 posts that include his stuff). It’s been a drip drip drip of such things lately.
At the AAAS meeting in San Francisco I was dismayed to learn that Bryn Nelson at Newsday also is taking a buyout, and that Time Magazine’s Mike Lemonick has gone solo too (although he, like co-former-Time sci writer Madeleine Nash, will continue writing for the pub as an outside contributor). I, bought out under duress by USNews a short few years back, was hanging around in the AAAS press room without much to do. So was former Dallas Morning News science editor Tom Siegfried. Earl Lane, former Newsday science writer, was at work: staffing the place. Gad. As it is, only about 4 percent of National Assoc. of Science Writers are newspaper or newsmagazine reporters or editors. I’d guess that’s half the percentage of 20 years ago. Science sections, according to Cris Russell (ret’d Wash. Post, now at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center) have dropped from 95 in 1989 to around 40 today and many carry little beyond medical and consumer health reporting. (LATE ADDITION: Thx to comment below from Boyce, here’s the link to Cris’s paper.)
Lafferty explains: “I am very disappointed. I will really miss daily newspaper journalism. But it would be stupid not to do this … I had planned to work another two years but with things as bad as they are in the newspaper industry an 18-month buyout and paid medical until 65 looks like something I should take.” That is a pretty good deal, considering. He’s 59; June 29 will be his last day. Plans at the paper are, he reports, to hire no replacement. His agenda: freelance, sail, garden, and travel. Good fortune.
Note: In an earlier version of this post, Lafferty was erroneously called science editor.
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March 28th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
So you and all your bored, underemployed ex-daily colleagues are now out pitching well-crafted feature ideas to national glossy monthlies, right?
Newspapers and the newsweeklies are cutting their science coverage at the same time as general-interest magazines–I’m not just talking Wired and Discover and Tech Review here–are upping their science content considerably.
March 28th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Depends. How much is Wired paying these days? Seriously, it’s not that the dailies’ editors are any more indifferent to covering science than they were before. Science generates important news. There is a readership as well as social service in it, just as you suggest. But publishers insist on traditional profit margins in a time of falling revenue for the dailies and the newsmagazines. The ax is flailing all over.
March 28th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Cris Russell also reports, in her eye-opening “working paper” for the Shorenstein Center (PDFs here) that of the approximately 2,400 members of NASW, just 85 are newspaper staffers. Figure that some more are not members, and you still have a dismayingly small number.
March 29th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Thanks for sharing the paper, Boyce. I think she sums up nicely the major current problem for science journalism here:
“In recent years, the rapid growth of the Internet has provided a new venue for public access to both scientific developments and writing about science, as well as opportunities for citizen journalism. The 24-hour electronic news cycle has also put more pressure on all journalistic outlets to put out information more quickly than ever before, often with little time to do in-depth reporting.”
It’s true that the web presents a great opportunity for audiences and science writers, and also true IMO that those 85 newspaper staffers continue to do admirably fine work .. but it is my fear that the decline of in-depth reporting — especially at the local level — of science and technology won’t be accomodated for online anytime soon (or ever).
One case in point: The academic and sustainable business communities in NW Arkansas have recently made a huge effort to get funding for a local light-rail system. The papers covered this heavily in the business and travel/tourism angles, but with no science reporters onboard, issues of population growth, energy, emissions, and new light-rail technology went ignored. A terrible missed opportunity. And probably one instance among many.
March 29th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Interesting discussion.
A few years ago I had to prove my worth to my editors, or face becoming another medical writer for the paper. Without Katrina and Rita — which re-emphasized the importance of hurricanes to the Gulf Coast — I might not have succeeded.
March 29th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Guys, here’s another bit of news on the subject: After 48 years at this paper and more than 6,000 bylines, my colleague and fellow Chicago Tribune science writer Ronald Kotulak is stepping down tomorrow, Friday. Ron won a Pulitzer in 1994 for a series on how experience helps shape the brain during childhood. More than that, he’s one of the most affable and easygoing guys in the business.
I’m optimistic about this beat, but we’ll miss Ron terribly. He’s a treasure.
March 29th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Am I also remembering correctly what some business-side person once told me, that it’s technology ads that fund science and technology sections? That after the dot-com boom, the electronics ads disappeared, and so did the will to run science?
March 29th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
In the early days, computer ads were sometimes placed in science sections, especially Science Times, but that was only a convenience. Most newspapers put them in the business sections, which the Times does nowadays, along with its occasional Circuits pages. Science Times was started in 1978, long before retail computer advertising. It ran with little or no advertising for years before personal computers (anyone remember when they were called microcomputers?) came on the market in a big way.
It is true that science sections do not pull dedicated advertising. But then, neither do sports sections. About the only sections that bring in dedicated advertising are arts & leisure, food, travel.
March 30th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Pharmaceutical ads helped keep TIME Magazine in the money for the past five years, which is why some of us were mystified when science and medicine coverage seemed to be getting short shrift in the latest redesign. Mike Lemonick and Christine Gorman, mainstays of TIME’s science and medicine coverage, both took packages in January. A few weeks later, Ed Gabel, the artist responsible for many of TIME’s best science graphics over the years, left the magazine for more lucrative corporate work. And when I was offered an opportunity to move to San Francisco as executive editor of TIME Inc’s Business 2.0 — returning to my journalistic roots in computers and technology — I grabbed it. After 27 years at TIME, including 12 years as its science editor, it seemed time to move on.
April 10th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
A belated response from the far North. The Canadian Science Writers’ Association currently has about 500 members. When last I checked with our executive director, fewer than 45 were working full-time in print and electronic media as reporters or producers. Many of those cover primarily medicine.
When I first began covering science in 1969 (joined NASW the following year) there were around 70 full-time reporters in Canada covering science and/or medicine, mostly for daily newspapers. Many major metropolitan dailies here no longer have a reporter assigned to cover science, and sometimes not even medicine although there is a medical school and research hospital in their circulation area. In some case the education reporter usually handles the story. In others, a general assignment reporter.
I’m chairing a panel next week in Melbourne at the Fifth World Conference of Science Journalists with the title “Seducing the Gatekeepers: getting more science into the news.” Panelists include print reporters from Australia and Japan and a TV science producer from Japan. No one from the U.S. so far as I know.