Independent: A Brit’s view of the AAAS Meeting
The Independent‘s science editor Steve Connor was among the crowd of journalists from the UK and many othat nations at last week’s AAAS meeting in San Diego. This week he explains why the conference is so popular with people like him – reporters with foreign accents and with travel budgets. It became common among US daily science news writers about ten years ago or so to pooh pooh the AAAS meetings as all policy and hardly any news. Then the daily news business in this country cratered, with science journalists laid off or stripped of such perks as being able to cover science more an hour’s drive away except by phone call, email, and press release. The National Association of Science Writers elected out of tucking its meeting under the AAAS’s tent, too. Those are reasons the meeting gets light coverage in its own country – or, at least, little immediate coverage. Perhaps the freelancers at the meeting will produce a more drawn-out bulge of news.
Connor loves the AAAS, admires US science, and throws in some praise for the current administration’s taste in science advisers and directors of major technical agencies.
Pic- that’s the old logo, and handsome it was.
- Charlie Petit
March 3rd, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Indeed, I was surprised at how many reporters at the meeting were European. I think there was one news conference where I was the only person without a Brit accent to ask a question.
March 3rd, 2010 at 5:53 pm
My recollection is a bit different from Charlie’s. I remember wide-spread grousing about the AAAS meeting among American journalists dating back to the late 1970′s: That’s 30-plus years, not just 10.