Guardian: The Sci Journalism satirist explains himself. If you’re in the biz, read this.
Remember that send-up of formulaic science reporting that Martin Robbins, science writer and blogger at the UK’s Guardian, put up last week and that promptly went viral and got noticed almost everywhere? If you don’t, see ksjt’s previous post, or go straight to Robbins’s post here. In this week’s Guardian he slaps himself a little sober, expresses amazement at this toss-off’s explosive spread (the pub’s most-read article of the week), and essays at length on what he was driving at:
- Guardian – Martin Robbins: Why I spoofed science journalism, and how to fix it.
I have quibbles around the edges and things I could discuss -such as not all his “scare quotes” are so scary or off-center from a study’s point – but the upshot: This is terrific. He puts well what I have sometimes referred to as the ability of superior reporters to take ownership of a story. Some commenters noted here that Part I last week was a quick and somewhat easy effort, i.e. perhaps on the shallow (if amusing) side. Read Part II – the author himself is not shallow. It’s BBC-centric, and thus illuminating in additional ways to US readers. It also is written in a land where there not only is the Beeb and a now-standard welter of on line outlets, but half a dozen or more daily, national newspapers with thriving, highly competitive science desks. Nonetheless the core message is universal to the daily science journalism trade
On this side of the Atlantic, we don’t know or at least I don’t know what a Ceefax page is. But there is an example to which he links. So I did a screenshot and stuck it up top right. Still … beats me.
- Charlie Petit
ps – Thank you Charles Q. Choi for alerting us to Robbins’s second shoe hitting the floor.
pps – I looked at some of Robbins’s other recent posts. In September, after reading a Nature.com blog assertion by Jennifer Rohn that science blogging is mainly a man’s game, he harnessed twitter to gather a list of science bloggresses, if you’ll forgive my retro coinage. The resulting tweety tea party produced an impressive 131-name roster – and he invited people to add those he missed.
October 7th, 2010 at 12:43 pm
It is a nice post, and nice that Robbins took the time to reflect as constructively as possible after his spoof.
The Ceefax issue is a lovely titbit – I use it with my science communication undergrads every year. Still, I can’t help wondering if it’s a bit of a red herring in terms of the larger issues to do with structure and online writing. One might when argue it’s quite efficient of the BBC.
News stories are written to the traditional “inverted pyramid” structure where you put the most important stuff up front and gradually flow through more and more detail. So, rather than paying for someone else to write the Ceefax stories (tiny audience for these), they simply lift the first bit of the web copy.
For me, the real question is whether the inverted pyramid is necessary online (when you are less likely to be cutting from the bottom up). As discussed a bit here, by Ed Yong. This is an issue much bigger than the BBC.