Exactly this. It is all about click bait to drive digital advertising. It is largely our own fault. We (by and large) don't want to pay good journalism. We want it to be free which means ads. NPR/PBS tends to have better and more balanced news but it is largely because of their donor/patron model. But to be clear, they are surely not immune. They are still run by people who are judged by views and reach and other eyeball metrics. We don't really want news anymore. We want our preconceived notions affirmed (we like to be "right") and we want to be entertained. Unfortunately, we get what we've asked for.

NPR's science reporting has been abysmal for the past few years. Maybe they don't have the click-bait problem (debatable), but they routinely report everything one side of the political spectrum says as scientific fact. They also fall victim to the "experts say..." and "scientific consensus is..." tropes. Their "scientific expert" source list looks suspiciously like a group of the loudest voices on Twitter.

I say this as someone on that side of the political spectrum.

>"Their "scientific expert" source list looks suspiciously like a group of the loudest voices on Twitter."

That's probably where the journalists find people to interview, likely because a large majority of journalists are active on Twitter.

This definitely isn't the only place, because there are free services like SciLine by the AAAS (source: https://www.sciline.org) and many others for connecting journalists to researchers. Many universities also have their own expert directories set up, and journalists can also find papers and contact their authors.

However, for many journalists on deadline, it's just far less effort to message vocal professors on Twitter, so this may be a reason for this effect if it's true. The people who market their research more on Twitter may be more likely to get covered in the press, and thus interviewed.

What really sucks is some funders are becoming interested in metrics that track social media engagement and other forms of attention, rewarding Twitter punditry.

Twitter influence is now a not-insignificant leg up in faculty hiring and academic politics. It’s becoming really hard to take academic science seriously.

> Exactly this. It is all about click bait to drive digital advertising. It is largely our own fault. We (by and large) don't want to pay good journalism.

I'm not buying it. Science reporting from university press departments is just as bad if not worse, and they are funded by the university not advertising (tuition, grants, alumni donations, etc..)

University press departments are (indirectly) funded by grant agencies. Thus, it is strongly in their interests to convey to those agencies that their institution is doing groundbreaking work.

IMO: People that write well are not jumping at the chance to write science articles for universities. Writing is hard and science is hard, and being passionate about both is rare.

You would be surprised. Universities pay substantially better than newspapers (likely with better job security), and writing jobs are typically hard to find and low-paying in general. Many former experienced journalists end up working at university press departments because of the better working conditions.

From an enjoyment side, writing is hard, but for a lot of people, it's much easier than research. There are fewer credentials needed for a career in science journalism versus scientific research (a Bachelor's only versus a PhD for many senior scientist positions). I know a lot of people who have a natural skill at writing who decided to major in a science field for one reason or another, performed okay-ish at their courses, and tried to get back to writing work.

The end result is also similar writing for a magazine/newspaper versus a university. A university may have higher standards for accuracy and precision (especially if an interviewed scientist wants to review it, while a newspaper/magazine may have a policy to avoid sharing drafts to avoid bias in the article). However, higher-end magazines (like the New Yorker) have more prestige. There is also far less room at universities for dissent (e.g. presenting an opposing scientific view or publishing investigative work).

It's not that rare, but the problem is that a lot of people who are outsiders, yet who truly understand science and then write about it, often end up becoming quite sceptical of it. Just like how journalists who understand politics end up sceptical. The difference is, journalists holding politicians to account is well understood to be a critical part of democracy, but for science it's the opposite. If journalists start asking tough questions they're immediately evicted from the best known institutions because scientists (academics) have done a great job of convincing those in power that doubting scientists in any way is immoral and dangerous.

So what you get is worthless fanboy journalism in which those who are smart enough to ask tough questions get removed, and those who are left just want to copy paste university press releases.

In turn that beds general scepticism amongst the population because they can sense that nobody is challenging the "experts".

It would help if journalists would hold anyone's feet to the fire these days. Science journalism is so bad at this that it seems to drive scientists to create low-quality studies.

Retraction Watch (source: https://retractionwatch.com) and independent consultants like Elisabeth Bik (article about her in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01363-z) are good for this, though they aren't really traditional media. ProPublica and large newspapers (e.g. The New York Times occasionally) do publish investigative work on science topics sometimes too.

This is not a proof. In logic, you can't say A and C => D is wrong just because B and C => D is wrong.

An example, "My uncle became blind because of diabetes", similar answer: "I don't buy it, my father is diabetic and never got blind". Doesn't work.

In other words, the reason why scientific journalism in non-university press could be bad for various different reason than university press.

Well first off, this is an informal discussion. Secondly:

> It is ALL about click bait to drive digital advertising

(Emphasis my own.) Science reporting is still crap even when it isn't funded by advertising, so there's obviously more going on than the funding model making things shit. The BBC and CBC both have crappy science reporting too, as do university press departments. These counter-examples refute the claim which was stated too strongly (I do think advertising plays some role in it, but obviously not all.)

> It is largely our own fault. We (by and large) don't want to pay good journalism.

It's not about people not wanting to pay, it's that the value of a single article is too small to charge money for. A single article is maybe worth a hundredth of a cent to me. There's no viable mechanism for me to pay a hundredth of a cent to a writer, just transaction fees will be more than the amount transacted.

I'm not going to pay a subscription to a site I might not ever visit again. I'm also not going to pay a subscription fee to every site I come across that might have a decently written article once in a while. Advertising ends up being the only viable way to "charge" a tiny fraction of a cent to readers.

> I'm also not going to pay a subscription fee to every site I come across that might have a decently written article once in a while.

What if the site was consistenly putting decent articles? I think one of the argument is that you would see more of those decent articles if people were more enclined to follow a subscription model where the journal is accountable to its customers.

>"you would see more of those decent articles if people were more inclined to follow a subscription model where the journal is accountable to its customers."

I think this argument holds up. For example, publications like the Scientific American and The Scientist tend to be very high quality in terms of accuracy (usually with unobtrusive citations, if I recall correctly). It's too bad their subscriptions prices are so high; they were hundreds of dollars a year if I remember correctly, versus less than 50 dollars a year for other magazines.

Ii'm not sure about how financially successful they are, but I found myself struggling to justify such a subscription price, when the purpose was essentially edu-tainment. The publications that can more easily get people to pay more, in my view, ostensibly help people make more money or find career success, which is why industry publications like STAT for biotech/medicine (and more generally, publications like the WSJ/Bloomberg) tend to be more financially successful.

> NPR/PBS tends to have better and more balanced news but it is largely because of their donor/patron model.

This is an interesting hypothesis, because PBS is near the top of my quality ranking for news orgs while NPR is near the bottom (obviously excluding the long-tail of sources I don't often encounter, like breitbart). I don't see much of a correlation with manner of funding.

NPR used to be my main news source until around 2016. Despite the bias in their funding source (~90% left-leaning donors), they put out a lot of important stories that criticized both sides of the aisle. Then they got a serious case of TDS.

> Despite the bias in their funding source (~90% left-leaning donors)

Despite? Or because of it? Left leaning politics need trust worthy news to advance, right leaning politics don't as their goal is to maintain tradition and the status quo. If nobody mobilises the right wing polices win by default, noise instead of news helps to create apathy, apathy is the bread of the status quo.

This is a highly simplistic and an ideologically-flattering (it's pretty obvious you subscribe to left wing views) picture you paint of the situation. Here's a mirror image of it your alternate right wing self might be saying on another HN in another universe:

?>>>? Right leaning politics need trust worthy news to survive, left leaning politics don't as their goal is to upset tradition and revolt on the status quo. If nobody maintains the status quo the left wing polices win by default, noise instead of news helps to create chaos, choas is the bread of revolution and malcontent.

As you can see, this sort of "I define my side to be the more accurate view of reality" is highly malleable and can be used to support any side with semi-convincing "just so" stories.

And you're not actually describing the left-wing/right-wing divide here (itself a highly simplistic and outdated view of politics and economics dating from more than a century), you're describing the conservative/progressive divide, which tends to correlate with the left/right divide in the US, which might be where you are from. But even there the correlation is not perfect, Trump for example was fairly 'progressive' in his populist politics, his extensive engagement with the public on Twitter was a very novel form of presidential press releases that upseted many traditions and angered many political conservatives. See how conservative/progressive is multi-dimensional ?, you're just too used to a few dominant dimensions being coorelated with a left\right slant.

Furthermore, even accepting the dubious renaming of conservative\progressive to right-wing\left-wing, it's still a leap of faith from here to assuming that the progressive side always benefits from representing truth and reality as it is. In fact, this is almost gauranteed to be false, because even if conservatives are randomly guessing, they would still get roughly 50% of the world right, and since progressives always oppose conservatives in this hyper-polarized political climate, they are gauranteed to be wrong that 50% of the time. This seems to be supported by reality as being a progressive is associated with a higher chance of believing there are 700 genders and that biological males are women, so there must be at least some situations where progressives ("Left-Wing" in your parlance) benefit from a mis-representation of reality.

> If nobody maintains the status quo the left wing polices win by default

Can you elaborate on this? Society has inertia, history has inertia, how is this "nobody mantains status quo" work?

Not at all, tradition and status quo needs maintaining just as much as revolution needs mobilising. The 'inertia' metaphor is misleading: humans die, if nobody educates\indoctrinates (depending on your view) the new generation then tradition dies off. Furthermore, the world keeps changing, constantly putting tradition and the status quo on the defensive, if nobody expends energy to constantly reinvent and adapt traditions, they will gradually become irrelevant.

What does TDS mean. Google is no help :(

TDS = Trump derangement syndrome

It refers to when a media outlet thinks that everything the Trump admin does is an unprecedented terrible action, even when that thing is humanitarian aid or peace treaties in the middle east.

It is not "largely our own fault", this situation has been engineered by the billionaires and the rest of the media and political power brokers specifically to create anxiety and confusion in the general public. Perfect preparation for eternal political divisions and whatever distracting whims they choose: War in Russia? Celebrity divorce! Planet on fire? Race on commercializing space! How's about an official Olympics digital coin and NFT series? Why not?

There's a bunch of millionaires who have broken off from legacy news to make written and/or podcast style news content. We're willing to pay for quality work, but the legacy news isn't creating it.

Who pays for podcasts?

Patreon created a whole industry around facilitating people paying for podcasts and other content.

I agree except for the implication that it used to be different.

>"Another problem with sources is that science news also frequently just repeats press releases without actually saying where they got their information from. It’s a problem because university press releases aren’t exactly unbiased."

This is probably why exaggerated claims from press releases usually just get passed on and, frequently, exaggerated. Even someone educated in the field doesn't have time to dig into 3 or 4 new sub-fields a day and actually understand the papers that press releases are talking about. e.g. A physicist with a background in optics is better situated than most to understand an experimental quantum cryptography paper, but they're still going to have to bang their heads against several walls to figure out what's going on. Head-banging takes time. Copying from a press release doesn't.

And those press releases are often written by university PR offices without a clear understanding of the research they're promoting, and the articles repeating those press releases frequently get copied poorly by other science publications. It's a game of telephone all the way down.

> I don't blame the journalists,

writing and publishing four articles a day with only cursory review/editorial oversight, if any, isn't journalism at all, it's a content mill

> They believed everything corporations said, because they had no time to check.

I remember a story from a famous freelance investigative journalist who found evidence of disenfranchisement of black voters in the 2000 election. He collected a huge amount of evidence and testimony, and sent it to news outlets across the US. Most of them came back with:

"Uh, we contacted the <person/group accused>, and they're denying this. We're not going to run the story."

Who'd have thought people accused of nefarious, potentially illegal activities would deny doing them?

> I don't blame the journalists, but the work conditions and economical situation of the media industry.

Why wouldn’t you blame people who voluntarily took a job writing science articles while having zero credentials? They could be normal news journos, nobody forced them to report on science specifically.

I once went to a journalism conference, and there was a panel where a professional science journalist strongly pushed for the view along the lines of, "you don't need a science background to be a science writer," instead of encouraging aspiring journalists to study the relevant background over the years.

I'm sure a view against credentials isn't shared by all journalists (for example, many publications do require a relevant background), but that experience was personally disheartening because it seemed to be supported in the room.

I was also disheartened by the focus on self-marketing and self-promotion in general over doing quality, accurate journalism, and a much bigger focus on having a good "narrative" and writing engagingly versus having a discussion on ethics. To some extent, I get it, because the advice likely works in helping someone succeed in their career. But there are clearly problems in science news related to precision and accuracy, and not much drive in many publications to fix it.

the news industry needs public investment from all angles. right now the incentives are completely wrong

I mean we have public broadcasters like Canada’s CBC and they still do the same thing.

Why?

Because they need to justify their budget. If nobody reads/views your reports, why should the government pay for it.

The real answer is: the public doesn’t want science reporting unless it’s punchy, simple and exciting.

Sorry, but news organizations aren't out there doing what the public wants. Most of them are doing what will get attention. That is very different. The public doesn't want to have to give them attention, but when they say things like "X cures cancer" or "X is a threat to your children" it makes people listen. When the article turns out to be nothing, a small fraction of the people you fooled turn off your channel forever, and the rest just say "this was a waste" and go on to read the next piece of clickbait.

This behavior needs to be called out and there needs to be accountability. However, there is none. Even when the stories are completely fabricated, as happened at USA Today recently.

What the public wants and what tricks people into giving you attention are different things. Journalists today go for the latter, which is why we have all of these "alternative" news sources now.

> This behavior needs to be called out and there needs to be accountability. However, there is none. Even when the stories are completely fabricated, as happened at USA Today recently.

I'd love a browser extension that shows me a crowd-sourced batting average for the author of any article I'm reading online. Something that tells me "Oh, you're reading an article written by journalist Joe Schmoe? Joe has previously written 400 breathless articles about scientists discovering space aliens"

I know I know, technical solution to a social problem. And curating these crowdsourced article tags and statistics would probably be an intractable nightmare. It probably can't hurt much to try though. I think the fundamental problem is there are too many journalists for many individual journalists to develop a reputation in the minds of readers. I read several hundred, maybe a few thousand articles a year, but I could only tell you the names of a handful of journalists at best. There must be some way for technology to help bridge this gap.

The idea sounds good, but I don't think it could work in the real world. The result wouldn't be people endorsing the quality of an article, but rather whether the article weighs on their political side of an issue

I've heard of newsguard and ground news. Both are biased in favor of "reputable" sources who should have been punished for fake news and haven't (USA Today, NY Times).

I would say quanta magazine is a counterexample

Also: Nautilus

https://nautil.us/

Nautilus is actually an example that supports how in-depth science reporting can be difficult to monetize. I really like many of their articles in the publication, but there was a major incident a while back when they were severely (many months, even longer than a year) behind on paying their writers.

I actually happened to meet a writer who had this happen to them, but this incident was also publicized in an open letter (source: https://nwu.org/an-open-letter-from-freelancers-at-nautilus-..., with discussion about this on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/aznfusion/status/941051077922869248). This happened in 2017, and I'm not sure how long it took to get resolved.

That’s very sad. There is go fund me and crows funding for all kinds of weird causes and 50k isn’t such a huge amount either.

The future seems bleak.

ETA: Oh!! The link re: the Twitter thread is gnarly! I hope this got resolved and the freelancers got something out of this.

How do they finance themselves?

A finance billionaire with a background in math and physics (Jim Simons)

Sometimes it's not about what the public wants, but what it needs.

what do you know about the public needs?

I don't claim to, but I do think it's pretty trivial to demonstrate that what one wants and what one needs is not necessarily the same.

Do you force the public to read it? Or just live with the fact you get dozens of views for news that took hours and thousands of dollars to create.

Well, if you've made dozens of people learn something, then that's surely better than filling millions of peoples heads with nothing but vapid nonsense, isn't it?

Sure it better.

But instead of making dozens of people learning something you paid for school lunches for 200 students each month?

It’s a limit pot of tax payer money and it needs to be used on the highest impact things.

How can you tell what has impact, though? What's the point in paying for school lunches for kids who have no interest in learning?

Even with your cynicism — and from your argument, why send them to school at all? — food is so cheap that paying for everyone’s school meals (even if they could afford it without help or hate learning) is a really cheap way to help those that are interested but can’t afford to eat well.

Let me use UK costs as an example, to show how cheap school lunches are compared to all the other aspects of education, because I don’t know the USA well enough: If I assume £2/school lunch (mine were £1, but that was the 90s), and if the school year is still 39 weeks, that’s £390/year, or £11,700 per year for a class of 30, compared to a qualified teacher’s starting salary of £25,714 (head teachers go up to £125,098 in London), and then you need to add the cost of books, and consumables, and the building itself, and insurance, and support staff (HR, caretakers, supply teachers).

> What's the point in paying for school lunches for kids who have no interest in learning?

Because the state requires them to be there anyway, so it's the state's responsibility to ensure they are well fed? Academic performance has no bearing on whether somebody deserves food.

The impact is they aren’t malnourished? Seems like a good goal.

Edit: we prioritize feeding people over giving them educational science articles; seems appropriate

Something that should be noted here is that our brains won't work properly without adequate nutrition. Our neurons require plenty of potassium to operate and other minerals such as magnesium and zinc. On top of that essential fatty acids and amino acids are super important for making neurotransmitters

All of this gets ignored because the poors deserve it or some stupid nonsense thrown around by the people with money and power

Many things are noble goals. Why is one to be preferred over another?

It’s easier to talk about feeding children to ignore stuff like out of control military acquisition or allowing oil companies to pillage public lands for peanuts.

The question is, given a sum of money and a goal to further the education of the people, what is the best way of spending that money.

What other people are doing that is wrong is rarely particularly useful to think about when working toward a goal of your own.

It's the difference between the government justifying the funding and politicians (who control the budget) justifying funding. The government could easily justify funding as its own in-house journalism team that processes raw scientific publications into information usable by various government agencies. Politicians, instead, pander to voters with their cost/benefit metrics.

I blame the journalists. They know what they are doing. They are part of the problem.

I wonder about this because allocation of money in the world is uneven, and people get paid LOTS of money to work for wall street, but very little for worthy journalism.

I think good scientific journalism might be something where funding is not proportional to benefit to society. Also things like investigating regulatory capture.

You blame the corporation and not the journalist? How is this going to work out in the long run?

The behavior we see due to the private ownership of media and news publishers betrays the colossal failure it is for the public and nations at large to have our society's self-reporting undermined by profit motives. News and media need to be treated as protected speech, with more formalization and more regulation. Leaving the governance of our society's self reporting to greedy Capitalists is a clear and active recipe for doublespeak and fascism.

The profit motive does a poor job of handling the externalities journalism should be addressing. But govt control of the media landscape to the degree you're talking about can easily hamstring the important adversarial function journalism has vis-a-vis govt.

It's a very hard problem, and there are no obvious or pat solutions.

Not government control, more regulation in the form of transparencies towards what gets reported and what does not, protections for investigative news journalists and whistleblowers, and no more masquerading entertainment as news journalism. Just as cigarettes have warnings about lung health, Fox News should have warnings about "not journalism, entertainment and the political opinion of Robert Murdoch".

On the contrary, letting the government determine what comes through the media is the recipe for fascism. As evidence, consider that the first thing that any authoritarian regime does is to take control of the media.

The first test you've got to do for any proposal like yours is to consider what the impact of it will be when your political opponents are at the reins. Are you comfortable with Donald Trump (or really, anyone of his faction) having this power?

Who said "government control"? I said more regulation. Of course letting any one power source control society's self conversation is bad. We need to accept the concept that regulation exists because the alternative is worse, and that includes regulation of how the news is delivered and the rights of those collecting information for news reporting. As it stands, society expects "good journalists" to give their lives to report the truth the public needs to understand how far our lack of regulation has allowed things to become.

> Who said "government control"? I said more regulation.

You do realize government control and regulation are synonymous, right?

Yes, they are, and in practice regulations exist not because some evil bureaucrat wants to oppress free enterprise; regulations exist because one or more parties abused a freedom to the degree their behavior's impacts harmed others enough for laws to be written.