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.