Science Reporting and Evidence-Based Journalism

In The American Scholar, David Brown makes remarks to the University of Iowa for the Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry.

From the piece...

I want to take the next little while to talk about writing about science in the popular press. My comments will be principally confined to science as it is reported in newspapers—how it’s done, and how to do it better.

I have been writing for newspapers for much of my working life. They are now what might be considered the wooly mammoths of the American media. People like me are hoping the Ice Age lasts as long as possible. But even when it ends, and the last newspaper keels over into the peat, there will be descendants of these once thriving behemoths, and some of them will be writing about science.

Enough of that metaphor.

What I’m trying to say is that science writing will go on forever, in one form or another.

Why? Because there’s so much science in our world, and it’s so interesting.