Columbia Journalism Review

Environment coverage TBD

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 11:00:58 -0500

By Curtis Brainard The New York Times’s decision is to dismantle its four-year-old environment “pod” has been called everything from “an unmitigated disaster” to potentially “a good thing.” In fact, a lot remains to be seen. InsideClimate News reporter Katherine Bagley broke the story on Friday and quoted Times managing editor Dean Baquet insisting that the...

Call in the math club

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:15:42 -0500

By Declan Fahy A reflective piece in The New York Times’s business pages points to a critical future role for science reporters—guarding against a “Big Data bubble.” The article, by Steve Lohr, described an MIT conference that explored the considerable promise that big data—a catchall label that describes the new way of understanding the world through the analysis of vast amounts...

Playing the study game

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 11:00:44 -0500

By David H. Freedman Recently in the pages of the CJR, I took on science journalism's lack of skepticism and misuse of published scientific studies, especially with regard to personal health. (“Survival of the Wrongest,” January/February 2013.) To highlight some of the problems, I look at reporting on obesity and long-term weight loss. I argued that this reporting has been focused on...

Climate coverage rebound?

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 17:45:18 -0500

By Curtis Brainard There are signs that climate-change coverage is poised for a rebound after three years of decline, experts say, but the media continue to pay it scant attention, and a lot would need to happen in 2013 to change that. Last week, The Daily Climate, a website that tracks stories about climate change, released the annual analysis...

Coming clean on food safety

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 11:00:00 -0500

By Helena Bottemiller Editors’ Note: Bottemiller’s bio should have mentioned that her employer, Food Safety News, is published by the law firm Marler Clark, which represents victims of food-borne illnesses. FSN operates separately and is editorially independent. In the January/February edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, I report on the challenges facing journalists covering food safety, from the slow trickle of information...

Must-reads of 2012: science

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 06:50:03 -0500

By Curtis Brainard As 2012 draws to a close, CJR writers brainstormed the year's best reads in their beats. The dream that failed — The Economist’s special report on nuclear energy marking the first anniversary of the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima power plant Media blows hot air about dinosaur flatulence — Smithsonian Journalists carried away by speculation about Jurassic farts...

Fronting for fossil fuels

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 14:50:00 -0500

By Curtis Brainard

Weathercasters on climate

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 11:00:53 -0500

By Curtis Brainard Rolling Stone’s Jeff Goodell rang an old bell in early December when he called out TV weathercasters for saying almost nothing about climate change throughout a year of extreme weather events—but he got people’s attention, in Maryland at least. According to a blog post at Baltimore City Paper, Tony Pann, a meteorologist at WBAL, a local...

Lanza, autism, and violence

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:45:10 -0500

By Curtis Brainard As with so many senseless acts of violence— including the shootings in Aurora, CO, last summer and Tucson, AZ, the year before that—some media outlets haven’t been able to resist the temptation to speculate about the mental health of the young man who killed 27 people in Newtown, CT, on December 14. This time,...

Flight of the bloggers

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 06:50:00 -0500

By Curtis Brainard

'Synbio' coverage on the rise

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:45:31 -0500

By Curtis Brainard You know an urban neighborhood is up and coming when it gets an abbreviation like “SoMa,” for the district south of Market Street in San Francisco. So it goes, apparently, with emerging sciences like synthetic biology, which Eleonore Pauwels, a public policy expert who studies the subject, often refers to as “synbio.” Buzzwords are not all, however....

Carney’s conspiracy theory

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 11:00:56 -0500

By Curtis Brainard Last week, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney blamed GOP operatives for revealing that Susan Rice, President Obama’s presumed favorite to become the next Secretary of State, has significant investments in the Canadian oil industry. “I would commend Republican opposition researchers for the intellectual bandwidth that is required to read a financial disclosure form,” he said, when asked...

NY community papers struggle post-Sandy

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 15:29:00 -0500

By Henry Gass The Wave offices, post-Hurricane Sandy. Photo credit: Henry Gass During Hurricane Sandy, the offices of The Wave, a community newspaper in the Rockaways, Queens, got hit by a five-foot tidal surge. Now the paper’s general manager, Sanford Bernstein, is figuring out how to publish his weekly newspaper with half the equipment, a bare-bones staff, and almost no...

Dull news from Doha

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 15:30:13 -0500

By Curtis Brainard The United Nations climate-change summit that began in Doha, Qatar, on Monday has so far been a ho-hum affair for the press. Most American news outlets didn’t even bother to send a correspondent, reflecting a general decline in attendance at the annual meeting by North American and European journalists. Coverage may pick up as the two-week...

Highway to the danger zone

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:15:56 -0500

By Curtis Brainard Hurricane Sandy renewed the media’s interest in the many foolish ways that we increase our vulnerability to extreme weather. There’s climate change, of course. That came up right away. But carbon pollution isn’t the only, or even the most immediate, thing that we’re doing to imperil ourselves. There’s also relentless, right-up-to-the-water’s-edge-in-a-floodplain coastal development. After focusing on global warming...