But the rapidly failing fortunes of the American print media, and specialty science reporting in particular, provided an underlying sense of gloom and doom at the annual science gathering. In what would normally be an exuberant ceremony, weak gallows humor repeatedly surfaced Saturday night at the Art Institute of Chicago, as the winners accepted their 2008 AAAS Science Journalism Awards, which are independently judged by respected U.S. science reporters. (The melancholy art of Edvard Munch on exhibit there seemed somehow appropriate.)
Veteran journalist Terry McDermott, winner of the “large paper” award, noted wryly that getting his hefty four-part series, into the Los Angeles Times had been a long struggle involving five top editors at the beleaguered paper. The series finally appeared in August 2007, but McDermott said he was fired in 2008 after being told he was a “luxury” the paper could not afford, because his in-depth projects took too long to complete. Kara Platoni, a younger reporter and winner of the “small paper” award, suffered a similar fate. She said she was laid off from the East Bay Express after her series, “In Search of Life,” appeared.
Nonetheless, the evening ended with a moment of cheer when the AAAS surprised my revered friend and colleague David Perlman, long-time science editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, with an unannounced award for career science journalism. Long-term is an understatement, since Perlman, who recently turned 90, has been reporting since he started a mimeographed paper in junior high, worked on the college paper as a Columbia University student (B.A., 1939; Journalism M.A., 1940), and became a copyboy at the Chronicle before going off to war.
“Writing about science is the best thing you can do because you’re learning all the time,” said Perlman, who has traveled the globe from the Galapagos (1964) to Ethiopia (2005), writing about everything from evolution to astrophysics, and has no plans to retire.
Interestingly, in an interview I did with him recently for ScienceWriters, the quarterly publication of the National Association of Science Writers, Perlman said he thought the biggest science story on the horizon “would be the discovery of earth-like exoplanets with habitable zones and then the discovery of some kind of life on them.” Just the kind of story that has long been a staple for science writers at the AAAS meeting.
- 1
- 2
I fear that Canadian science journalists fall into the North American "dwindling" classification, rather than the "growing" European and others.
There are no more than a handful of dailies in Canada with designated science reporters (maybe five). When I covered my first AAAS in 1970, there were more than 20 staffers across Canada and at least five were at the AAAS from Canadian dailies.
I was not at Chicago, having retired from The Toronto Star in June, but I'm told there was one staffer there from Canada. Even the CBC's Quirks and Quarks (an hour-long weekly science show) was not represented by a staffer.
Peter Calamai
Posted by Peter Calamai on Wed 18 Feb 2009 at 11:28 PM
I think that science journalism is a vanishing specialty in Germany as well as in the United States. After 20 years on the job I find it puzzling, that only a small minority of German science writers that attend AAAS can be seen at scientific conferences at home. AAAS provides good overviews and easy stories - but I think that science journalists should be aware of becoming entertainers. Instead we should continue to seek out the original research, sorting out facts and data from opinions, identify conflicts of interest and putting important stuff into context.
Michael Simm
Posted by Michael Simm on Thu 19 Feb 2009 at 05:41 AM
Lest we attach too much importance to the decline of U.S. journalists at the AAAS meeting, it's important to add that several years ago, the National Association of Science Writers stopped meeting jointly with AAAS. The NASW meeting drew a lot of American reporters to AAAS, and when it moved it took some of those reporters with it.
Also, as all science reporters understand, the AAAS is often not the place to find the latest breaking science news. The panels at the AAAS meeting generally wrap up recent research that has already been published or presented elsewhere. It is rarely a showcase for breaking news.
For reporters from overseas, who can make only one or two trips to the U.S. each year, AAAS is a good way to catch up on what's happening here. But breaking stories usually appear first in journals or the annual meetings of such groups as the Society for Neuroscience, the American Geophysical Union, or the American Heart Association.
Paul Raeburn
Author, Fathers and Families blog.
Posted by Paul Raeburn on Sat 21 Feb 2009 at 05:41 PM
"The panels at the AAAS meeting generally wrap up recent research that has already been published or presented elsewhere. It is rarely a showcase for breaking news."
Come on Paul. This has been the case in the 30 years or so since I first attended the AAAS in Denver. That never stopped the rat pack from descending en masse.
And the idea that the NASW's meeting "drew a lot of American reporters to AAAS" is just plain bonkers. No one would get their paper to pay for hacks to attend an annual reunion.
Sorry, I'll need a lot more evidence than that to counter Cris's case.
Posted by Michael Kenward on Tue 24 Feb 2009 at 05:52 PM