The first three months of covering the COVID-19 pandemic felt, by Tina Hesman Saey’s estimation, “closer to 300 years.” From February to April 2020, the Science News senior molecular biology writer had produced a flurry of stories on the new coronavirus that wove together findings from dozens of scientific papers and reports. Her hours were long and stress levels high. But the science wasn’t slowing down, so neither could she.
“We’re in a hyperdrive situation,” Saey said in May 2020, reflecting on her pandemic reporting. “It’s amazing how fast the science is moving.” In mere months, researchers had completely overhauled their understanding of how the SARS-CoV-2 virus infiltrates the body, and vaccines were already in the works. Readers were counting on Saey and her Science News colleagues to sift through the deluge of information pouring out of labs across the world. “The information that they get from us can really help them make life-or-death decisions,” Saey said.
Since then, Saey and other Science News reporters have cranked out hundreds of stories on SARS-CoV-2’s basic virology, new variants, vaccine rollouts and more. To boost public understanding of the new coronavirus, Science News has freely offered its COVID-19 stories to local and nonprofit news organizations since April 2020.
“What Science News provided was authoritative reporting and in-depth articles on what we’re all talking about and what we’re all worried about,” Cleveland Scene editor in chief Vince Grzegorek said after his publication started reprinting Science News coverage. Whether a story was about the importance of masking up or the riskiness of in-person shopping, Grzegorek said, “what people can read from Science News on our site is going to go a lot further than a 45-second spot on the local [news] station.”
Science News’ push to get reliable reporting in front of as many eyes as possible harks back to before the publication was even a magazine. A little over a century ago, Science News got its start as Science News Bulletin — the first syndicated news specializing in science.
“There certainly had been media coverage of science before,” says Bruce Lewenstein of Cornell University, who studies science communication. But that coverage was more sporadic and often plagued with sensationalism and superstition.
Newspaper magnate Edward W. Scripps, who believed that a functioning democracy required a science-savvy public, wanted to get more accurate, reliable science news in the public eye. To do that, Scripps teamed up with his zoologist friend William E. Ritter to form a new organization for science communication in 1921. Based in Washington, D.C., Science Service — now known as the Society for Science — was funded by Scripps and overseen by a board of 15 scientists and journalists. That board of trustees included famed astronomer George Ellery Hale and Edwin Gay, president of the New York Evening Post.
“Science Service was formed at a critical time for science and public understanding of science,” says Susan Swanberg, who studies the history of science journalism at the University of Arizona in Tucson. In the early 20th century, the pace of scientific discovery was making it harder for nonexperts to keep up. At the same time, World War I, nicknamed “the chemists’ war” for the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, had heightened many people’s uncertainty about, and interest in, science.
Scripps and Ritter hoped their new organization would help bridge the gap between scientists and the public. When Science Service announced its debut in the journal Science in April 1921, the organization branded itself as “a sort of liaison officer between scientific circles and the outside world.” In this go-between role, Science Service hoped to foster popular support for science while helping people become more well-informed citizens. That same month, Science Service launched Science News Bulletin, a weekly — then daily — dispatch of stories to subscribing newspapers across the country. This marked the first sustained effort to provide engaging, accurate news about scientific research to a national U.S. audience.
By October 1921, the bulletin fed more than 30 subscribing newspapers with a combined circulation of more than 1.5 million readers. Libraries, schools and science enthusiasts started requesting copies of the bulletin to keep for themselves. In response, Science Service began bundling its dispatches into a stand-alone publication, dubbed Science News-Letter. Readers got the first issue 100 years ago this month, in March 1922. The publication became Science News in 1966.
Science Service’s first editor, Edwin Slosson, fancied himself a “renegade from natural science.” A chemist-turned-writer who had worked as a magazine editor and authored science books, he shared Scripps and Ritter’s belief that democracy hinged on scientific literacy — and that science didn’t need to be overhyped to capture readers’ imaginations.
“It is not necessary,” Slosson wrote in Science News-Letter, “to pervert scientific truths in the process of translation into the vernacular. The facts are sensational enough without any picturesque exaggeration.”
When Slosson took charge of Science Service in 1921, his challenge was not finding interesting science to write about. It was finding journalists to do the writing. Science journalism was a new field. And without an established pool of reporters to call on, Slosson reportedly spent his first month at Science Service begging friends to write articles for him, only to spend the next month, as he put it, “sending the articles back and telling them how rotten they were in such polite language as to induce them to send soon some better ones.”
But not all of Slosson’s early searches for science writers turned up disappointments. He did find Watson Davis — or rather, Watson Davis found him. The 25-year-old journalist and engineer was allegedly waiting on Science Service’s front steps to ask for a job when Slosson showed up for his first day at work.
“Davis had the instincts of a journalist and an engineer’s ability to organize,” historian Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette wrote in a 2006 article about Science Service. “He could ferret out news and glean the essence from dull research reports, and proved to be a skilled manager.” Those traits served Davis well as Slosson’s right-hand man, and later as the director of Science Service from 1933 to 1966.
Science News-Letter’s earliest stories set the stage for the magazine’s coverage over the next century. Readers learned about news on the biggest scientific happenings, such as the discovery that insulin could treat diabetes, as well as curious everyday insights, such as what foods help houseflies live longer — detailed in a story charmingly titled “How to feed flies in case you love them.”
For Science Service writers, the name of the game was transforming the dry language typical of scientific papers into compelling narratives. But having staked its reputation on scientific accuracy, Science Service was careful to avoid sensationalism. Writers couldn’t risk alienating their scientist sources. Biology editor Frank Thone, for instance, once wrote a story describing insects that were “just as fond of the bright lights, a hot time and fast living” as their human counterparts — after which Thone sent a rather sheepish note to the researcher asking for forgiveness for the jazzy language.
Sometimes, Science Service’s deference to the scientific community went so far that, by today’s standards, it broke the code of journalistic objectivity. Perhaps the most striking example was Science Service’s involvement in the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925, when high school science teacher John Scopes was put on trial for breaking a Tennessee law that forbade teaching evolution. Leading up to the trial, Science News-Letter printed a pledge of support for Scopes by the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In another article, Davis proclaimed that anyone could see Scopes was in the right “if men will but use their eyes and their brains.”
Science Service went far beyond editorializing in its coverage of the trial. The organization helped Scopes’ lawyers find expert witnesses to testify on his behalf. And when Davis and Thone traveled to Tennessee to cover the trial, they moved into the Victorian mansion that Scopes’ legal team was using as headquarters.
“All day long and far into the night, the rumble of scientific discussion and laughter issues forth from Defense Mansion,” Thone wrote, calling the place “the headquarters for the defenders of science, religion and freedom.”
From a 21st century perspective, the whole affair was completely inappropriate. But LaFollette doesn’t judge Science Service too harshly. “We must be careful in applying retrospectively contemporary standards,” says LaFollette, whose 2008 book Reframing Scopes explores Science Service’s role in the trial. The modern code of journalistic ethics was not as formal in the early 20th century as it is now, she says, and back then many journalists were more comfortable cozying up to their sources.
“Davis and Thone believed they were doing the right thing by assisting the Scopes defense,” LaFollette says. After all, in its 1921 debut announcement in the journal Science, Science Service had sworn it would “not indulge in propaganda, unless it be propaganda to urge the value of research and the usefulness of science.”
Read the article from here- https://www.sciencenews.org/article/science-news-journalism-history-century-birthday
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