Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

i don't really get why a national newspaper is publishing blog posts, but i think this is the least bad blog post i remember the guardian publishing: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1. will be interesting to see what the bloggers make of it.

i'm sure that the ben goldacre nerd army is right that science reporting is worse than other specialisms, but i feel the same way about this as i did about that charlie brooker youtube viral on tv news: it's not that insightful just to point out the obvious stylistic features of news writing.

this is just facile: "This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like "the scientists say" to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist."

attribution isn't "weasel words", and ffs what does he expect them to do, replicate the experiment in their newsroom?

yeah, it's pretty banal and self-congratulatory, and links to peer-reviewed papers is not where the fight is being lost. it's just when the guardian publishes a blog post that is not awful it reminds me that: jesus wept, the guardian is publishing people thinking out loud. i mean, i get that they're not going to run out of space, but they could set the bar a little higher.

it's pretty funny. didn't read the whole thing. does sort of raise question of 'what do you want?' if the scientific finding is 'a glass of red wine every day will kill you/extend your life', then ok, blast away. but sure, journalists can't venture an opinion on scientific specialisms -- oh noes. because of course there are hundreds of scientists who are specialists across the board and can write for a wide public.

xposts

This paragraph contained useful information or context, but was removed by the sub-editor to keep the article within an arbitrary word limit in case the internet runs out of space.

lol

on the subject of the article, rather than the end of civilization in the guardian, well, i guess my point would be there are far too many science articles based on press releases that are simply not interesting or important or newsworthy, so science stuff ends up as the new "and finally...". scientists, university press departments and journalists would be doing everyone a lot of favours if they stopped that.

on the few occasions when stuff actually deserves reporting (fertility? genetic engineering? science funding? solar system exploration? that's about it imo) the standard is usually pretty good, and certainly no worse than, say, economics journalism.

the ben goldacre nerd army

these fuckin guys

on the subject of the article, rather than the end of civilization in the guardian, well, i guess my point would be there are far too many science articles based on press releases that are simply not interesting or important or newsworthy, so science stuff ends up as the new "and finally...". scientists, university press departments and journalists would be doing everyone a lot of favours if they stopped that.

e.g. the NYT is too self-important and po-faced as a paper, but not enabling this shit is one thing they do literally 10000000000x better than any mainstream publication in the UK.

yeah, i get what ben goldacre tries to do but he consistently overreaches in the most annoying way possible

on a sidenote the tradition of intoning the day's currency and stock index movements in even a short 25-minute newscast just confounds me. they say this stuff as if it's important to anyone - as if it's the weather. it's not the weather, it's an aggregate computation that literally means nothing 99% of the time. what is its function??? i think it's more psychic than anything else, it's like some kind of general thermometer of life or something. but i thought grown ups were sort of beyond this kind of explicitly supernatural thinking, at least in newscasts.

these fuckin guys

― l'avventura: pet detective (history mayne), Tuesday, 28 September 2010 13:44 (3 minutes ago)

welcome to the last year of my life

Sorry to hear the news LJ.

it's a creed that has totally taken over british science in the past couple of years. totally inflated sense of ability and relevance. suddenly if you've got a phd in astronomy you should be listened to in re: public sector pensions because, what, "evidence"? it's dreadful.

also looooooooool martin robbins just punked everyone on my course

well, he's right insofar as the world is not a better place for 90% of the articles on this page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science_and_environment/.

^^^ main offender.

hahaha I went straight for this http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11418033

and they manage both 'troubling times' AND 'uncertain times' as subheadings :D

'Tough' mackerel stance welcomed

glad to hear it. for years these fucking fish have been walking all over us.

the environment ones aren't actually that bad imo.

but seriously:

City life 'boosts bug resistance'
Neanderthals were 'keen on tech'
Soyuz lands safely after delays
Fossil flower 'clue to daisies'
LHC finds 'interesting effects'
Malaria 'caught from gorillas'

it's like the science section of the daily mail, but really really boring.

(the soyuz thing is actual news, so is an honorable exception)

well, the one I linked does seem to have a decent interview containing real facts - is it the physics, medical and technological ones which don't say a fucking thing?

oh LOL xpost

LHC finds 'interesting effects'

this article is worse than the headline, but the worst thing about it is that isn't some BBC reporting doing an act of daily journalism and hitting the pavement to get a story. it's based on a press release CERN felt moved to issue. why? i'm sure it's a perfectly good formulaic press release -> article job. my problem is the existence of the press release, and the choice of the journalist not to do something else with their day.

exactly

a guy from my course is now a LHC communications guy and I'm slightly worried he was responsible for that press release

Excellent: "Clumps of ash retrieved using double-sided sticky tape are giving scientists fresh insights into the recent Eyjafjallajoekull eruption."

this is just facile: "This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like "the scientists say" to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist."

attribution isn't "weasel words", and ffs what does he expect them to do, replicate the experiment in their newsroom?

No but I expect a science journalist to be able to tell the difference between a valid experiment with a significant effect, or a bullshit press release.

(tiny space-filling) article in the times last week said that scientists have finally validated general relativity's prediction that gravity slows time... so spending time in your basement will help you live longer. It said that the difference is in billionths of a second or whatever... "but scientists say that that figure is too small to have a real effect on people's lives". Thanks, scientists, would never have figured that out for myself.

but i thought if an astronaut went into outer space for 20 years she'd age less than if she stayed on earth for 20 years.. does this new finding cancel that out??

/jokes

/not really

special vs general relativity maaaaaan

or is it? time dilation due to gravity vs. time dilation due to velocity anyway. both v small unless yr velocity is close to light speed.

time dilation thru boredom

another 'problem' with bloggification, a small one, granted, is the duplication of effort. there have now been at least three reviews of 'the social network' in the guardian and it isn't even out till mid-october. the latest is by hadley freeman and... it's retarded.

Now, call me a heartless wench [that's right, it's a crowbarred in ferris bueller line that doesn't make sense], but the story of a nerd stealing a vague computer idea from a pair of wealthy twins called Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, as Zuckerberg was accused of doing, doesn't strike me as having the same dramatic hook as, say, saving the planet from imminent destruction, or escaping from the Nazis. It seems unlikely that Humphrey Bogart is weeping in heaven at the lost chance to appear in a movie whose Eureka moment is the creation of the "relationship status" function.

leaving aside whether that's such a stupid eureka moment... n/m in the wake of prr-gate maybe this is actually great and im the idiot.

prr-gate?

she used to have the world's cutest byline photograph

nah this is the world's cutest: http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/darraghmcmanus

how much of a dramatic hook does writing about such a film on commentisfree have? it seems unlikely that james joyce is weeping in heaven at the lost chance to write an article whose Eureka moment is "a film is silly".

the core point, that the two films-about-facebook don't really deal with what's interesting/bad/creepy about facebook itself, is pretty sound? but yeah she spends way too much time going 'thesocialnetwork has quite a boring story all things considered'. It'd be more interesting if she'd managed to sum it up in a pithy paragraph the way she summed up Catfish.

Can't be doing with all this weeping in heaven

what does she actually like? i don't give a shit if hadley freeman thinks facebook is "a bit rubbish" cos i am almost 99 per cent certain anyone whose dislikes are tedious has nothing more interesting going on anyway.

and personally i love facebook, so there!

the core point, that the two films-about-facebook don't really deal with what's interesting/bad/creepy about facebook itself, is pretty sound? but yeah she spends way too much time going 'thesocialnetwork has quite a boring story all things considered'. It'd be more interesting if she'd managed to sum it up in a pithy paragraph the way she summed up Catfish.

― no szigeti (c sharp major), Wednesday, September 29, 2010 12:40 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

well no, because she's (as per) gratuitously glib and dismissive; the film does deal with what's interesting/'bad'/'creepy' about fbook! but so what? it's hardly to be compared with the destruction of the world or the nazi menace.

ilx: guardian blog 'gratuitously glib and dismissive'

a film is more than its story, but even then: a 19-20y.o. kid inventing (?) s.thing that goes on to have half a billion users and becoming one of the world's richest men, that is sort of intrinsically interesting, before you get to what the film actually does.

why does guardian have blog :-(

Everything has a blog now.

:-(

that's kinda problem when for most newspaper film coverage, a film is its story xps

Should newspapers get more bloggy, or deactivate their blog websites and exist only in paper format?
Will blogs ever be ‘as relevant’ as newspapers?
Will blogs ever go to ‘print format’, or is that part of the business just a ‘huge financial burden’?

I don't despise her writing or anything (it is a bit meh, which is why I've really not commented either way before) but I've never seen the cuteness of which you speak - she's all thin, stringy hair, with kind of average looks. Perhaps that's just what a certain kind of guy finds unthreatening and therefore winsome.

Newspaper coverage of arts is also blighted by the whole 'media partner' phenomenon.

she's all thin, stringy hair, with kind of average looks

:(

To contrast, here is one of my colleagues at a fashion week - I could have chosen from several v. attractive peeps to make my point, but maybe I'm a bit spoiled for choice.

http://www.fashionconfidential.co.uk/~/media/FC/Test%20images/JAR%20PARIS.ashx

There's so much weirdness to unpack in the last few posts it's kind of terrifying.

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00041/fellaini_280x420_41323a.jpg

*spluttering tea over computer*