This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss big science and hanging out with hackers.
JASON: I weirdly wrote two articles about science this week—one silly and one not. In my career, I’ve read many scientific papers and have talked to a lot of scientists, and we’ve certainly referenced a handful of studies and papers on 404 Media over the last few months. But it’s been a while since I’ve done reporting on specific studies, other than that Flock study I wrote about, which, I argued, was not really much of a study at all.
Writing about science is very difficult to do well, and there’s a lot of very bad science journalism out there for a whole lot of different reasons. I am not claiming that I am even particularly good at it, because many of the best science journalists are scientists themselves or are people who have very specific subject matter expertise. But I have done a lot of it over the years* and here’s how I personally approach it.