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I suspect that half the time the journalist a) hasn't read the study, and b) is only rewording a press release from either the university or activist group associated with the study. You can tell by the way all articles on a study will use identical framing and share particular phrases that aren't quotes from the study itself. Frequently they all make the same odd mistake, like a typo, mislabeled figure, or metric conversion.
The big universities have entire offices dedicated to research publicity, and of course it's the entire goal of most non-profit "institutes."
From reading a lot about insulation and heat pumps I've developed a spider sense for "this entire news article was written by a Rocky Mountain Institute publicist"
Outside a handful of prestige outlets (and even then...) it's shocking to me just how many times my self-interested, comms department-approved talking points have shown up verbatim and uncredited in supposedly neutral news articles. Literally all you have to do is be the pithiest of the two or three people they bother emailing to ask for comment on a story, and they'll usually print whatever you tell them without the slightest effort to push back or verify. (And keep in mind, this is in a context where the journalists have no intrinsic interest in taking my employer's side. Imagine how easy this must be for prominent advertisers, favored politicians, etc.)
In my experience, journalists have exactly two settings: "libelously hostile" and "please just write my copy for me," depending on what their deadline looks like.
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I’ve mentioned it before but my former journalist friend (working for a major newspaper, but think BBC news site not the NYT) was required to write 8 articles a day. There just isn’t the time for more than
That might be true on average - i.e. space-padding articles that are forgotten they moment you're finished reading. I doubt that's how narrative-setting ones about hot CW issues are written.
Probably - my understanding is that the top NYT writers might get weeks, which is why I specified that he wasn’t one of those. I just think it’s an interesting fact that deserves to be more widely known.
Yeah when you write features you get a set amount of time you work out with your editor based on the estimate of the amount of time and work you'll have to put in. It can range from anywhere from 24 hours (usually a group project) to years (although that's more for when a publisher wants to hire a well respected author so they'll go to to their dinner party). When you write copy, you slam it out as fast as you can. Copy used to be a path to feature writing or correspondence, but nowadays it's just a molochian devourer.
Right, that’s why my friend got out of it. That, and the fact that editors tend to be so heavy-handed you can’t recognise what you wrote when they’re done with it.
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Yep this is it exactly on the journos behalf. Except change half to 90% - and that's being charitable. The publishers could change this but don't however, because they don't want people leaving their site for any reason ever. What if they don't come back!? They are often right to be afraid - after all why continue reading some moron's interpretation of a study when you can just read the study itself? Or why listen to a journo's memory of a politician's policies when you can check out their website and discover them for yourself?
And scientists don't really mind (as much as they complain about science journalism among themselves), because nothing gets citation numbers up like journo spam.
How would it being difficult to find their paper lead to more citations?
What?
Journalists excluding information that makes it easy to find your paper does little to help you get citations.
No, because anyone in a field close enough to cite you will easily find and have access to your paper through their university. But they're a lot more likely to a) hear about it and b) want to associate their own work with it if they hear about the paper on NPR rather than skimming through issue #1708 of the Journal of Queering Anthropology (which nobody ever actually does)
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