EurekAlert! Has spoiled science news. Here’s how we can fix it

Science news has evolved into a uniform and predictable pr-machine, tightly controlled by press offices and dominated by services such as EurekAlert!. Here’s why this is a problem and how we can fix it.

Let me start with a confession: I have a love hate relationship with science news. Yes, I do like to read about science, and I like to be the first person to read new papers, discuss the methods and findings with the authors and other scientists. And yes, I have produced science news on a regular base for several years and still do occasionally.

But as I hope to show you in this article, science news has become one of the least creative and timely divisions of science journalism and of journalism in general. I will show you how press offices of institutions and journals started dominating the science news, and how services such as EurekAlert! have catalyzed this. I will also sketch how I think science news can be made more relevant, both from a journalism and from a societal perspective.

The early days of science writing
But let me first go back into time, to tell you about the history of science journalism and science news as we know it. Meet William Laurence, science journalist of the New York Times. This picture was taken in 1945 just before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He…