This is How Science Journalism Ends: Not with a Bang but a Twitter.

Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum have written nothing short of a Science Communication "State of the Union" in the American magazine The Nation this month.

They talk about Sabin Russel, the award-winning, but now-redundant Science Journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who last week tweeted: "This is the way my career ends. Not with a bang, but a Twitter."  He had 14 followers at the time.

Video, broadcast conglomertion, atomisation of media, and nearly everything else since the 70's has slowly but surely eroded scince journalism to the point we're at.  How bad is it?  The article's authors cite a few tidbits:

• From 1989 to 2005, the number of US papers featuring
  weekly science-related sections shrank from ninety-five to thirty-four. 

• Just one minute out of
  every 300 on cable news is devoted to science and technology, or
  one-third of 1 percent.

But this issue is far more complicated than a few factoids that make us scratch our heads and remmeber the good old days of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. 

And remember, blogs have played a role in this decline too.  As internet grazers, we read niche blogs (ahem), with very small audiences, ususally produced by individuals or with little or no regulation.  The authors' see the benefits of blogs, but say "the
Internet is not unifying our culture around a comprehensive or even
reliable diet of scientific information, and it isn't replacing what's
being lost in the old media."

So don't read about it here! Go read the article!

(Photo from Flickr by Martin Deutch)