Overview: Communications Strategy

Each side of the climate debate accuses the other of exaggeration and suffers from its own... sometimes feel like a shouting match in a roomful of children wearing earplugs... We have allowed our political, national, economic, and cultural narratives free play ... where... are the narratives from science itself? Where is the science teacher?... p…

Scientists often speak of the “general public” as a group that is far removed from the academic circles that they belong to.... Scientists have “othered” the general public... there is no such thing ... except for in very specific contexts (i.e. vaccine developers are not the general public vs those who do not develop vaccines when one is speaking…

hierarchy of good writing, particularly of good science writing... Explainers make information clear and comprehensible... Elucidators go beyond explanation and into illumination — they transmute information into understanding by ... integrating various bits of knowledge into a larger framework of comprehension... Enchanters do all of the above, b…

Each issue is conceived around a single topic ... with a new cluster of pieces, grouped together as chapters, published each Thursday.... To supplement ... Facts So Romantic, a blog updated closer to daily Another against-the-grain move: Its print magazine collects the best of the magazine’s web content... printed on high-quality paper and desi…

In this week’s newsletter I return to the “3 Topics, 12+ links” template of week 1, but present things a little differently…

"@NASA is the 104th most popular Twitter account in the world... and 3.5 million on Instagram. The Department of the Interior, whose stunning wildlife and nature pictures make it the only government agency with cool visual content to rival NASA’s, has just 654,000 ... John Yembrick and Jason Townsend are veterans of other government agencies...…

"One of the most frustrating things about reading (or listening to) science journalism is trying to resolve contradictory claims. Coffee is good for you; no, it’s bad for you... Eating meat is good for you; no, don’t eat meat! Some people, like many of those who oppose vaccines, ease the tension by deciding that science is all relative—just a ma…

Good reading for anyone communicating on an issue like science - or indeed the EU: "The problem is that he delivered his argument by targeting the most admirable hallmark of the scientific method: uncertainty in the face of incomplete evidence. And that makes his essay a pernicious attack on science itself. Bilton’s argument follows a familiar f…

"Hughes will be establishing a health and science desk that will consist of approximately five reporters, according to an email from BuzzFeed. A science staff of that size will catapult BuzzFeed News into the top tier of science news sites by sheer size alone. It won't have the largest staff of science reporters, but it will be among the largest. …

"But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benef…