Welcome to the Covering Science in Cyberspace Blog

Two dozen prominent science journalists and science communicators were invited to participate in this special conference with three goals: 1) Identify the critical issues facing science journalists in the digital age; 2) identify innovative forms of multimedia story-telling and presentation of complex issues online; and 3) identify “best practices” for coverage of science issues on digital platforms. Among the topics discussed were:

• Defining exactly what is “science”;
• Revealing untold science stories and determining why they have not been told;
• Exploring visual journalism and digital story telling techniques.

Knight Digital Media Center welcomes comments from readers related to the journalists’ specific discussions or related to the more general topic of science journalism. To post your comments, please browse the blog posts once the seminar has begun.

I look at the kinds of science news we do at Discovery News - text and video - as a kind of invitation to people who want to know more, not the be all and end all on a topic.

Our text stories are limited to about 400 words—occasionally we’ll go longer if the topic warrants it or we want to cover something more deeply—so we can’t really go very deeply into things. And our video stories (http://www.discoverynewsvideo.com) are usually around 3 minutes.

But hopefully, through succinct reporting that presents a good overview of what any given research is, we’ll prompt readers to go deeper into the topic. We try to facilitate that through sidebar links or video content that’s relevant to the story.

Lori Cuthbert, Director, Discovery News