Notes from the biomass

How journalists report scientific progress has been criticized strongly in the scientific community, certainly blogside, and has been the subject of many scientific studies itself. A recent article in PLoS Medicine reviews some efforts for reporting on new treatments and looks into reports published in HealthNewsReports.com. There is a strong “who watches the watchblogs”-reaction in me after looking into the site conducting the reviews, and I haven’t made up my minds about how much of it can practically be done by science coverage in traditional media in the first place. For bloggers in the sciences, the evaluation criteria provide standards that you might not want to follow to the T but certainly review, at least before commenting on news coverage like “the cure for cancer by sequencing animals”.

[via the Short Sharp Science]