200 Words
Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief, MIT's Technology Review
Good science journalism is hard. Researchers use a highly specialized language, and they often present their findings with complicated data.
When scientists use ordinary language at all, their words do not always possess their customary meanings. Inevitably, science journalism exists at a kind of metaphorical remove from real science--a remove that scientists find frustrating, and which they frequently criticize when discussing science journalism. This can be demoralizing for science journalists.
But the true constituency for science journalists is not the specialists who know a subject best, but non-specialists for whom it is new, confusing, or insufficiently explained. For the non-specialist, good science journalism performs an invaluable, unique function: it should accurately capture, in language that any educated person can appreciate, both the content of a scientific discovery, and also its impact. That function has arguably never been more useful or important.