At a time when weekly newspaper science sections are as rare as a single top quark, two North Carolina newspapers recently teamed up to prove they still have a place in the modern media.
In January, The Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer jointly launched SciTech, a two-page, weekly feature focusing on scientific research and technology in the Carolinas. The launch is a rare reversal in the otherwise rapid decline in weekly science sections, which fell from a peak of ninety-five in 1989 to thirty-four in 2005. Due to limited resources, creating the new section was not easy, however.
“It’s been a while since we’ve been able to grow our newspaper,” the Observer’s editor, Rick Thames, said in an interview. “The idea that we could add two color pages to Monday was a head turn.”
The feature supplements the day-to-day science coverage in the two newspapers, which is already more comprehensive than most local publications, according to Thames. So, rather than allocating staff to work on SciTech, the Observer uses local freelancers to produce most of the content.
“There is this incredible reservoir of freelance writers who want to write about science,” Thames said. “We’re using a lot of them now, and the content is fresh.”
Fresh and local, emphasized Ann Allen, editor of SciTech at the Observer. Although SciTech takes about 30 to 40 percent of its news from the wire, “the copy we generate ourselves is all local,” she said. “The main story is usually about someone in the Carolinas doing interesting, engaging science. We want to put a face on it. We want to show people that this is something that’s happening in our area that people like them are doing.”
Recently featured in SciTech was an article about University of South Carolina professor Tim Shaw’s recent expedition to Antarctica to study the relationship between the composition of icebergs and climate change. This week, the section features a profile of Kevin Grace, a student at North Carolina State University, and his work in the electric motors lab at NCSU in Raleigh. The section also runs weekly interviews with local science bloggers like Craig McLain, a native of Durham, North Carolina, who blogs at DeepSeaNews.com.
Since the January launch, public response to SciTech has been overwhelmingly positive, according to Thames. “We have been deluged with e-mails of thank-yous from readers we didn’t even know we had,” he said.
Allen agrees. E-mails pile up in her inbox every week on Monday when SciTech is published, but she finds the new workload refreshing. “There has been a phenomenal reaction; it’s tough finding time to keep up with responding to the public,” she said. “But we’ve seen so many cutbacks recently, its’ a real pleasure to do something new. I’m having fun.”
Before SciTech, the Observer never had an official science section, Thames said: “we’ve always blended science news in with the rest of it.” In the last two years, however, the paper has cut more than a third of its total staff reducing the newsroom to around 150 journalists. Its news hole has decreased accordingly, and the normally four-section newspaper now runs only three sections on Mondays, not including SciTech.
At one point, the News & Observer had five staff writers working on science-related content, according to Sarah Avery, who is now the only health and science writer at the paper and the editor of the SciTech pages there.
The Charlotte Observer newsroom generates the majority of the SciTech content printed in both newspapers, but the sections are edited and printed independently by each newspaper. The News & Observer will often include more stories pertinent to the Raleigh community, for instance. In particular, the paper focuses on the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, a thirteen-county area that is home to a large number of industrial, academic and non-profit research institutions. As Avery puts it, “I try to make sure there is a Triangle presence in the section here.”
Hi. I was not able to open the "rapid decline (pdf)" link in the article "Reviving Science Coverage in the Carolinas". The link leads to a blank page. Thank you in advance.
#1 Posted by Laura Vargas-Parada, CJR on Sat 13 Mar 2010 at 08:20 AM
This is, of course, a positive development. My only quibble is the editor's assumption that readers are interested in science only if research emanates from North Carolina. Almost all research these days is conducted multilaterally, featuring collaboration among scientists at various universities and in several states--and countries.
#2 Posted by Harvey Leifert, CJR on Sat 13 Mar 2010 at 12:23 PM
The newspaper that gave us Jim and Tammy Baker now combine for a science column. Excellent!
Read your hometown newspaper. See how many have daily horoscopes. Now, how many have science columns? Let me recommend to any reader, Science News, a biweekly newsletter that covers science.
#3 Posted by J. David Reno, CJR on Mon 15 Mar 2010 at 03:30 PM
I posted a rather critical comment on this item at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker. I'd welcome further debate on this subject here and there.
#4 Posted by Paul Raeburn, CJR on Tue 16 Mar 2010 at 12:07 PM
Harvey, you have a good point about collaborative research. But I think the N&O and The Charlotte Observer are going for local science stories because those stories are right in their backyard. Because of that, they're able to provide unique content that more nationally focused news sources aren't covering.
These papers are after science stories no one else is covering, and as local papers, the best way to do that is to focus locally.
#5 Posted by Tyler Dukes, CJR on Thu 18 Mar 2010 at 10:10 AM
In putting this whole thing together, highlighting Carolinas content (though certainly not exclusively) was central because the most important single point was to draw the attention of pre-college students to the sci-tech activity right in their own back yards. This was an action response to the inaugural address of UNC President Erskine Bowles (of the Bowles-Simpson Plan), who saw that Asia was amassing so large and highly trained an engineering concentration that some day our State's workforce might not be positioned to compete.
The ignored tech news issue that sparked all the Sci-tech effort was hydrail, the world's transition of railways from diesel and catenary electric to hydrogen fuel cell hybrid traction.
Sadly, after all that work, the Sci-Tech section has still never printed one word about hydrail, which Taiwan, Japan, China and the USA (BNSF R.R.) have introduced and which Spain puts into revenue service in 2012.
#6 Posted by Stan Thompson, CJR on Thu 22 Dec 2011 at 09:46 AM