Physicists love to complain about the way in which science is covered by the mainstream media. News stories, they say, are either inaccurate, overhyped or dominated by dinosaurs, medical research and errant asteroids that might collide with the Earth. Many will therefore be delighted to learn that BBC Radio 4 in the UK is planning to devote a whole day of programmes on an as-yet-unspecified date in July to particle physics, when CERN injects beams into the Large Hadron Collider for the first time.
But science is rarely afforded such blanket coverage and mostly has to make do with news stories about individual research articles. Many of these stories are based on papers in Nature and Science, which use a system of “embargoes” whereby thousands of journalists are e-mailed details of upcoming articles in advance on the proviso that they do not report on them before a certain time. When the embargo lifts, the journal in question often receives prominent and widespread coverage of those papers (see “Mind the hack”).
Some commentators have called for the system to be abandoned because it encourages “pack journalism”, whereby reporters feel pressurized to cover particular papers for fear of being scooped by rival publications. The system also encourages science to be reported as a series of neat breakthroughs when in fact it usually takes a much messier path. Moreover, embargoes give undue prominence to papers in a small number of journals and can put off science journalists from carrying out more in-depth investigations.
However, embargoes do serve science by allowing journalists the time to write accurate stories on tricky subjects, and axing the system could lead to a decline in the number of science stories in the mainstream media. After all, very few journalists currently look for stories in journals like Physical Review Letters, which does not embargo any of its papers. The bigger problem for science reporting is a lack of resources — BBC News has just six science reporters — and an over-reliance by all journalists (not just those who cover science) on press releases: a trend that has been dubbed “churnalism”. Embargoes have their faults, but it is doubtful whether abandoning them would do much good for science communication.
