Is there still anywhere left that’s producing good science news for the general public? I’m willing to pay for a reasonable subscription. Would prefer written articles over podcasts or videos, for ease of scanning and faster reading.
By “good”, I mean factors like:
Informative & interesting
Non-sensational
Readable at a college level (i.e. not just reposts of studies but at least some fair summary of them)
Analysis & commentary optional
It doesn’t have to be some super elite journal, just something I can read and occasionally share with family members without fear of the outlet fabricating sensationalized nonsense headlines out of some random preprint. Something respectable but still readable.
I am signed up for email alerts from Nature News, which covers a broad spectrum of science with short articles that cite the original research and seem to minimize the hype.
In the technology realm, IEEE Spectrum is free to read online and gives the “lay engineer” level of discussion on topics like robotics, microelectronics, etc.
A friend of mine, who is a science aficionado, has subscribed to the print version of Science News for decades. It looks like many of their articles are available on their website, as well, though I don’t know if they are paywalled.
I like Nautilus. Aside from the annoying email login, it’s well-laid out and accessible to a knowledgeable layperson, and it doesn’t break the bank or inundate you with ads and “sponsored content” like Scientific American (which I’m constantly on the edge of not renewing until they come out with a couple of articles that I really find interesting). I read Quanta magazine for a few years but found that they tended to engage in too much speculation presented as almost-fact. I do subscribe to Science News but it is just mostly topical tidbits. I used to read MIT Technology Review regularly but it has become hyperfocused on AI, Mars colonization, and commercial nuclear fusion efforts, essentially acting as a hype-rag for startups.
The Wall Street journal has surprisingly good science coverage. I enjoy science news, but agree that it’s often light. Ars technica, a web site, is pretty decent although it’s more about technology than science, per se.
I subscribed to Scientific American for over 50 years, but got into a shouting match with their help[less] subscription agent who actually canceled the subscription two months early. I still subscribe to American Scientist, although it is less interesting since Henry Petrowski died and they chose not to even try to replace him. Actually the same decision Sci Am made when Martin Gardner retired, even though the French edition still has a math column and all they would have to do is translate it.
I also find the Tuesday Science Times generally interesting. And i still subscribe to MIT’s Tech Review, although I share Stranger’s misgivings.
I ended up subscribing to several of the digital magazines, especially Nature News, Science News, and Nautilus (which I’d never heard of before this, so double-thanks for that). They seem to have a different enough editorial focus than the old standbys (SciAm and New Scientist) that I’m going to try reading them digitally for a few months, and maybe get a print sub for that old-school paper feel if any of them especially stand out.
The tech stuff I could mostly live without (already work in the industry, and don’t feel a need to be bleeding-edge on it), but it’s fun hearing about developments in the natural sciences and other fields.
I appreciate all the suggestions!
As for:
Is it always/usually just to counter the psuedoscientific stuff (which I was never really into, so there’s no need to debunk them for me), or does it also do general science coverage?
I clicked into this one, and into the Physics category, to see what it was about. I see that the very same Hossenfelder discussed in this other thread is a regular contributor. So I clicked on one of her recent contributions, an article titled “The End of the Dark Universe?” This article is bad science news for two reasons.
The first is that it is the usual latest-preprint-chasing, headline-optimizing article that plagues a lot of science news. Remember, anyone can post (almost) anything to a preprint server (e.g., arxiv.org), and any media outlet can cover any of those preprints. They can also choose based on how exciting they sound rather than on scientific merits. Good science coverage should not do this. The race to be the first to report on something “exciting” by picking random arxiv.org articles and running with them leads to a terrible signal-to-noise ratio in the science news system. This is a sharp example of that problem. And when one outlet writes about a random article, ten others echo the story, making it seem more news-worthy than it ever actually way. It’s not like any of the outlets are doing their own reviews of the merits of the paper. (The paper in question here has still not passed peer review, and I expect it’s not from lack of trying. There is, however, a peer-reviewed published article outlining in great detail multiple fatal flaws in the proposed theory. If Nautilus had waited another month, they would have seen this and seen what experts had to say about the proposed idea, rather than just running with it because it looks exciting. Irresponsible, IMHO.)
The other reason this is a bad article is that, in the sea of random un-reviewed works out there, this one was (I speculate) chosen by Hossenfelder because it lets her wave one of her favorite flags, MOND, as discussed briefly in the other other thread. I would not want my science news outlet to be a self-serving platform for its contributors. But I may be interpreting the point of the website wrong. If it’s essentially just a blog collective, then I could choose to ignore certain bloggers (if I know to).
In case this was an anomalous example, I clicked on another recent contribution from her, but it was the exact same topic, and just as self-serving. Clicking another contributing author entirely led me to a transcript of an interview with working physicists, which looked harmless and potentially interesting. I didn’t immediately read it.
So, don’t take my comments as reflective of Nautilus as a whole. I sort of cherry-picked a contributor that was already a known concern, and found, well, concerns. But the rest might be great.