The job of science journalists IS the interpretation. It’s their job to educate the public on science, and potentially critical thinking. Instead, you get rubbish fringe science, bunk, unreviewed studies, bigfoot, pseudoscience and “5 years until the FOUNTAIN OF FUCKING YOUTH”. It’s meant to be the job of science journalists to act as intermediaries between (science, scientists, jargon, and journals) and the lay person. If they can’t do it, then they’ve failed at their only goal. And if they think that it’s too difficult, then yes, they need more funding, or larger teams etc. It’s not rocket science. And as Novella pointed out, a source of these teams and sources are dedicated science bloggers (Like Goldrace, or even this blog, people like Novella, Shermer and Prothero).

Sounds like a wonderful dilemma. I wish y’all the best of luck with that.

Absolutely.

And in my humble experience, if you’re going to be a science writer, you have to be a specialist. You have to study the subjects you cover and devote your efforts almost exclusively to science writing in order to produce accurate pieces. This is why I like science writing. It’s both very challenging and very educational.

But that brings up another issue. There are topics I won’t write about in any significant capacity. Why? Because I don’t know them very well and I would rather point my readers to an expert in the field then try to go it alone and end up misinforming them. I know I have a good base in physics, astronomy and evolutionary theory and these subjects are my primary focus.

That’s the exact condescending attitude that Steve Conners complained about in his diatribe about science bloggers and scientists in general. Part of the problem is that most scientists do not go into journalism, with a few notable exceptions, and part of the problem is that the scientists themselves frequently don’t know how to explain what they’ve uncovered to the lay person that is covering their scientific discovery. Part of it is laziness on one end, but another part is laziness on the other, in formulating the discovery in a manner that someone who hasn’t been following the cutting edge of research in artificial intelligence, or genetics, or biochemistry.