Beginning with the coverage of last week’s Nature paper on the genetics of autism, The Guardian is trying out a new way of reporting scientific stories.

Alok Jha explains in his science blog the reasoning for this method of reporting called ‘story trackers’.

Jha points to his unease at the disparity between the way scientific news is distributed and received amongst scientists and how it is reported to the public.

 

‘Any scientist knows that a paper can only ever be an interim point in the study of a topic and, on publication, it will immediately be dissected and analysed by other researchers all over the world. Readers who are scientists and other interested people might pick up on some of this discussion but, unless you're steeped in a subject, you might miss out.

After the first headlines and news stories summarising the research and instant reaction to it, a casually interested reader might hear nothing about a topic until the next big splashy news story.’

The idea behind the story trackers is to document an informed discussion between scientists and the public about an item of science news from the moment it makes headlines and to follow the story as it develops.

The response to the announcement of use of story trackers has been met with a  positive response in the comments on Jha’s blog and on the members’ discussion board for the ABSW.

A few commenters have concerns that the process will be overly time-consuming for journalists and that most of the public are too busy to have a deep understanding of the scientific progress of a story.  Most of the comments are enthusiastic, however, and some call for the use of story trackers in all facets of news reporting of complex issues, such as politics and even fashion.

Other examples of story tracking that have already been implemented are the Knight Science Journalism Tracker (which is ongoing) and Google’s Living Stories) experiment (which ran from Dec 1009 to Feb 2010).

Alok Jha discusses the idea on this week’s Guardian Science Podcast and a Twitter account has been set up to further facilitate the dialogue.

 

 
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