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Comment by camillomiller | Hacker News Reader

If you're asking this question, to me you're saying you know how science works, maybe, but you have absolutely no clue how newscycles and the news work. If you'd knew both, you would definitely see the (honestly unsolvable) incompatibility between the pace and approach of science and the need for ephemeral news-able items to make a science publication actually compelling to a larger non-technical audience.

A science publication that wouldn't care about news economics and readership -- therefore maybe only a publicly-funded no-profit -- could maybe approach science news in a way that would solve the problem illustrated here.

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Like any good nerd kid of the early 90s I read Discover magazine. Looking back I see that it was filled with breathless coverage of the discoveries of a decade ago, rehashes of 101-level science, and a few newsy articles about a current topic. There was always a little bit of red meat for people like dinosaur enthusiasts and space futurists. Many topics would get recycled a year or two later.

I guess my point is that science is large enough and has enough history that it doesn't need the 24 hour news cycle to be interesting. In the sense that what you already know is news to most people, you can stay interesting without getting a scoop.

I tried following ScienceDaily with an RSS feed a while back and it was just too much. A fire hose of articles and little organization.

One thing I wonder is why there isn't a resource like HN outside of this area. I suspect that people aren't doing as much writing to understand themselves in other fields, and at the same time, they are afraid to discuss preliminary results publicly.

>"science is large enough and has enough history that it doesn't need the 24 hour news cycle to be interesting. In the sense that what you already know is news to most people, you can stay interesting without getting a scoop."

For additional evidence, consider how History Today articles often reach the front page of HN, about historical findings that haven't necessarily been published recently. There is certainly an interest for well-written timeless articles.

>> the need for ephemeral news-able items to make a science publication actually compelling to a larger non-technical audience

What is this need of which you speak?

Let's say some responsible journalistic outlet decided to just store it up, filter it, edit it and publish it in something like Popular Mechanics. Does that mean that Yahoo and Google have to still scrape the bottom of the barrel for new daily garbage from space-fun.biz to fill their "science news" sections?

Scientific American is already scraping the bottom of the barrel. You can’t trust any publication to be written in good faith.

> Scientific American has hit rock bottom with this new op-ed that is nothing more than a hit piece on Ed Wilson, basically calling him a racist.

> It is written by someone who apparently has no training in evolutionary biology, though she says she “intimately familiarized [herself] with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.”

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-america...

https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-shameful-decline...

> Scientific American just did a hit job on one of America’s leading biologists and conservationists. All that, right after his passing. This marks a shameful low point in a steep decline of the magazine in recent years.

> Scientific American is the oldest magazine in the US dealing with science. Continuously in print since 1845, it is known for being full of articles by world-class scientists on different topics. According to its About page, over 200 Nobel Prize winners have contributed to it.

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