The Higgs boson and I
My first byline as a professional journalist (a.k.a. my first byline ever) was oddly for a tech story – about the advent of IPv6 internet addresses. I started writing it after 7 pm, had to wrap it up…
science journalism
89 posts
Press releases and public duty
From 'Science vs Marketing', published on In The Dark, on May 20, 2022: … there is an increasing tendency for university press offices to see themselves entirely as marketing agencies instead…
Sci-Hub isn't just for scientists
Quite a few reporters from other countries have reached out to me, directly or indirectly, to ask about scientists to whom they can speak about how important Sci-Hub is to their work. This attention…
Anonymity in journalism and a conflict of ethics
I wrote the following essay at the invitation of a journal in December 2020. (This was the first draft. There were additional drafts that incorporated feedback from a few editors.) It couldn’t be publ…
News coverage in India of open access papers
In a study published in November 2021, Teresa Schultz, of the University of Nevada, Reno, reported that gold, green and hybrid open-access (OA) modes of publishing of scientific papers were correlated…
A false union in science journalism
At what point does a journalist become a stenographer? Most people would say it's when the journalist stops questioning claims and reprints them uncritically, as if they were simply a machine. So…
The problem with rooting for science
The idea that trusting in science involves a lot of faith, instead of reason, is lost on most people. More often than not, as a science journalist, I encounter faith through extreme examples – such as…
Scicommers as knowledge producers
Reading the latest edition of Raghavendra Gadagkar's column in The Wire Science, 'More Fun Than Fun', about how scientists should become communicators and communicators should be treated a…
Anti-softening science for the state
The group of ministers (GoM) report on "government communication" has recommended that the government promote “soft topics” in the media like “yoga” and “tigers”. We can only speculate what…
The commentariot
The following post is an orange flag – a quieter alarm raised in anticipation of something worse that hasn't transpired yet but is likely in the offing. Earlier today, at the end of a call with a…
A Q&A about my job and science journalism
A couple weeks ago, some students from a university in South India got in touch to ask a few questions about my job and about science communication. The correspondence was entirely over email, and I&#…
Why scientists should read more
The amount of communicative effort to describe the fact of a ball being thrown is vanishingly low. It's as simple as saying, "X threw the ball." It takes a bit more effort to describe ho…