It’s not just “political science”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/01/ungate_my_heart.html. “Sean Carroll”:http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/01/13/galaxies-so-near-yet-so-far/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CosmicVarianceBlog+%28Cosmic+Variance%29&utm_content=Google+Reader complains about the difficulty of attracting sustained media attention in the field of cosmology, which, unlike political science, (a) has media sex-appeal, and (b) has a truly wonderful “open access archive of papers”:http://www.arxiv.org available for anyone to browse through.
So why are galaxies at redshift 8 considered news, if galaxies at redshift 10 have already been discovered? As Charlie Petit talks about at the “Knight Science Journalism Tracker”:http://ksjtracker.mit.edu/2010/01/06/at-aas-most-distant-galaxies-yet-reported-no-check-that-one-pub-has-had-this-news-and-more/, the difference seems to be that the former were announced at a press briefing, while the latter just appeared on arxiv.
For better or for worse, conventional science journalism has been cut back to the point where most reporters have no choice but to wait for press releases to appear to write a story. They don’t have the resources to scan through arxiv postings every day — and even if they did, the precious newsworthy nuggets are rather sparsely scattered through the mass of Kuhnian normal science. And let’s not even think about the idea that journalists should spend time (and money) going to lots of conferences and talks and chatting with scientists about what’s hot in their fields these days — the resources just aren’t there.
There is some room for blogs to help out here. A blog by a respectable scientist can point to interesting stories that didn’t appear in any press releases, and journalists can follow up. (I know it’s happened here before.) But the thing about blogs is that they’re remarkably non-systematic; bloggers mention things because they personally find them interesting, not because they feel a duty to the wider public. The nature of journalism is changing rapidly, and it’s not clear how things will eventually shake out. I certainly hope that we continue to enjoy the work of people like Cowen, who make the extra effort to find good science stories and spread them widely.