Somebody points me to this horrifying exposé by Paul Raeburn on a new series by the Washington Post where they reprint press releases as if they are actual news. And the gimmick is, the reason why it’s appearing on this blog, is that these are university press releases on science stories. What could possibly go wrong there?
After all, Steve Chaplin, a self-identified “science-writing PIO from an R1,” writes in a comment to Raeburn’s post:
We write about peer-reviewed research accepted for publication or published by the world’s leading scientific journals after that research has been determined to be legitimate. Repeatability of new research is a publication requisite.
I emphasized that last sentence myself because it was such a stunner. Do people really think that???
So I guess what he’s saying is, they don’t do press releases for articles from Psychological Science or the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. But I wonder how the profs in the psych dept at Chaplin’s university feel about being singled out like that???
To be serious for a moment, yes, we have a press office at Columbia. And, yes, I love it when they publicize my work. I have no problem with press releases. But it’s the job of a serious journalist to read the press release and use it in a story, not just to reprint it!
P.S. It seems that one of the editors of the Post’s science section is named Pooh Shapiro. How cool is that?
via:http://andrewgelman.com/2014/02/17/washington-post-reprints-university-press-releases-news-stories/
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