Cristine Russell is a leader in the field of science and health journalism, and a former colleague at the Washington Post (as well as my very good friend). She is president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, a past president of the National Association of Science Writers, and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Her bona fides for assessing the field are plainly impeccable.

In an article entitled “What Does the Future Hold for Science Journalism?” in the fall issue of ScienceWriters, the quarterly journal of the National Association of Science Writers, Russell offers this appraisal: “The failing fortunes of science sections reflect the overall drop in science reporting resources in the nation’s traditional print and electronic media. There are fewer jobs for staff science reporters and smaller news holes than in days of old. . . . As travel budgets grow tighter, there are fewer enterprise projects. Around-the-clock coverage and multimedia challenges add to the pressures on serious science coverage.”

And yet, Russell goes on to cite “signs of optimism” about the future of science writing (in the broad sense that includes everything from health to technology). She includes an array of on-line outlets from established sources such as National Public Radio, which has a health and science Web page “with NPR newsfeeds, podcasts, AP stories, research news, books on science, blogs and special features, such as the year long Climate Connections series on global warming.” And she notes ScienceBlogs.com, which calls itself “the largest online community dedicated to science.” Russell writes that scientists themselves are becoming more sophisticated in explaining their work to general audiences, that mid-career programs for reporters writing about science-related issues are continuing, and that the role of science in national and internal life means that coverage is mandatory, even when resources are strapped.

Russell’s assessment of her specialty corresponds to the experience of her counterparts in areas such as business and economic reporting, education, and religion. Coverage is both shrinking and expanding at the same time. Newspapers and the traditional electronic media are offering less, but other outlets are proliferating. While she doesn’t say so directly, influence is shifting from editors to “aggregators” that collect information from a variety of sources and present them in a unified portal. Google and Yahoo have turned this kind of assemblage into huge businesses by supporting their sites with targeted advertising that benefits, largely, their own investors rather than flow to the places where they get the information being featured.

The questions that arise from this evolution are the same across all areas of today’s reporting. What constitutes good coverage? How do you know where to get it? The burden of knowing what is reliable and thorough has shifted from, say, science editors to readers whose freedom to select where to go is both liberation and a peril. In a study she wrote as a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School in 2006 (available in full on the school’s Web site), Russell provides many ways to decipher the value of science reporting along with guidance for the writers on how to improve the standards of their own work.

Inevitably, there is a tug-of-war between what is meaningful and what is sensational. Russell quotes a long-time medical writer at the Washington Post, the late Victor Cohn, who used to say there were two kinds of front-page newspaper stories on his beat, “new hope and no hope.” In recent years, the focus of medical writing has shifted toward health and fitness of the “news you can use” variety and Russell lists the sections in newspapers that have been renamed and repositioned accordingly. On television in particular, and especially in sweeps periods, all coverage seems to fall into the losing weight category or scare stories warning that “your drapes are going to kill you.” That is hardly new as a genre, but Russell’s point and that of others is that mass media of the sort that reaches the largest and most uncritical audiences is spending vastly more energy on what sells than on what matters in a deeper sense.

Science writing is also, understandably, subject to fads. There was a time when reporting on the space program was especially glamorous and extensive. In most respects, space coverage is now about flaws, delays, and occasional scandals (the love-sick astronaut who confronted a rival is, currently, our most famous space traveler) rather than what is possible in our examination of the universe. The current hot ticket is global climate change, and there is reason to be grateful for its popularity as a subject because real changes are going to result in how the issue is handled. The obesity “epidemic” is another very big story. Here again, the consequence of this kind of journalism is that society reacts in ways that can, in the long term, actually alleviate problems being uncovered.

What Russell and her fellow practitioners in the National Association of Science Writers, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Association of Health Care Journalists, Inc., are facing, along with everyone else in the news and information business, is how to adapt to the transformation of the way our work is distributed and the business models that support the change. As Russell points out, the litany of cutbacks at newspapers, magazines, and broadcast companies is a very serious problem, but it is only part of the story.

Peter Osnos is Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation. Sign-up to receive Osnos’ columns weekly by email here. Read past columns here.