> I am a little surprised, given the title, that the issue being highlighted is blogspam and the brokenness is basically that science journalists can't fairly capitalize their effort.
I think this was slightly highlighted later in the post but agree that it wasn't stressed enough.
> Science journalism is broken not because spam blogs copy-paste articles. It's broken because the entire ecosystem has the wrong incentives.
I think the two are closely related; the copy-paste behavior contributes greatly to minimizing the window of capitalization. However, it's definitely not the only factor.
> Researchers, many of whom have inadequate statistical training, are academics facing publish-or-perish and weird publication barriers (p-value filtering, premium on sexy new results over well-researched incremental advances). The more senior authors who have tenure and are safe from some of the incentives still rely on lab funding, which is similarly competitive, and also tend to people whose methodological training is substantially out of date. Most journal reviewers are subject matter experts, some with limited statistical training.
That's basically a problem of science, perhaps at the core of it, but not science churnalism I think.
> I see very little evidence this process stems from the article's implied undertone that blog spam is costing legitimate journalists money and starving them of resources they need to do a good job.
You don't think aggregators that built some traction (i.e. Phys.org, MedicalXpress) are taking away opportunities of good journalism? I don't have quantitative evidence for this but the qualitative one is pretty strong (talking to journalists, for example).
> There is no notion of including comment from critical authors, and there is certainly no notion of critiquing the design, replicating the experiment (either a limited replication using the author's code / data, or a more thorough replication to obtain the substantive result) [...] The problem is the incentives. Imagine a science website that posts only 1/10th the number of posts, but deep-dives all of the ones they do. [...] This should be especially followed in disciplines like social psychology, applied economics, neuroscience, evolutionary anthropology or evolutionary psychology, medical research, nutrition research, and other fields where experimental or quasi-experimental design are more difficult.
Precisely the raison d'être of something like Health News. I guess this was pointed out near the end of the post. Although realizing it will take some time and traction, it looks like a good starting point.