[raattgift]

Huh, this turned into a wee-hours rant. Sorry. I hope the extra information in it makes up for that.

The Ars article focused on the NANOGrav raft of papers; NANOGrav is just one of the several pulsar timing array collaborations that are in this synchronized un-embargoing of papers. There is substantial overlap between, say, the NANOGrav papers in the Ars Technica article and the joint InPTA/EPTA set which includes https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.16225 https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.16214 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.16226 but also enough non-overlap to encourage reading all of them (and to refresh one's foundational knowledge by consulting e.g. Burke-Spolaor et al 2019 "The astrophysics of nanohertz gravitational waves", <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00159-019-0115-7>).

Unfortunately I find myself griping about a focus on -- to be rude -- only the USA-based-institutions-dominated collaboration (<https://nanograv.org/collaboration/partner-institutions>, although of course there are non-USA and non-North American institutions and researchers in that collab too). Relatively USA-institution-light collabs will chase press attention in different markets and in different ways, of course, but there is scant sign of them in the Ars article (which at least names and links to IPTA) or in the WaPo one (which only lists "Europe, India, Australia and China", not naming the actual collabs).

The inter-collab two year plan on synchronization of paper releases (the "3P+ agreement") itself is something of a story; I wonder if it's going to get much attention in anyone's press.

That said, I don't mind either Ouellette's or Achenbach & Jaggard's reporting. I think they serve amateur enthusiasts well enough that their summaries of the results and science don't need to be nitpicked. Other than that both articles use the unhelpful cliché "fabric of space[-]time" (the latter also has "fabric of the cosmos", "fabric of space and time", because variety is important right?), grrrrrrrr.