| Alas, I believe you two are not communicating! Marcia McNutt, the (now former) editor-in-chief of Science, was certainly talking about the News section of Science magazine, the magazine of the AAAS. That is, McNutt is talking about: https://www.science.org/news This is not the same as "Science News" -- https://www.sciencenews.org/sn-magazine The reason I think this is that the next sentence refers to a "Perspective" (also with initial capital, just like she used earlier with "News"): > Third, I check to see if there is a Perspective by another scientist. If you read Science regularly, you know there is a News section that has some "hot topic" stuff, like "Curiosity rover discovered ancient lakebeds on Mars", or "Arecibo telescope collapsed." It's right up front. And following the News section of Science magazine, there is a Perspectives section that has contextual overviews of less "front-page" technical stuff that is still important, but more niche. ("A major advance in modeling of superconductors that could yield new materials in upcoming years" type thing.) Perspectives are tied to a technical article, and News is sometimes, but not always. I read the print version of Science during these years. It was outstanding. My recollection is that they didn't usually do both a "News" and a "Perspective" on the subject of a technical article. It was typically one or the other. * My personal opinion is that this order (I look at News and then at Perspectives) is perfectly fine. In particular (@timr), Marcia McNutt is not talking about reading "the news", as in "the newspaper." Slagging Marcia McNutt as some kind of lightweight is all kinds of wrong. She's the president of US National Academies of Science, and that's just the top line (https://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/52683.htm...). This kind of callow dismissal is one of the least attractive aspects of HN. |
And as far as credentialism goes...I don't care if McNutt is the Nobel-winning reincarnation of Carl Sagan. She's literally saying that her go-to for reviewing any new paper submitted to Science is to look at the work of journalists, to see if the article is noteworthy enough to continue. That's just wrong, if for no other reason than Science journalists don't cover stuff that isn't in a top journal (which is typically...Science!)
I didn't misquote her, and I'm not misinterpreting the meaning of her words. It's quite plain. All of the other responses were variations on...actually reading the paper. Hers is about using proxies to read the paper for her.
[1] Here are the bios of the writers for science.org/news:
https://www.science.org/content/author/eric-hand
I grant that a few have technical backgrounds or undergrad degrees, but all have subsequently become professional writers, or "science communicators".