Science Journalism Insights

Why philanthropists should invest in independent journalism When a Gabonese community’s ancestral forest was threatened by a logging concession, officials ignored their appeals, until the story was reported. Once facts reached the public record, the environment minister revoked the permit and legally protected the forest. Journalism didn’t create policy; it made policy possible. It turned private harm into shared knowledge and shared knowledge into collective pressure. For philanthropists focused on climate or biodiversity, journalism may appear peripheral beside land protection or clean technology. In truth, it’s a high-leverage investment that makes all those efforts more effective. Environmental damage thrives in secrecy: unrecorded deforestation, unverified carbon credits, unexamined subsidies. Independent reporting exposes what others miss, creating the accountability that lets interventions work. In Peru, a company raised millions in London claiming it would restore the rainforest. Investigative reporting revealed it had already cleared more than 2,000 hectares of Amazon forest. The permit was revoked, the company delisted, and tens of millions of dollars in damage—and 29 million tons of CO₂ emissions—were averted. A small investment in reporting helped prevent massive loss. Transparency can yield exponential returns. This reflects the kind of generosity Laurene Powell Jobs and MacKenzie Scott have described in recent pieces: one that relinquishes control. Supporting journalism decentralizes authority and funds information that anyone can use. It respects communities as participants, not subjects. The path to impact is rarely linear: most stories inform, some inspire, and a few shift systems. But sustained investment creates the conditions for those catalytic moments when facts drive change. Once wrongdoing becomes public, regulators respond and communities gain leverage. For donors accustomed to counting hectares or tons, journalism offers another metric: the number of better decisions made because the facts were known. Journalism is information infrastructure for civic and environmental action. It translates science into plain language, reveals governance failures, and documents success so others can learn. Where journalists thrive, corruption shrinks and stewardship grows; where they are silenced, both reverse. Philanthropy spends billions on climate and conservation yet only a fraction on the mechanism that keeps those efforts honest: independent reporting. Supporting it is not sentimental but strategic. Truth, when placed where it can be used, is catalytic. Investing in journalism is investing in society’s capacity to see clearly and act wisely. 👉 The full piece: https://lnkd.in/ggnB-Jry

How to find the perfect journal for your paper without wasting months on rejections. Most researchers submit to the wrong journals and waste 6-12 months on rejections. They pick journals based on prestige instead of fit. Or spend weeks manually searching through hundreds of options. Here are 12 free tools that match your manuscript to the right publication venue: Major Publisher Tools: Elsevier Journal Finder → Best for science, technology, and medical fields → Analyzes your abstract to suggest matches Springer Nature Journal Suggester → Ideal for interdisciplinary and Nature journals → Covers broad range of scientific disciplines Wiley Journal Finder → Suitable for health, social sciences, and humanities → Provides impact factor and scope information Taylor & Francis Journal Suggester → Great for social sciences, arts, and humanities → Detailed subject area matching IEEE Publication Recommender → Perfect for engineering, technology, and computing → Specialized for technical research Specialized & Open Access Tools: PLOS Journal Selector → Best for Open Access in life sciences and medicine → Focuses on rapid publication options MDPI Journal Finder → Fast finder for multidisciplinary open-access journals → Quick turnaround times JANE (Journal/Author Name Estimator) → Powered by PubMed database → Ideal for medical and life science research Independent & Analysis Tools: JournalGuide → Independent tool covering multiple publishers → Includes credibility indicators and peer reviews Edanz Journal Selector → Filter by impact factor and subject area → Comprehensive database coverage Enago Journal Finder → AI-powered suggestions with detailed metrics → Publication timeline estimates Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) → Check journal quartiles and international rankings → Compare journal performance metrics The secret to successful journal selection: Use 2-3 tools to cross-reference results. Match your research scope to journal focus. Consider acceptance rates alongside impact factors. Most researchers pick journals randomly or by reputation alone. Smart researchers use systematic matching tools to increase acceptance rates. Your research deserves the right audience. These tools ensure you find journals where your work will be valued and cited. Which of these journal finder tools would be most helpful for your research field? #phd #research #journalpublishing #academia

Yair Titelboim geocoded 89,694 energy projects across Texas. But that was the easy part... I've been reading his Substack for a few weeks, and every piece circles the same problem. The real world does not hand you ready to use geospatial data. It hands you news articles, interconnection reports, permit filings, and announcements that go silent. Turning that mess into something a map can read is where most analysis breaks. You are conflating two different worlds: messy, unstructured text and absolute geometries. Connecting those two used to take a team and a full quarter to close. Yair closed it with an AI-first workflow. He pulled 665 articles, parsed 90 ERCOT reports, geocoded 89,694 projects, and mapped the distance between where Texas makes power and where data centers want to consume it. Then he found something interesting. Projects with organized opposition, lawsuits, zoning fights, press coverage, survived at 79%. The quiet ones generally didn't proceed. 12 of his 15 stalled projects had zero opposition. His analysis: opposition means attention, and attention means the project is still alive. My take: I love to see the story, but when it comes to the data the method is the what stood out. We can now parse complex, real-world text into a spatial dataset fast enough to ask questions we could never afford to ask before. That is a measurement problem before it is a media one. And it is exactly the kind of thing spatial work is built to catch. Check the full article out in the comments. 🌎 I'm Matt Forrest and I talk about modern GIS, earth observation, AI, and how geospatial is changing. 📬 Want more like this? Join 14k+ others learning from my daily newsletter → forrest.nyc

You’ve probably seen the bold blue-to-red climate stripes that reveal our planet’s warming - year by year, line by line (created by Ed Hawkins in 2018 to represent global temperature rise). It’s also becoming a powerful way to visualize biodiversity loss over time (the steady decline in species populations since 1970). While still less common, W A T E R -related stripe visualizations are emerging and they hold powerful potential for communicating water changes - especially if we want to highlight the linkages of water & climate. These visuals can help us better understand the urgency of W A T E R and to inspire the action we need in different environments. I came across a 2023 article from the Los Angeles Times, showing the intensity of droughts and wet periods in California since the 1980s. The visual which was adapted from data by Katherine Hegewisch and John Abatzoglou - uses colored stripes to depict fluctuations in the local water balance . Each strip represents 5 days. This data is based on the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration Index (you can find more details in the article link in the comments). 🌎 While there’s no universal “Water Stripes” campaign yet, there could be and maybe there should be! 🌊 Water touches everything from rainfall and groundwater to urban water scarcity and the health of our ecosystems. Visualizing these changes through simple, striking graphics could help turn complex data into a story that resonates. You can create your own 'Water Stripes' using local data such as: ➡️ Rainfall trends ➡️ Groundwater levels ➡️ Urban water stress ➡️ River or lake health (water quality) Let’s move beyond static tables and reports and bring our water data to life- to inform, to inspire, and to mobilize action. What do you think? There’s a real opportunity here for a tool like ShowYourStripes for Water. It can be something simple, open-access, and regionally customizable so if you know of this tool then please let me know as I would be interested to learn more. #Showyourstripes #watermanagement #waterstewardship #waterquality #waterquality #calltoaction #watersecurity #waterassurance

Covering climate change matters. In research recently published in the Journal of Risk Research, my colleagues and I found that when TV news reports mentioned climate change or recommended actions to prepare for severe weather, viewers’ concern about severe weather events, climate change, and willingness to support policies that protect against severe weather events increased. The study, led by Wändi BRUINE DE BRUIN from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy alongside Gale Sinatra at the USC Rossier School of Education and Allison Agsten at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, examined more than 3,000 survey responses to TV news reports developed by journalists trained by the USC Annenberg Center for Climate Journalism and Communication. To date, the center has trained hundreds of journalists, scientists, and other professionals in science-backed best practices for accurately and effectively communicating about climate change. In a rapidly warming world, and one where weather related events grow more frequent, disruptive and costly, news audiences need access to relevant and timely information.  https://lnkd.in/gcQNeyuD

Solar panels alone won’t fix India’s climate crisis. And no one’s talking about it. Without the right grid and transmission infrastructure, solar panels are just expensive sheets of glass. India’s renewable energy goals are ambitious, but the road to getting there is far more complex than it seems. Which is why India’s transition story needs deeper, on-ground storytelling. That’s where the Earth Journalism Network steps in, training communicators to make complex climate stories accessible. Through their "Renewable Energy in India: Workshop & Bootcamp for Communicators & Content Creators", these conversations are taking shape. From decentralised renewable energy to solar policy, to the real barriers to scaling clean energy, and the big question: who is actually funding this transition? We’re proud to share that Krishnanshu Panda from News With Navya is one of the selected participants, probably the youngest in the room. Someone who’s been chasing stories across the length and breadth of the country, bringing out voices that often go unheard. This transition isn’t distant policy, it affects how cities adopt rooftop solar and how farmers power their fields. At News with Navya, we’re committed to telling these stories as they are, so you can see the full picture and understand what’s changing around you.

We need to stop communicating climate change as a standalone environmental issue and start communicating it as a lens through which every aspect of society is understood. That was my takeaway from the Reporting Climate Change event at London Climate Action Week. People don't experience climate change through "climate". They experience it through food prices, housing, health, migration, sport, insurance, jobs, infrastructure and the cost of living. A few lessons that stood out. 1. Meet people where they already are. The audience isn't waiting to click on a "Climate" section. If someone cares about football, farming, parenting, local politics or business, those are the entry points. The task isn't to persuade people to care about climate change. It's to reveal the climate dimensions of things they already care about. 2. Stop leading with doom. Lead with agency. People need to understand the scale of the challenge, but they also need to know what can be done. The most effective communication doesn't ask, "How bad is this getting?" It asks: What's being done? What's working? and what can others learn from it? Solutions journalism isn't optimism or greenwashing. It's rigorous reporting that investigates responses alongside the problems. 3. Our visuals often undermine our message. One discussion focused on heatwave coverage. We frequently pair stories about public health risks with images of people eating ice cream or enjoying the beach. The text says: this is dangerous. The image says: this is a lovely summer day. If we want people to understand climate risk, we need to show: who is affected; who is vulnerable; how people are adapting and what resilience actually looks like. 4. The voices missing from the conversation often aren't silent at all. Farmers, local communities, ethnic media, artists, regional journalists and young people are already discussing climate. The challenge isn't always giving people a voice. It's recognising the voices that already exist and making space for them in the mainstream narrative. 5. Climate comms is fundamentally about trust. Trust requires time to understand communities, understand local context and build relationships before asking people to tell their stories. In an attention economy built around speed, that feels increasingly difficult, but also increasingly necessary.

We need a global debate about “the strain on scientific publishing”, as it was termed in a landmark paper last month from Quantitative Science Studies (The MIT Press). “Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published,” said the paper, from Mark Hanson, Pablo Gómez Barreiro, Paolo Crosetto and Dan Brockington. “The total number of articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science has grown exponentially in recent years; in 2022 the article total was ∼47% higher than in 2016, which has outpaced the limited growth — if any — in the number of practicing scientists. Thus, publication workload per scientist has increased dramatically…. “Such exponential growth cannot be sustained.” The implications for faculty workload, for the quality of peer review and indeed on the quality of published research outputs are profound. The issue also raises important questions on scientific publication in an era of artificial intelligence and bibliometric measurements of research quality - including in global rankings. Please share your thoughts? How deep is the problem? What action is needed? You can read the paper, The strain on scientific publishing, here: https://lnkd.in/eJj3iizr Meanwhile, Finland has just decided to downgrade almost 300 Frontiers and MDPI journals to its lowest rating – a de facto blacklisting move that might soon be replicated in other countries, according to an expert. One MDPI publication, the Journal of Clinical Medicine, published 44 papers in 2017 but 4,367 in 2021, according to analysis by Grenoble-based economist Paolo Crosetto published last year, which also found that some journals were opening so-called “special issues” at a rate of nine a day. Read Times Higher Education’s report here: https://lnkd.in/eGmbcCWn There’s also an excellent blog on the issues from Dorothy Bishop here: https://lnkd.in/eSgesKjy Please share your views as I’m keen that Times Higher Education puts these issues high on the global agenda for our events and content in 2025.

Imagine an early-career researcher sitting down for a promotion meeting. Years of research, teaching and service are distilled into one question: "How many papers have you published in top journals?" We know this is happening everywhere. But what is rarely asked and reflected on is why it is so difficult to publish in 'top journals'. Well, one answer is that they are controlled by close-knit elite networks, mostly involving men at North American unis. In a bold new paper in the Journal of Business Ethics, Mindel and Ciriello examine the networks behind elite academic publishing. Their audit covers 946 author-editor relationships across 788 articles involving 54 highly prolific scholars in two Financial Times 50 journals between 2010 and 2024. The findings make uncomfortable reading: - 49.7% of the audited relationships involved at least one definitive conflict of interest under the study’s reasonable-observer standard; a further 11.6% were possibly conflicted. - Conflicts clustered within dense elite networks, with reciprocal editorial handling the most prevalent pattern. - The 54 prolific scholars accounted for roughly half of the journals’ publications. Some 94.5% were men, and 90% held North American PhDs. These findings raise serious questions about elite cliques within ‘top journals’ and the structures that sustain their influence. The study does not establish collusion or individual misconduct. It does expose institutional vulnerabilities that make insider advantage possible and difficult to scrutinise. Clearly, the stakes involved are high, and they extend far beyond publication counts. These journals help determine who gets hired, promoted, funded and heard. Their decisions shape whose knowledge counts. Based on this research, I think we clearly need more transparency and accountability - and ethics - in journal publishing. This means transparent editorial relationships, enforceable recusal rules and independent scrutiny. A journal’s place on an elite journal list is no substitute for evidence of fair procedures. ...and if you are a HOD or research director in a university department: take this paper and similar evidence into account when making promotion decisions. Just counting publications and applying elite journal lists is not a way to evaluate research quality. https://lnkd.in/dEY_BhhT

What happens to evidence once it enters a government department? This paper (https://lnkd.in/etZG37gg) strips away the fiction that #evidence simply “feeds into” #policymaking. Inside departments, #KnowledgeBrokering is less about transfer and more about constant translation, negotiation, and alignment. Evidence moves through informal conversations, trusted relationships, and iterative sense-making long before it appears in briefings or submissions. What matters most is not the quality of evidence in isolation, but its fit with departmental priorities, timing, and internal workflows. Brokers spend much of their effort managing expectations, mediating between analytical standards and policy urgency, and protecting evidence from being either ignored or overstated. The insight here is practical and political. #EvidenceUse is shaped by organizational pressures and power relations, not by deficit of skill or goodwill. Strengthening evidence-informed policy, therefore, means investing in brokering capacity as core governance infrastructure rather than treating it as a peripheral function. Evidence does not travel on its own. It moves because someone makes space for it. #KnowledgeTranslation #PoliticalLiteracy