The New ‘Scientist’
Who is the intended readership of the New Scientist magazine? Most of you have presumably at least flicked through a copy of the New Scientist; what did you think of it?
I personally think it has an identity crisis. On the one hand the public think of it as an up to date technical magazine where as those in research see it is dumbed down ‘popular’ science. It fits the later by trying to engage the public by being interactive like many other general science providers. Therefore it provides a website which includes podcasts, blogs and such like.
The problem in engaging the public seems to be that the content is too specific for those who not have none or little scientific background and hence understanding more than just the title becomes difficult. From my experiences the majority of the articles I can only get the gist of because there is a lot of presumed knowledge by the writer. Also a lot of stories covered do not necessarily have practical implications yet and therefore may not be of interest to the general public.
To gauge scientists points of view Alice recommended to me this discussion list (see point 12) which discusses the New Scientist usefulness to the scientific community. There are a range of views with some very interesting points. The majority seem to think that New Scientist is not an accurate report on research in their field and therefore are not trusting of the rest of the text.
To summarise I think the New Scientist is perfect for those scientists who wish to keep tabs on what is going on outside their field as the text is not up to date as a journal but also not so detailed. Though the last page of the New Scientist would certainly suggest that it does have a readership which extends outside the scientific community since ‘The Last Word’ has even been published in book form.
2 comments:
I wonder whether a lot of New Scientist's readership is ex-scientists or science students? So the many students here, for example, who go off to work in the city or in graduate schemes, leaving academic science behind them but retaining some knowledge and interest. Maybe these are the people who meet what seem to be NS's criteria - non-expert but interested and a certain level of background knowledge.
That group of people would ceratinly fit the bill; I hadn't thought of them. Although surely as time goes by they loose touch with the scientific world and hence are unable to understand as many articles? Therefore this readership seems pretty transient to me which is not what a magazine wants for its subscribers.
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