Science
News Online is an online version of an award-winning weekly publication
Science News based in Washington, D.C. Sixteen pages long, each
issue of the print
edition goes to about 200,000 subscribers and contains approximately twenty news
articles.
Since its inception in April 1996, Science News Online has served as a vehicle for providing additional, bibliographic material for all the articles in the print edition and for introducing nonsubscribers to the
magazine. Each week, the editors select a sample of three or four articles from the print edition for posting online in their entirety.
The Web site also includes four regularly updated features available only on line: Ivars Peterson's MathTrek, Food for Thought, Science Safari, and TimeLine. All posted material is archived indefinitely.
This weekly newsmagazine covers the most important research in all fields of science. It is packed with short, accurate articles that appeal to both general readers and scientists.
Public interest in science has a long history, and Science News has played a major role in promoting and feeding this fascination for more than 70 years.
The weekly magazine debuted on March 13, 1922, under the name Science News-
Letter. Edited by Watson Davis, the first issue heralded the arrival of radio broadcasting by reporting the first allocation of radio wavelengths by the government. In several articles in that issue, it provided a glimpse of "the future of America's youngest, fastest growing, and most astonishing development." Filling 14 mimeographed pages, the newsletter also featured articles on observational astronomy, pneumonia vaccines, soil chemistry, and more.
Science News-Letter has grown out of an effort to supply newspapers with timely reports on scientific and technical developments. In the early part of this century, newspaper coverage of science consisted largely of snippets of sensational fare or cute features about oddball characters tinkering in basement laboratories. In 1921, to help change this view, Davis teamed up with chemist and writer Edwin E. Slosson to found and edit the Science News Bulletin, which delivered material of scientific interest to newspapers. It quickly grew into a primary source of science news, eliciting numerous requests from libraries, schools, and individuals for direct access to the reports. The result was Science News-Letter, which could be obtained by personal subscription ($5.00 a year, postpaid).
Over the years that followed, Science News-Letter reported a wide range of scientific developments, from the early days of atomic energy to the beginnings of modern genetics. Its solid coverage helped make science reporting acceptable and respectable in both newspaper and science circles.
The magazine officially became Science News with the March 12, 1966, issue. Science News did expand a few months later to 24 pages but later reverted to the 16-page format it still has today. It now has an international circulation of more than 200,000 and remains the only weekly newsmagazine of science published in the United States.
Bought at the news-stand or delivered in the mail, the print edition of a magazine or journal disappears into a black hole from which only snippets of usage information escape. Relying on sample surveys or questionnaires, letters from readers, and informal comments made at meetings or dinner parties, publishers, editors, and writers get just the slightest hint of what readers look at and how long they spend
with particular articles.
But as a publisher of online science magazine, it seems one might has learnt at Science News Online, that a Web site's logs provide a huge amount of data, which can effectively guide ongoing Web site development. Even without collecting data via cookies or online forms, one can see the steady growth in traffic month by month. Publishers can also glean fascinating insights into the way visitors use the Web site and the sort of information they s.
More reviews about the Science News Online @www.sciencenews.org