Newspaper Science Pages

Newspapers, especially daily newspapers, organize their content into separate sections. Common sections include local news, business, sports, and lifestyle. Some sections appear daily, while others may appear on a weekly or biweekly basis. Organizing newspapers into sections serves several purposes, including facilitating reader navigation of the material. People interested primarily in business coverage or sports news can turn directly to those pages. Newspapers are able to sell advertising into these separate sections to help advertisers reach a specialized and engaged audience. For example, home and garden sections are common weekly segments, and newspapers can sell ad space in that section to companies that wish to market products—from lumber to lawn services—to an interested, involved audience. Organizing content into sections also allows newspapers to highlight content and promote particular coverage areas. Science, health, and technology sections are among the weekly sections often featured in daily newspapers. However, the number of those sections is on the decline as newspapers struggle with declining advertising and declining profits.

In 1978, the New York Times launched a separate section for science news called Science Times. Other newspapers followed. In 1986, a survey by the Scientists' Institute for Public Information found that 66 other daily papers had weekly science sections and another 80 had science pages. But after reaching its height in the mid-1990s, the number of papers with science sections has fallen. The falloff has not been limited to smaller papers; the top 20 circulation papers like the Dallas Morning News and the Boston Globe have dissolved their science sections. The decline in science news sections has been traced to a decrease in retail computer ads in the late 1990s and to a general decline in media revenue—and subsequent cutbacks and staff layoffs—since the early 2000s.

A multiyear study of the Science Times section found that the size of the section grew in the 1980s and early 1990s, reaching a peak average size of 9 pages in 1995, but that the average size had decreased to 7 pages by 2000. However, the amount of science content increased despite a decrease in the number of total pages. The loss in total page size was a result of a sharp decrease in advertising, going from an average of 6 pages to an average of 2 pages. Computer retailers accounted for 95% of the advertising in the Science Times between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s. By [Page 514]2000, a little over half of the ads in Science Times were computer related, and health-related ads had climbed to 46.5%.