Why use AI image-generation tools for blog posts?

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Adding images to blog posts improves the user experience and helps with SEO – Google likes multimedia content, and the richer experience of images in posts drives more time on site (which improves search rankings.)

So where do you get all of these images? In the past, I used a combination of photos and graphics I created myself, using a camera and photography and design software such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Canva. I also used stock photography and graphics websites, such as Shutterstock and Canva’s stock library.

BUT…I can’t always find what I want prerolled on stock sites and, when possible, I prefer custom photography that other sites don’t have. Also, I don’t always have the time, or the skills frankly, to make what I want.

That’s where AI comes in. The AI generation tools are still in the early-ish stages of development, but they are already powerful enough to create passable and, at times, very cool imagery for your blog posts.

What are the best AI image-generation tools?

There are a number of AI image generation tools on the market, but the two I’ve used that were most useful are DALL-E and Midjourney.

DALL-E

DALL-E is an artificial intelligence program developed by OpenAI, the company behind Chat GPT, that generates original images from textual descriptions. It uses a deep learning algorithm to interpret text inputs and then generates corresponding images that match the description.

DALL-E is capable of creating a wide variety of images, including abstract concepts, animals, objects, and scenes that have never been seen before. This program has the potential to revolutionize the field of image creation and has many potential applications in areas such as design, advertising, and entertainment.

Here is an example of a blog post hero image for my overlanding site that I generated with DALL-E.

To use DALL-E, you go to the website and sign up for an Open AI account – if you already have one for Chat GPT, that’s the one you’ll use for DALL-E.

Once you’ve signed in, you go to the DALL-E interface page where you input a description of the image you’d like to see. To learn the basics, I recommend reading Open AI’s guide to using DALL-E.

Midjourney

Midjourney is another AI design tool that enables users to create original visuals and graphics for their projects without the need for extensive design experience. Here’s an image I made for this website using Midjourney:

Whereas DALL-E operates through a page on the Open AI website, you use Midjourney through Discord, the popular platform that allows users to create private servers or channels for text, voice and video communication.

Discord was originally designed for use by the gaming community, but has since expanded to be used by various communities, including businesses, educational institutions, and social groups.

Discord allows users to create and join servers, which are essentially private chat rooms where users can communicate with each other. Within a server, users can create channels for specific topics, voice and video chat with other users, and share files and links.

To use Midjourney, you need a Discord account (free) and have to join the Midjourney server. Midjourney has a getting started guide on its website.

Is DALL-E or Midjourney better?

I use both DALL-E and Midjourney for generating images and artwork for my blog and social media channels. That said, I’ve leaned toward using Midjourney more. It tends to produce more polished images, and I’ve had pretty good luck getting it to create something that looks good and is publishing ready.

Neither is perfect, and in my experience, you’ll need to experiment quite a bit to get the hang of using them. I’m not going to go into too much detail here, as the usage/interfaces will probably change quickly over time. The key, in my experience, is what is known as “prompt engineering,” which in layman’s terms means knowing how to tell the system what you want it to do.

Midjourney has a helpful tutorial on using various parameters for the different versions of the software. One parameter that is very helpful is that you can tell it what aspect ratio the images it generates should be. If you’re website template has a certain aspect ratio for the hero images on blog posts, you can tell it to make the images that size.

You can also get DALL-E to produce images of a certain size – though not vertically oriented – but it is more challenging and inconsistent. You first have to generate a square images, then tell it to make that image wider. I’ve found that the wider images created this way are often unusable – but maybe I’m just not using it correctly. I suspect DALL-E will improve on this front.

One thing about DALL-E that gives it an advantage of Midjourney is that it seem to be less opinionated in the images is produces. Midjourney has a pretty distinct “house style” for images where you haven’t told it to mimick a specific style.

This is great, if you are looking for that style. Otherwise, it can feel somewhat constraining. DALL-E seems to be a bit more free-for-all in its style, which can produce some very unique images. The downside is that DALL-E images are often bizarre.

The image above of the truck in front of the mountains, for instance, is very cool, but some of the details, like the thing with the wheel and the strange fire pyramid make it unusable for most editorial purposes. Although, I could potentially remove them and then have a very cool image…I just might.

All in all, as I write this Midjourney seems like the more mature technology and you’ll probably have better luck generating something that is ready or close to ready to publish. But I have a feeling DALL-E will do very well going forward, as it’s under the OpenAI umbrella and shows a lot of promise.

You need to interate

In my experience, you rarely get just the right imaged the first time around. Both DALL-E and Midjourney allow you to reiterate on a prompt or on an image it has generated already, either letting it freestyle a new version or make one based on additional guidance from you.

As an example, here or four sets of images Midjourney make based on iterating on an initial prompt, changing the styles and other elements each time:

As you can see, the images are pretty distinct. It can take patience, but it’s worth it, to my mind, to have original imagery for your website.

Using Image Prompts for AI Generated Art

One thing that really seems to help guide AI systems is to provide it with an image and tell it to riff on it. What I do is to rough in an image in Canva with the various components I want it to include, then upload that image to the AI art generator.

It doesn’t always work, but it seems to work better than text prompts alone. For instance, I used the image below, created in Canva, as an image prompt for a blog post I was writing on outdoor safety.

Below is the first round of images it generated from this image and the following prompt

male and female adventurers looking off in the distance at an epic mountainous landscape, a storm is approaching from behind the mountains and the two people are watching it, concerned about their safety, there are animals lurking in the woods ominously, including a bear, snake, and mountain lion, jeep is between them and the mountain, woodblock print novel style –ar 3:2

After playing around with the prompt and revisions of certain outputs, I ended up with the image below, which suited my needs.

Modifying AI-Generated Images

The last thing I’ll mention is that I have been using AI to generate a base image, and then using Canva, Photoshop or Illustrator to add to it. Sometimes you want an image that has specific elements in it, and the AI image generators will only give you part of what you want. They have a frustrating habit of ignoring some prompts…

Here is an example of a hero image I made for one of my blogs. The image of the woman the truck and the mountain were generated by Midjourney. I added the concentric circles and the radio tower on the mountain.

You can’t tell, but I also made the woman and the truck bigger, using Canva.

Sometimes it Just Doesn’t Work

While I’ve had some great success with these systems. They don’t always produce something that’s useable. Providing guidance in the form of mocked up rough images can help. But sometimes, they just seem to struggle.

For example, I was trying to create an image for a skateboarding article today, and Midjourney just didn’t seem to understand what a halfpipe was, or REALLY wanted to present a highly stylized version. This was as good as I could get:

None of these were close to what I was looking for. I probably could have used some of Midjourney’s parameters to get closer. But in the end, it was just easier to use Canva to creat something. Here’s what I ended up using:

Conclusion

I’m a fan of using AI for creating bespoke artwork for online publications. It takes a bit of practice to get up to speed and, like everything in life, it requires knowledge and effort.

But I believe that AI generated content, both writing and design, are a major component of the future of publishing. Those of us who learn to use them will have a major advantage over those who don’t, both in terms of productivity and creativity.

I’m planning to document some of the things I’ve learned about feature writing here, in a series of related posts. I thought I’d start by asking an AI bot what it thinks feature writing is. Here’s what it told me:

Journalistic feature writing is a form of writing that focuses on telling stories in a way that captures the attention of readers and provides them with a deeper understanding of the subject. Features are typically longer articles that go beyond the basic who, what, when, and where of a news story to explore the why and how.

Unlike hard news reporting, which is typically focused on providing the most important information as quickly and accurately as possible, feature writing is more about using literary techniques to engage readers and create a vivid picture of the subject. Journalistic features can cover a wide range of topics, from human interest stories to in-depth analyses of complex issues.

Some common elements of journalistic feature writing include strong characters, detailed descriptions of settings, and compelling storytelling techniques such as narrative arcs and dialogue. Features may also include expert analysis, data and research, and quotes from sources to support the story’s premise.

Overall, the goal of journalistic feature writing is to provide readers with a more nuanced understanding of a subject than they might get from a traditional news report. By engaging readers with compelling storytelling techniques and providing them with valuable information and insights, journalists can help them develop a deeper understanding of the world around them.

Not bad. Guessing it spun that answer up from a few different sources it found out in the wild. The reason I initially turned to the AI was to see what it knew about feature writing structure. I’m guessing a lot. For instance, I was curious if it could codify the types of leads used for features. A couple come to mind — my human mind.

Anecdotal leads are one category, where you start telling the story with a story. In fact, there are many subcategories of anecdotal leads. Anyway, I have long meant to sit down and catalog the various types of anecdotal leads myself, but it occurred to me that this is just the kind of job AI is good at. So here we go:

1. Anecdotal lead: This type of lead uses a brief story or anecdote to introduce the main topic of the story. The story should be engaging and relevant to the overall topic of the article.
2. Descriptive lead: A descriptive lead sets the scene and provides a vivid description of the setting or the main character of the story. This type of lead is often used to create a strong visual image in the reader’s mind.
3. Shocking or provocative lead: A shocking or provocative lead grabs the reader’s attention by starting with a surprising fact or statement. This type of lead is effective for stories that deal with controversial or emotionally charged topics.
4. Question lead: A question lead asks a question that is directly related to the main topic of the story. This type of lead can be effective for engaging the reader and creating a sense of curiosity.
5. Quotation lead: A quotation lead uses a quote from a source or expert to introduce the main topic of the story. This type of lead can be effective for stories that deal with issues or events that are highly relevant to the source’s expertise.

Seriously, that was my first reaction when I started using it. Its ability to understand and generate human-like text is uncanny. The first time I had it crank out some copy, I thought, “Welp, maybe I could go back to waiting tables…”

ChatGPT is an AI-powered language model developed by OpenAI, designed to generate human-like text based on input. It has been trained on a massive dataset of diverse texts, allowing it to answer questions, write coherent paragraphs and converse on various topics.

After my first fearful reaction, I had a zen moment in which the words, “If you can’t beat them join them.” Popped into my head. That freed me to see the manifold possibilities. Now I see that – assuming it remains available and I can afford it when they start charging – it will become a major tool for much of my work, including research, organization, and content creation.

In this article, I will be sharing my experience as a writer and publisher, and how I’ve utilized ChatGPT’s powerful language processing capabilities to enhance my work and streamline my research process. Specifically, I’ll talk about how I use it to write product buyer’s guides for my niche websites.

Research with ChatGPT

The first thing that really stood out for me was how helpful it can be for research. Let’s say we are writing a buyer’s guide about apples. First, you want to know about the various varieties of apples. Just type into ChatGPT bar the question, “What are the most popular varieties of apples?”

When I just did this, here is what it produced:

1. Red Delicious
2. Gala
3. Granny Smith
4. Golden Delicious
5. Honeycrisp
6. Braeburn
7. Rome
8. Fujian
9. Jonathan
10. Empire.

That seems like a good start. I could have done a Google search with the same prompt and found out the same info, but Chat GPT produces a list quickly and I didn’t have to sort through featured snippets and search results to find this list. The other big advantage is now I’m in a conversation with Chat GPT, so can continue on.

Next, I give it this prompt: “Write a sentence or two about these varieties and why people like them.” Here’s what it produces:

Red Delicious apples are sweet, juicy, and crisp and are great for eating as a snack.

Gala apples are sweet and crunchy and are popular for their snack quality and versatility in cooking.

Granny Smith apples are tart and crisp and are often used for baking and cooking due to their balance of sweet and tart flavors.

Golden Delicious apples are sweet and soft, making them great for eating as a snack, cooking and baking.

Honeycrisp apples are known for their sweet and juicy flavor and satisfying crunch.

Braeburn apples have a balanced sweet-tart flavor, making them great for eating raw or cooking.

Rome apples are firm and tart, making them ideal for cooking and baking, especially for making pies and sauces.

Fujian apples are crisp and juicy, with a slightly sweet flavor and are commonly used in baking and cooking.

Jonathan apples are a sweet-tart variety with a crisp texture, making them great for eating raw and cooking.

Empire apples are a sweet-tart variety with a firm texture, making them good for eating raw and cooking, especially in salads and sauces.

Pretty good, right? Now, this information came from the 2021 data set that was provided to Chat GPT, so if any of the information was time sensitive, it might not be captured accurately here. But apple varieties don’t change much, so I’d be pretty comfortable that this information is accurate – though with any AI generate content, I would want to fact-check it.

Now that I had this list, I’d start doing some research online on the various apples and probably go buy some of the varieties to try and take photos of. I’d also see if there were other important varieties that weren’t covered. Where I wasn’t able to try the apples myself, I’d do online research on what other people have to say about them.

I might also do some more research using ChatGPT on each variety For instance, I might ask: “I’ve heard people don’t like red delicious apples because they lack flavor. Tell me more about that.” Here’s what Chat GPT responded with:

Red Delicious apples have a reputation for being bland and lacking flavor because they are often picked before they are fully ripe and mature. This can result in a texture that is tough and dry, and a flavor that is lacking in complexity. In recent years, growers have worked to improve the quality of Red Delicious apples by allowing them to fully mature before picking and by developing new, more flavorful varieties. However, these efforts have yet to completely change the public’s perception of the Red Delicious apple, and many people still view it as a less desirable variety compared to other, more flavorful options.

Interesting. I’d do a bit of snooping online to confirm this, and if I had a lot of time maybe even talk with an expert. But this gives me some good fodder for a pros-and-cons section on this apple.

In fact, I could use this info as a prompt to go ahead and created a first stab at a pros and cons list by prompting, “Use this information as a start for a pros and cons list for Red Delicious Apples. Put it in bullet point format.” Here’s the result:

Pros of Red Delicious Apples:

• Sweet and juicy
• Crisp texture
• Good for eating as a snack

Cons of Red Delicious Apples:

• Often picked before fully ripe, resulting in tough and dry texture
• Lacks flavor and complexity compared to other varieties
• Public perception as a less desirable variety compared to others.

Another thing that is very helpful with buyers guides is using ChatGPT to write a section on how to choose the product in question. Continuing on the apple theme, I’ll prompt it with, “What are the criteria that someone should look for when choosing an apple?”

When choosing an apple, consider the following criteria:

1. Ripeness: Choose apples that are firm and have a consistent color, avoiding those with bruises or soft spots.
2. Flavor: Apples come in a range of sweet to tart flavors, so choose one that matches your personal taste preference.
3. Purpose: Different apples are better suited for different purposes, such as snacking, cooking, or baking.
4. Season: Some apple varieties are only available during certain times of the year, so check for seasonal availability if you have a specific variety in mind.
5. Appearance: Apples should have a bright and shiny skin, with a smooth and unblemished surface.
6. Origin: Some apples are grown using more environmentally friendly methods, so consider choosing locally grown or organic apples if that is important to you.

Amazing! Again, I would go through these to make sure they are accurate and to add my own ideas, particularly if I happen to have a lot of knowledge in this area – I don’t in the case of apples.

The last thing I’ll mention is that ChatGPT can be really helpful when trying to put a lot of bland technical detail into prose. This is something that is often laborious when writing about the features of a product. Apples aren’t a great demonstration hear, so instead I’ll focus on a different kind of apple, the iPhone 14.

I went to the iPhone 14 official page on the Apple website, and highlighted and copied a bunch of technical information from the technical specification page. Just a big mess of words and numbers really, and then pasted it into the ChatGPT prompt. I actually meant to give it some guidance on writing about it but forgot and hit enter too soon. Still, hears what ChatGPT produced:

The information you provided appears to describe the features and specifications of the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus models. These models have a ceramic shield front and a glass back with an aluminum design, available in Midnight, Purple, Starlight, (PRODUCT)RED, and Blue colors. They have a capacity of 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB and have a width, height, and depth of 2.82 inches by 5.78 inches by 0.31 inch (iPhone 14) or 3.07 inches by 6.33 inches by 0.31 inch (iPhone 14 Plus) and weigh 6.07 ounces (172 grams) or 7.16 ounces (203 grams), respectively.

The iPhone 14 and 14 Plus both feature a Super Retina XDR display with HDR and True Tone, and both are water, splash, and dust resistant with a rated IP68. They both have a A15 Bionic chip and a dual-camera system with various photography features and modes.

See how that would take much of the pain out of gathering and writing up all of these technical details about a product. Again, I’d need to fact-check it and augment it with my own thoughts and style, but the bones are there.

Conclusion

As you can see, ChatGPT can really speed up your workflow on producing buyer guides for online publications such as niche sites and authority sites. And it’s just the tip of the digital iceberg. There are some caveats of course. You have to check the facts – AI is notorious for sounding definitive while spewing completely untrue garbage (though I’d argue that this is much less of a problem with ChatGPT).

Also, there has been a lot of talk about how Google may penalize sites that use AI content. Personally, I think it will target sites that produce “bad” AI content – thin, bland, and inaccurate content – and that if you do the high-level thinking and polishing to produce quality content, it will be appreciated by readers and, thus, by search engines.

It will be interested to see how competitive things get when lots of talented people get up and running with these tools. And I’m very curious to see how much they will charge for them.

Fun fact: the hero image on this page was created using OpenAI’s image creation tool, DALLE 2

With that in mind, I want to briefly introduce a unifying theme for the ideas laid out on this website that I hope will provide a lodestone for navigating this tricky landscape.

Introducing the AIR Concept for Science Writing

From a storytelling standpoint, scientific discoveries are like seeds.

They are pure potential. Consider the short abstract that appears at the top of most scientific papers: a block of jargony text tightly packed with information, dense and, to the uninitiated, impenetrable.

For the non-expert reader, the typical scientific abstract offers little evidence of the fascinating flower hidden within. The science writer’s job is to germinate that dense, information-rich seed through interviews and research, to bring the seed to blossom through compelling prose, and to help it emerge fully matured into the open air.

Here, then, is our unifying concept: AIR. The foundations of science communications as I see them can be summed up through the use of this heuristic, and we will explore its meaning in more detail in other articles.

But for now, suffice it to say that AIR stands for Accessible, Intriguing, and Relevant – three characteristics that make for strong science writing and storytelling. Here are our short working definitions:

• Accessible — Conveying clear meaning
• Intriguing — Arousing curiosity or providing entertainment   
• Relevant — Providing useful information

As you proceed through this site, keep in mind these characteristics. If you get overwhelmed, confused, or otherwise hit a wall, they can help you regroup and find your way through the morass.

At a Minimum, Science Writing Should be Accessible

Let’s go a little deeper. Every piece of popular science communications needs to be accessible so the reader or viewer can comprehend the ideas, events and import of the story.

If the audience can’t understand what’s being said or gets thoroughly confused, they will simply turn away. Instagram awaits!

Unfortunately, science communication in its raw form is often particularly inaccessible. Take these titles of papers published in Nature and Science, two of the most widely read journals in the world:

Multimetallic catalysed cross-coupling of aryl bromides with aryl triflates

Circuit-specific signaling in astrocyte-neuron networks in basal ganglia pathways

Coherent coupling between a ferromagnetic magnon and a superconducting qubit

These papers were published in top journals, which is a hint that they may turn out to be important discoveries. For the average person, though, these titles are gobbledygook. They are castle walls hiding the meaning within. The first step for the science writer is opening the gate and throw out the welcome mat. 

Even if you throw open the gates, it doesn’t mean your guests are going to come in. Accessibility is the first step to ensuring the reader, viewer or listener will stick with you as the story unfolds, but it’s really only a start.

Science Stories Should Also be Intriguing or Relevant or (Ideally!) Both

Who wants to hang out with someone who tells entirely comprehensible but boring, irrelevant stories? We want to hear intriguing and important stories, right? That’s where the other two elements of the AIR trifecta come into play: intriguing and relevant. Making a story accessible opens the door to the audience; making it interesting and relevant convinces them to come inside. 

In many ways, interest and relevance are two sides of the same coin. If something is interesting, it is likely to be relevant, if only because it is entertaining.

YouTube videos of cute animals are inconsequential “fluff,” but millions of people watch them every day. Why? We humans have an inborn need to smile and laugh and feel that everything is going to be alright — and this need is not trivial. Life is tough and we need relief from the rigors of living in an imperfect world. Playful kittens are relevant because they provide that escape for many YouTube viewers.

While acknowledging this relationship between intrigue and relevance (and noting at times how they can be addressed simultaneously), for our purposes we will discuss them mostly as discrete concepts. To demonstrate the distinction, let’s explore examples of stories that lean heavily on one element or the other.

Intrigue vs. Relevance

First, a scientific paper that possessed hidden intrigue. The report by researchers at the University of Exeter in Britain, published in the journal, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, was titled: 

“Image calibration and analysis toolbox – a free software suite for objectively measuring reflectance, colour and pattern.” 

The title is faintly accessible. At least we get that it’s some kind of free software, and that the software has something to do with images.

Is our curiosity piqued? Heck no.

But surprise, surprise, this paper was fodder for a New York Times blog piece. It turns out that the scientists had developed a computer algorithm that converts digital photographs into “animal vision,” allowing scientists to glimpse the world the way insects or animals see it.

The far more intriguing title of the New York Times post on the paper was: Tool Gives Researchers ‘Animal Vision’. The paper included images that had been converted to animal vision, along with the originals.

For instance, the shot below shows the blooms of the flower Echium angustifolium, the left image in human vision, and the right from a bee’s perspective.

In nature, bees can see two patches at the top of the flower (greenish yellow) that absorb ultraviolet light, and the animal vision program allows us also to see them.

This is a great example of finding something compelling in an ostensibly dry science paper. The Times reporter dug up a nugget of ‘gee-whiz’ science buried in a mundane headline, and summed it up with an intriguing concept: animal vision.

It’s also a model for a story where intrigue outways relevance.

Do you want to know how animals see differently? Sure, sounds cool. Do you really need this? Unless you’re a scientist, probably not. There may be some really important applications for this, but in the context of this story, we really just want to try on the “animal vision” goggles. This was a high intrigue story.

On the other hand, another New York Times medical news headline from around the same time heralds a story that hinges on its relevance:

Study Finds Drug Lowers Risk of Diabetes Complications

The story, an Associated Press brief syndicated by the Times, reported the results of a clinical trial of a diabetes drug called Jardiance. The study found that the drug delayed the time until patients died of cardiovascular disease or suffered a heart attack or stroke–the all-too-common and dire complications of diabetes.

Clearly, this is not a story meant to entertain or appeal to curiosity, as few people seek distraction by reading about the deadly comorbidities of diabetes. Then again, for someone who has diabetes or has a loved one with the disease, the subject is literally a matter of life and death.

A diabetic informed about this new drug might inquire about it next time they visit their doctor, possibly buying additional days, weeks, months, or even years of life. What’s more relevant than staying alive? 

Broadly speaking, science, technology, and medicine stories are relevant if they help us to understand the world and, ideally, to make informed choices. Things that are not in the least ‘entertaining’ can be very relevant and command attention.

The toolbox of a well-rounded science communicator will include tools for enhancing both intrigue and relevance in our stories.

Make a story more intriguing may require the rhetorical equivalent of, say, a drill while making it more relevant calls for a saw. Sometimes, a single tool can do both jobs.

In other articles, we will explore the distinct skills necessary for these tasks, all the time knowing that they are both central to building the solid framework of a science story. 

Before we wrap up chapter, let’s review by laying out working definitions for all three elements of the AIR approach once again:

• Accessible — Conveying clear meaning
• Intriguing — Arousing curiosity or providing entertainment   
• Relevant — Providing useful information

These definitions may seem overly simplistic, but they describe the essence of a compelling science story and will provide a touchstone for our explorations of science writing.

Much of the American public is ill-informed about the scientific consensus on topics such as evolution, stem cell research, vaccinations, and climate change. In the age of the Internet and social media, misinformation abounds and many people have difficulty discerning fact from fiction, propaganda from journalism, and conspiracy theory from scientific theory.

We’ve Got a Science Communication Problem

A recent Gallup poll found that more than 40 percent of Americans believe that “God created humans in their present form,” which translates as a belief that humans didn’t evolve from other life forms. The parody newspaper The Onion ran a headline announcing that “Kansas Outlaws the Practice of Evolution,” a sendup of that state’s willful and persistent misadventures in science education.

In California, where I live, whooping cough and measles made a comeback as a result of parents’ misguided fears of getting their children vaccinated.

We live in the information age, accelerated by the Internet, social media and mobile computing power. The downside is that misinformation is rampant and spreads through digital and social networks like wildfires burning a path of misunderstanding and confusion.

As I write this, the country is seized by a deadly coronavirus pandemic that has ignited an epidemic of conspiracy theories and bunk medical claims. The confusion, misinformation, willful ignorance, and faulty decision-making that results from poor communication – whether innocent or malign in intent – was on full display during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The travails of newspapers and other media outlets in recent decades has further undercut the flow of well-wrought science news. When I worked as a science and medicine reporter for The Baltimore Sun, that city’s major newspaper, I was part of a team of six reporters covering science and health news. After multiple rounds of downsizing, most of those positions and reporters have been eliminated from the paper.

In general, the quality and quantity of science coverage in the United States has dramatically declined. And it’s not just media coverage and public awareness of science that’s taken a hit. So, too, has the business of doing science. Federal funding for scientific research has steadily declined the United States in recent decades, the result of economic crises, the cost of waging multiple wars, paying for social programs for an aging population, and apathy or even open disdain towards science among politicians in charge of the federal government purse strings. As a result, scientists and research institutions have struggled to secure funding, and it has become ever more difficult for young scientists to establish themselves.

All this is to say that communicating the excitement, relevance, and need for science is more important than ever. There is a need for science communications just as there is a need for science.

No, the humble science writer isn’t going to prevent wars or shrink the federal budget deficit. But she can share scientific knowledge with the public, show how science leads to life-changing technologies and medicines, and argue the case, a story at a time, that supporting research pays dividends in economic, social, and personal well-being.  

The Golden Age of Science

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not all doom and gloom either. The power of science to improve people’s lives and tackle big problems has never been greater. We live in a truly remarkable era.

The reason for this, in a word, is technology. Technology gives us the power to know things and to do things. It gives scientists and engineers information that leads to new ideas. It gives each generation of scientists and engineers new tools to poke at dogma and revise or replace it with new ideas.

Consider the microscope. The first compound microscope was probably developed in the Netherlands in the 1500s, literally providing a tiny window into a previously unseen and unseeable world. By the 1700s, the resolving power of the microscope had improved to the point that Robert Hooke could begin studying individual cells. Cell theory, the assertion that cells are the fundamental units of life, has proven a particularly rich vein.

Next time you take a medicine, thank the inventor of the microscope, as our understanding of disease owes much to our ability to visualize cells. Nowadays, scientists can see individual molecules in action, opening yet another window into the microscopic – or should I say “nanoscopic”? – world. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has recently been awarded to three scientists for their work on super-resolution microscopy, imaging techniques pushing beyond theoretical limits on how small of an object we can visualize. 

Microscopy is just one of many technologies helping to advance science radically in recent decades. Supercomputers crunch vast amounts of data, allowing scientists to hear the voice of nature in all of its noise. The sequencing of the human genome provided biologists a copy of the operating instructions for the human body, a blueprint they are working feverishly to decipher.

The miniaturization of electronics and the connectivity of the internet and satellites allow various types of sensors to collect and transmit data in ways never before possible. A village-sized collider in Sweden lets us smash the tiniest subatomic particles apart so see what’s inside.

With so much happening so quickly, tales galore await the telling.

1. Popular science communications intended for a broad audience of non-specialists
2. Technical science communications intended for a narrow audience of insiders to a particular field

Science writing and communication are broad topics and it’s important to define our purview and a little about the approach I’ve taken on this website.

This website focuses on popular science communications, which I define as:

Communicating the significance of scientific research and technological innovation to non-specialists and specialists reading outside of their field of expertise.

My expertise and experience are mostly in popular science communications and the concepts and skills shared on this website fall into that category. I’ll go into a bit more detail below about the distinction between popular science communication and technical science communication.

It’s worth noting that science education materials are somewhat of an edge-case between popular and technical science communications. A book on the solar system for a 5-year-old leans towards popular science writing, while a college physics text book edges toward technical science writing (though it does the heavy lifting of explaining concepts and jargon along the way).

A quick aside: You’ll notice that I often use the word “writing” in referring to a broad range of communications mediums. Science stories are told through text, photos, video, infographics, sound recordings, and other multimedia. But as with a Hollywood movie, a written script is often the basis for audio and visual forms of communications in science.

In the worlds of public relations and journalism even photographers often portray their subjects based on a written story draft or note from a reporter/writer. To simplify the discussion, then, I will often use “writing” to refer generally to the core art of crafting a science, medicine, or technology story. 

Popular Science Writing vs Technical Science Writing

Popular science writing and technical science writing typically have different intended audiences.

The institutional purveyors of popular science stories range from media outlets like CNN and the New York Times to television networks like Science Channel or National Geographic to universities and non-profit research institutes such as MIT, Stanford, and Scripps Research.

These stories reach a broad audience with diverse levels of education and knowledge about science. An article on particle physics in the New York Times might be read by a Columbia University anthropology professor or by Times Square hotdog vendor, neither of whom has a deep understanding of quantum mechanics.

On the other hand, technical-scientific communication includes, among other things, scientists corresponding among themselves through scientific journals and meeting presentations, grant applications written to funding agencies, and reports of data from clinical trials to the Food and Drug Administration (the people who write these technical reports are typically referred a “medical writers” in job ads).

The highly technical language used in these “insider” venues allows experts to communicate precisely and efficiently – explanations of jargon and core concepts are dispensed with because the audience is familiar with the lexicon of the field.

While tremendously important, writing in this mode of communication is not the focus of this website – although technical science writing certainly wouldn’t suffer from applying some of the concepts you’ll find here. A well-written scientific paper, for instance, is more likely to get published than one that’s poorly written.

What is the Purpose of Popular Science Writing?

Organizations’ goals for creating and disseminating stories and information about science vary.

A CNN news spot hopes to entertain and inform to keep you tuned in to boost the network’s viewership and advertising sales. That university fundraising letter to alumni highlighting the fascinating research taking place at your alma mater hopes to inspire your support for the school and the research with a donation.

While these communications have different goals in mind, many of the same fundamental principles are necessary to communicate successfully in these different venues and towards various goals. Different needs and audiences require variations in messaging, tone, and medium, but at the core, they are variations on a theme.

Popular Science Communication Forms

Science communications come in a variety of packages. Here are just a few of the forms that science storytelling can take, in no particular order:

• News stories from journalistic media outlets
• University press releases organizations
• Industry press releases
• Social media posts
• YouTube videos
• Podcast episodes
• Magazine articles
• Fundraising letters
• University websites
• Presentations at events
• Documentary films

Conclusion

As you can see, the term “science writing” can be applied to many different forms and styles, from a Tweet to a 5000-word magazine article to a feature-length documentary.

But as I noted above, many of the core storytelling concepts apply to all of these different forms and intended goals. My plan is to share those core concepts with the intention of helping you become a science writer or grow your skills if you are already one.

The next article in this series is Why is Science Writing Important?