If I had to author an article in the New York Times, there are a few elements to make it appeal to a broader audience while still being scientifically sound. One of the things everyone would do is simplify the information from the primary source. I think that sometimes this can be dangerous because the information from the primary source can be oversimplified. This could cause the facts to be distorted which can create some fallacies in the report. Other than simplifying scientific jargon, a good representation of scientific research in a popular report is providing data with visual aides. This is a good way to simplify data, but not distort it.

 

The whole theme here is oversimplification. I think that is something that authors of popular reports about science need to improve upon. However, I think that has more to do with the authors’ backgrounds than the authors themselves. If the author has a degree in the discipline that they are writing in, they most likely will already know how to simplify the information is the primary source, but authors who don’t have degrees in the discipline they write about may not have a working knowledge of the topic and therefore may dumb down the facts too much.