Journalistic Science

In perusing my amphibian book, the amphibian book which holds many answers, "Amphibian Declines: The Conservation Status of United States Species," I came across an article entitled: Of Men and Deformed Frogs: A Journalist's Lament, by William Souder.  In it, Souder tells the story of deformed frogs from the discovery in Minnesota by middle school children, through the scientific debates, the discovery of nematode mediated deformity, and the continued debate.  He also tells the story of how it happened in the media.  Basically it was: "Deformed Frogs!", a few articles here and there about the mystery, and then, after the nematode discovery, "Mystery of Deformed Frogs Solved!"  In the literature, the story is not over, but it is for the media.  Why? One reason Souder gives is that results are not published immediately or continuously and thus are invisible to the public media eye.  Because of this lag between publications, science is covered by journalists in a different way than politics and other topics.  According to Souder, reporters and editors see science as a discontinuous story.  Science is a boring process that occasionally produces news. 

And really, this isn't wrong.  A journalist would have to follow a scientist (or group of scientists) for many years before having what one might consider an exciting and news worthy story.  Think about the recent earthquake/tsunami in Japan.  There was hourly coverage, then daily coverage, and now we are at about weekly coverage.  I'm sure the coverage will continue to slow down, but there is a continuous story.  The same when elections come around.  It's all the news can talk about because new things are always cropping up.  Now I think about my project: population structure of cricket frogs in a fragmented landscape. Oooh, exciting I know.  But the process and story is not news worthy week to week.  These would be some headlines.  "PCR Fails! project falls a few days behind," "PCR Failure due to Machine, not Researcher," "PCR Success, Fragment Analysis Fails! Project stalls," "Everything Works! 12 individuals added to data set after week of work," 

Perhaps, my little story is not worthy of new coverage.  But surely, the issues of habitat fragmentation on species persistence is.  In this case, new research is being published every week and a truly dedicated journalist could follow all the articles and come up with one very confusing, contradictory, and complex story to run for the rest of human civilization.  Science has no end and this makes things hard for journalists when the story doesn't stop. But not only does the story not stop, the story the keeps changing, and when journalists rely on published data for their story, the story has huge gaps.

Is there anything we researchers can do (or should do) to make science more journalisticly friendly so that our stories continue in the popular media?