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Steal This IdeaEvery news beat needs something like the KSJ Tracker.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2006, at 5:54 PM ET
Click image to launch the Web site

The hardest-working press critic in the country is Charles Petit, the lead writer at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker blog. If Petit isn't the hardest-working press critic, he's easily the most productive, writing a half-dozen to a dozen entries each weekday critiquing the most noteworthy science news stories. KSJ Tracker, which launched in April 2006, scans the dailies, magazines, the wires, Web sites, and even does broadcasts.

Billing itself as "Peer review within science journalism," KSJ Tracker sifts the Web for the day's newsiest science stories, summarizes the topic, and assesses the work of one or two of the reporters before linking to the other takes on the story. When Petit gets the URL to the press releases behind the science news, he links to them, and he charts his favorite stories on the "Petit's Picks" page. Think of KSJ Tracker as a Romenesko for science scribes.

The site's ambition is to improve science journalism by making it easy for reporters and editors to read and judge the competition. It makes the site sound hopelessly pedagogic, but it isn't. KSJ Tracker's target audience is science journalists, but its creator, Boyce Rensberger, doesn't mind if you use the site as a science-news service.

Rensberger labored in the science journalism trenches for three decades, working at the Detroit Free Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Science 81-84 magazine. In 1998, he took over the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships program at MIT. When an endowment-payouts error in the program's favor was discovered, Rensberger funneled some of the cash to hire Petit, another veteran science reporter, to start Tracker.

"Science journalists are a tiny minority at any given newsroom," Rensberger says, numbering as few as one or two if the beat exists, and he hopes Tracker can create a virtual community in which science journalists look over one another's shoulders. Judging from Tracker's 500 daily hits, the community is big enough to fill a rock club but not a high-school auditorium. Tracker's readers are a silent lot, rarely accepting the invitation to talk back in the site's comments section, a deficiency Rensberger acknowledges.

I exploited KSJ Tracker three months ago after reading its skeptical take on press coverage of new tobacco findings by the state of Massachusetts. The item, written by Rensberger, who occasionally substitutes for Petit, prompted me to do additional reporting and write my own press critique about how the AP, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS News, and ABC News covered the story.

KSJ Tracker is such a good idea that other foundations and universities should pinch the idea. The Shorenstein Center could track and critique political coverage and the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship could blog about the best and worst financial journalism. Additionally, we could assign Morehouse College to do the same for sports journalism, the Nieman Watchdog for muckraking, and Johns Hopkins for international news coverage.

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Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
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