The Best Science Journalists in 2023

12 mins read

The world of science is continually changing, and every month scientists are uncovering more secrets of the world and developing incredible inventions to improve everyday life. However, sometimes no matter how innovative the invention is, getting that news out can be a challenge. Ask any PR expert, and they will tell you that securing the coverage your story deserves depends on multiple factors combining, but one of the most crucial is pitching the information to the right science journalists. Having a solid media list is crucial, and finding the relevant science journalists can be a very time-consuming process if you do it on your own.

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If you’re searching for the science journalists and their contact details, you can easily find them in PRnews’s publisher list. Its team will pitch the science journalists and distribute your content at a fixed price to relevant publications with the audience you need. 

Anyway, it’s useful and interesting to follow the best representatives of the science reporters. So let’s start my list.

Best Science Journalists Collection:

Corey S Powell 

Science Journalist, New York
Science Journalists, Corey S Powell
Twitter

Corey S Powell is an editor and reporter with a special dedication to all things astronomical and particulate. He spent 15 years working at Discover and was the magazine’s editor-in-chief for four years. Before this job, he was a longtime member of the Board of Editors at Scientific American. Since then, he has been working as an editor at Aeon. He is also the author of God in the Equation (2003), an examination of the spiritual impulse in the nowadays cosmology. 

He also collaborated with Bill Nye on his books Unstoppable (2016), Undeniable (2014), and Everything All at Once (2017), and together they created the Science Rules! podcast. Now he lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

Carl Zimmer

The New York Times columnist
Twitter

Science journalist and blogger Carl Zimmer is the writer for the New York Times weekly column “Matter.” Prior to joining the Times in 2013, Zimmer created “The Loom,” a blog about new scientific research on life, which was honored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academies of Science, and Scientific American. He wrote ten books about science.

Andrew Revkin

The New York Times Journalist 
Twitter

Andrew Revkin is writing The New York Times blog, is an author of “Dot Earth”, about “efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits.” He dedicated his works on the environment for The New York Times for 14 years, reporting about Hurricane Katrina, climate change, the Asian tsunami, science policy and politics, and the North Pole. 

He also was a senior editor of Discover, a Los Angeles Times staff writer, and a senior writer at Science Digest. Revkin earned a biology degree from Brown University and a Master’s degree in journalism from Columbia, and worked as an adjunct professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, teaching environmental reporting.

Ira Flatow 

Host of Science Friday on Public Radio
Twitter

Ira Flatow is the host of National Public Radio’s Science Friday podcast, an in-depth talk show that reaches radio and Internet followers with discussions on science, technology, health, space, and the environment. He also is president of Science Friday, Inc., creator, and president of The Science Friday Initiative, a non-profit organization dedicated to creating radio, TV, and Internet projects that make science popular and “user friendly.” A 35-year veteran of public radio and television, Flatow has worked as host and writer for the Emmy-award-winning Newton’s Apple on PBS and science journalist for CBS This Morning.

Chris Mooney

Climate and Environment Writer at The Washington Post
Twitter

Chris Mooney, formerly an editor at The American Prospect, is a reporter specializing in science and politics. 

Chris Mooney writes about energy and the environment at The Washington Post. Prior to this, Chris worked at Mother Jones, where he wrote about science and the environment and hosted a weekly podcast. Mooney worked a decade before that as a freelance writer, podcaster, and speaker, with his work appearing in Wired, Harper’s, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, to name a few. He also is the author of four books about science, politics, and climate change.

In May of 2020, Mooney and his staff were awarded the Explanatory Reporting Pulitzer Prize for their groundbreaking series that showed with scientific clarity the dire effects of extreme temperatures on the planet.

Elizabeth Kolbert

A New Yorker Staff Writer
Twitter

Elizabeth Kolbert is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.

Elizabeth has been a journalist at The New Yorker since 1999. Prior to this, she worked at the Times, where she was an author of the Metro Matters column and worked as the paper’s Albany bureau chief. Elizabeth’s series on global warming won the 2006 National Magazine Award for Public Interest. 

In 2010, she was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. Elizabeth is also the editor of “The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009” and the author of “The Prophet of Love: And Other Tales of Power and Deceit,” “Field Notes from a Catastrophe,” and “The Sixth Extinction,” for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2015. 

Helen Branswell

Senior Writer, Infectious Disease
Twitter

Helen Branswell joined just launched STAT in 2015 and works as a senior writer there till now. She’s writing about infectious diseases and global health. Helen has been covering bird flu, the H1N1 flu pandemic, Ebola, Zika, AFM, measles. Now she leads STAT’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. In 2018, she was honored by an AHCJ award for beat reporting on infectious diseases and global health. She dedicated the summer of 2004 incorporated at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a CDC Knight Fellow. 

In 2010-11 she was a Nieman Global Health Fellow at Harvard, where she worked on polio eradication. She received the 2020 George Polk Award in the public service category for her articles about the Covid-19 pandemic.

Laurie Garrett

Foreign Policy Columnist
Twitter

Laurie Garrett, author, speaker, and Foreign Policy columnist, worked as a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York for 13 years. In 2018 Garrett led the Anthropos Initiative, which engages at the nexus of the Anthropocene, climate change, and human health. And she is a featured columnist for Foreign Policy magazine and journalist for The Lancet.

Ms. Garrett is the only journalist ever to have been won all three of the Big “Ps” of the journalism awards: the Peabody, the Polk, and the Pulitzer. Her experience contains emerging diseases, epidemics, pandemics, drug resistance, bioterrorism, planetary health, and climate change.

Tara C. Smith

Professor of Epidemiology at the Kent State University College of Public Health
Twitter

Tara Smith continued her education at the faculty of Kent State University College of Public Health after nine years in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Iowa College of Public Health. There she directed the college’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases and achieved the rank of associate professor with tenure. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Toledo, researching the pathogenesis of the Group A Streptococcus, and her B.S. in biology from Yale University. 

Smith’s research is dedicating to zoonotic infections (infections that are transferred between animals and humans). She was the first to detect livestock-associated strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in the United States. Smith has written more than 70 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters and presented her research at numerous national and international platforms, including talks on Capitol Hill on the topic of agriculture and antibiotic resistance. Tara also takes a very active part in science communication and outreach. She is keeping a science blog for 12 years and has written books on Group A Streptococcus, Group B Streptococcus, and Ebola, including Ebola’s Message (MIT Press). She also regularly covers infectious diseases for various online platforms and is a member of the advisory board of the Zombie Research Society.

Dave Levitan

Writer about Science, Climate, Politics
Twitter

Dave Levitan has written about science and the environment for more than ten years, for a wide variety of outlets such as Scientific American, Slate, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Primarily a freelancer, he was published in over 50 mainstream titles, but he has regular features within The Washington Post, New Republic, and Gizmodo. He covers a wide range of topics across science, health, and environment and has also written his own book, ‘Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science.

Conclusion: Science Journalists

As we are continuously attacked by all sorts of content, the problem of this revolution is not the quantity of media content we receive, but how to filter it. My advice is to follow the professionals and real experts in the niche.

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