by: Christopher Zara | International Business Times

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the newspaper business is hurting these days, but for science journalists -- ordinary people tasked with communicating extraordinarily complex ideas to a mass audience -- the challenges faced within this waning industry are particularly exigent.  

In 1989, the number of newspapers with weekly science sections was 95. Today, that number is down to 14, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. That’s a big drop, even for one of the fastest declining industries in the country. Figures from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that the newspaper industry as a whole has shrunk by 40 percent over the last decade, so clearly newspaper companies have tough choices to make when it comes to which sections get the ax. But few people agree on where that ax should fall.