Context needed in reporting

Two headlines a month apart on the BBC news website, one of the world’s most respected sources for serious news

The older one, “Schizophrenia: talking therapy offers ‘little benefit’” is based on a summary of 50 randomised trials.

The newer one, “Schizophrenia: Talking therapies `effective as drugs‘”, is based on a report from a pilot study of 74 people that compared cognitive behavioural therapy to no treatment, not to drugs.  It doesn’t mention the earlier story.

Ezra Klein, who’s one of the United States’ top political and economic journalists, has just left the Washington Post to start a new web-based publication.  He writes

New information is not always — and perhaps not even usually — the most important information for understanding a topic. The overriding focus on the new made sense when the dominant technology was newsprint: limited space forces hard choices. You can’t print a newspaper telling readers everything they need to know about the world, day after day. But you can print a newspaper telling them what they need to know about what happened on Monday. The constraint of newness was crucial.

The web has no such limits. There’s space to tell people both what happened today and what happened that led to today.

For health and science stories there should be room for less newness and more context even on paper, since only a tiny minority of the most interesting stories are covered. But even if you can’t explain why today’s headline is different, you can at least notice that it’s the opposite of what you said a month ago.

[update: I lost the credit to Dean Rutland and Ben Goldacre for the picture in editing. My apologies to them.]