How the hell did you get here?

Hello human.

I’m Jackson Ryan and I was once the Science Editor at CNET.com, a great website that became a pretty awful website for a while there. I also worked as a science and tech reporter at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I am a freelancer now and the person who writes this newsletter.

In my daily life I come across a lot of science writing, comms and journalism — I am what the children call “terminally online” but for science — and a lot of it is quite good but some of it is quite bad. Some of it is even really bad. Bad science writing and reporting can be really damaging for scientists, for the media and for institutions built around research.

I started this newsletter to unpack some of the more incredulous science reporting you might see and explain how it came to be. I believe that doing this helps you understand the worlds of science and media better. It started strong, took a long hiatus while my job collapsed around me and now its sort of operational again.

That’s what this newsletter is all about and that’s why I hope you’ll subscribe.

Before you go, take this with you

You can find me online @dctrjack or on Mastodon, if that’s more your speed.

Obviously, you can also respond to any of my stories via email and that will come straight to my inbox. If I get something wrong, let me know — that’s what science is all about — but I don’t tolerate dickheads.

You don’t have to pay a cent to get the content here at No Breakthroughs but you might have to pay for some content one day. There are some stories that just might need a paywall.

Thanks for reading.

The cover photo for No Breakthroughs is from “Henrique Alvim Corrêa’s Illustrations for The War of the Worlds (1906)”
The logo for No Breakthroughs is from Émile-Antoine Bayard's Illustrations for Around the Moon by Jules Verne (1870)