July 2, 2026

In praise of Research Fortnight

I was saddened to discover yesterday that Research Professional News, an independent publication that reports on research policy and funding in the UK is to close down. 

When I studied journalism at Polytechnic of Central London we barely discussed trade press and all of us had our sights on jobs in national news – then a thriving business employing many journalists. But soon after college I attended a glitzy press award where several of the winners were specialist magazines I had never heard of. Some issues even seemed to have rival titles, sitting at different dinner tables and clearly competitive. Pulse v Health Services Journal. Inside Housing v Housing Today. It dawned on me then that many of the big stories and scandals in housing, education, health etc. were unearthed by these outlets before hitting the main national news. This made sense of course – imagine a whole group of specialist reporters with the resources to focus on one sector day in and day out. This was proper scrutiny of key sectors of our national life, and I remember understanding then that these media outlets are a crucial part of the independent press we need for a healthy democracy.

Many years later when I entered the science world I looked around for the magazines that did this kind of scrutiny of the science sector. While THES covered science as part of its reporting on universities, and magazines like New Scientist provided more in-depth reporting of science news, Research Fortnight (as it was then called) was the only title focussed almost exclusively on the people and organisations that run science in the UK.

‘We don’t do science funding’ was how one broadsheet journalist responded to me offering a story on cuts in my early days. With a few exceptions, including Pallab Ghosh at the BBC and others at the Guardian and FT, that unwritten rule has prevailed. Occasionally funding stories have broken through. When Paul Nurse told a room of science reporters at the SMC that you would have to be a neanderthal to cut the science budget in advance of Cameron’s Comprehensive Spending Review in September 2015, it was picked up everywhere, with the tabloids delighting in using pictures of our extinct human relatives. More recently the news that the Treasury was trying to include the UK’s annual fee for accessing Horizon Europe in the budget allocation for science – a story broken by RPN – was picked up by nationals who were being briefed by the science establishment that this would be a disaster. The furious lobbying and national media interest helped see off the threat.

This lack of interest has always struck me as slightly odd. Science may not be as high on the agenda of public or policy makers as housing or transport but it’s no small endeavour. A quick check on how much the British taxpayer spends on UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) tells me it’s £9.2 billion this year and will be £10 billion by 2030. That’s a hellava lot of public money, and I’d say there is a significant public interest in it being well spent. This lack of investigative reporting on science has always intrigued me. At the World Conference of Science Journalists back in 2009, I ran a session asking, ‘Why no Boat Rocking journalism in science?’ at which Ian Katz, then senior editor at the Guardian, conceded that none of the Guardian’s many award-winning investigations had focused on science and he had previously never given that much thought.

All this made Research Fortnight even more important. The response to the news of the closure yesterday shows that many of us have relied on it for news about what is really happening in science policy and funding. I recounted to younger colleagues some of the many stories RPN broke or covered in detail that barely touched the sides of national news. The long-awaited Horizon deal, the ODA science cuts, and the impact of Trump’s actions on UK research. More recently it was RPN who broke the story of the STFC cuts that has sent the UK physics community reeling and brought to attention that the MRC had paused its core funding schemes. Not all the stories are about funding, and many made uncomfortable reading for the science community, including political interference in the Alan Turing Institute, the bullying investigation into a head of a research council and the row at the Royal Society over whether to remove Elon Musk’s fellowship. Noone else paid as much attention to every twist and turn of the outrageous incident in 2023-24 when Michelle Donelan, the Secretary of State for Science went public on a letter demanding that UKRI take immediate action against members of an advisory committee who she claimed had posted messages on social media that showed support for Hamas. When almost everyone else had forgotten about this incident it was from RPN that I first learned that the cost to the taxpayer for Donelan to settle a libel action from the scientists she wrongly accused of supporting terrorism was close to £60,000 by the time legal fees were fully accounted for.

But it would be wrong to think that RPN has only ever been a thorn in the side of the science establishment. Anyone who received this news with a sigh of relief should consider where they now go when they have an important story on funding or policy that is unlikely to get any pickup in national news. Out-with its role in asking tough questions, it is where I go to read about new strategies launched, significant funding announcements, interviews with newly appointed leaders, and the record on science (or lack of it) of new ministerial appointments. I have often approached RPN to take Opinion pieces on my efforts to fight off various government attempts to restrict academic freedom including the anti-lobbying clause and the changes to the Civil Service Code. When I and others succeeded at getting Sue Gray to change the wording of the pre-election guidance to clarify that it does not apply to the day-to-day commentary of independent scientists, I knew the best place for that was RPN. Sue signed off that piece as accurately reflecting the spirit of the change and to this day I send it out before every general election to embolden fearful comms officers.

This is not to say that RPN never got it wrong and there were times I found myself unable to defend lazy reporting to exasperated scientific leaders. But these were few and far between and often not helped by a lack of willingness of those same people to speak to the journalists or correct the record. The more enlightened UKRI and DSIT insiders are well aware of the value of RPN. As one former UKRI comms officer put it on hearing the news yesterday “the scrutiny is often a pain in the a**e, but I’d always have rather had it than not. And it sometimes made us better.”

In a blog on my chapter on media in the RS’s new report on public engagement, I made the point that the scientific community does not have to be a passive spectator in the decline of high quality, reliable science journalism. We have money, influence and innovative people. This might be the end of RPN, but I really hope some in science recognise what we could be losing here. We can ill afford to lose the scrutiny, the independent reporting and the first class science journalists that look set to lose their jobs. I really hope someone can step up to save something from the ashes.

This blog contains the thoughts of the author rather than representing the work or policy of the Science Media Centre.