The state of journalism in the world today is certainly questionable.  While much of the mainstream media seem content to be court stenographers for the powerful elite classes, every once in awhile, some journalist manages to produce a work of such genius that it needs to be highlighted.

Such is the case with Martin Robbins' Sept 24th 2010 article in the UK's Guardian newspaper, This is a news website article about a scientific paper.  In a stroke of genius, Robbins lampoons every lay-science article ever published in a newspaper by laying out in a very simple form exactly how to write a lay-science article.

The sub-head for the article lays out Robbins' intentions beautifully.  "In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?"  What follows is nothing short of sublime, as he lampoons every major cliche of lay-science writing.

"This fragment will be put on its own line for no obvious reason."

"At this point I will include a picture, because our search engine optimisation experts have determined that humans are incapable of reading more than 400 words without one."

"This paragraph contained useful information or context, but was removed by the sub-editor to keep the article within an arbitrary word limit in case the internet runs out of space."

Follow the link above for the rest of this wonderful article, and start your new career as a lay-science writer tomorrow.  (Hat tip to Heather from Why Don't you Blog for pointing this out to me)