Ingelfinger and the reporting of upstream journalism are not really related. Despite the existence of Ingelfinger, there is lots of imaginative, creative, long-form science journalism already out there that describes work yet to be published and draws the reader into the excitement of the subject and the grit and messy details of the process of real science and real policy-making around scientific issues. Not just from specialist outlets either – but usually from outlets that support longform journalism.

Alice Bell’s post on ‘moving science journalism upstream’ niggled me because – as much as I agree with her that what she’s so persuasively advocating is a good idea – she didn’t recognize the upstream journalism that already existed. I could immediately rattle off tens of examples of the genre that she seemed to be groping for.

However, I assume that she was probably thinking mainly about daily newspapers, where writers do have to write a lot of material, fast, and so rely heavily on the existing embargo system. Kudos to those newspaper/daily website journalists who still manage to report round the journal press release churn.

But Ingelfinger doesn’t really come into this, I don’t think. It may stop you reporting results directly from a conference – because the scientist is reluctant to speak until work is published. But you can still talk to the scientist, keep that information, and write a terrific detailed article whenever the work *is* published.

The bottleneck for more ‘science journalism upstream’ articles is mainly a shortage of time and financial support for journalists to write longform pieces that require detailed work, I think – not Ingelfinger.

This will almost certainly mean we’ll be late to the eLife stories compared to where we might be if there were an organized embargo system. But (like Ivan noted for Reuters) we’re already late to a lot of embargoed stories. We just rely on trying to do a better job and reaching audience that don’t otherwise carefully track science news.