The qualitative literature related to health and science journalism often states that little is known about the perspectives of journalists. This is, in part, because of individual studies being like scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In this article, the authors report the results of a qualitative metasynthesis aimed at reassembling the qualitative literature involving health and science journalists. Comprehensive literature searches gave a data set of 21 studies whose synthesis produced 14 metathemes and four taxonomic groupings. This synthesis is used to show the state of qualitative knowledge and the potential for future research.

The future looks brighter with the promise of biofuels. But with the gaining popularity of these fuels, one thing has become clear: there are unintended consequences that must be assessed before Canada gets carried away with its production.

Science journalists are increasingly confronted with the ability of audiences to comment on science stories, create and share multimedia content, and blog about science. Yet, there is a surprising lack of literature exploring the narrative impacts of such changes on science journalism. To fill this gap, this article draws on the concept of the ‘unfinished’ science story to provide a narrative analysis of story-commentary sets from a Canadian newspaper (the Globe and Mail). It shows how the authority to ‘finish’ scientific narrative now faces: (1) the opening up of science journalism narratives to raw experience; (2) the reframing of issues by audience comments; (3) the emergence of a journalists–audience ‘stress test’; and (4) the heavy existence of negative commentary.