Broad exposure in the press, if accurate, is good for science. For an individual researcher, however, interactions with the media are not a straightforward road to prestige. Handled badly, an interview can equally lead to colleagues' raised eyebrows (or worse). Demand for informed comment on geoscience topics is on the rise, with climate change, natural disasters and environmentally damaging accidents increasingly in the public eye. The more Earth scientists understand how the media works, the more likely they are to be able to inject the latest research into the public debate.

To aid communication between science and the media, Nature Geoscience is launching a monthly column by geologist and science writer Axel Bojanowski. The first instalment can be found on page 421 of this issue. Each month, Bojanowski will explore an Earth science story that has garnered press attention. In an accompanying box, he will explain what it was about the science that captured his attention as a journalist, and how the story was received by the audience. Bojanowski has been covering all things geoscience for almost fifteen years, and currently writes for Spiegel Online, the leading German-language news portal.

First and foremost, the column is intended to entertain. But we hope that the accompanying box will additionally offer insights into the transformation of a scientific paper into a piece of news. A journalist's viewpoint of a popular news story should complement and perhaps challenge our readers' more habitual roles as scientists and consumers of news. We hope that some familiarity with the news-making process will help our readers to communicate their perspective more efficiently when the occasion arises.

It is important to us that the geosciences are reported accurately in the mainstream media. To that end, Earth scientists must know how journalists work — and work with them when called upon.