There’s been a rash lately of articles and blog entries pleading with scientists to enter the blogosphere. One disturbing aspect of this has been how many of them have been written by various aspects of the Nature Publishing Group. Three recent articles (here, here and here) all make the case that scientists should start writing blogs because science journalism is on the wane, and that science blogs can fill the void left behind for educating the general public about science. Coincidentally, Nature just happens to run one of the biggest centers for science blogging. Does their desire to have this venture grow and succeed have any influence whatsoever on their opinions about the need for scientists to take on this extra workload? From Nature’s own ethical guidelines:
“In the interests of transparency and to help readers to form their own judgements of potential bias, Nature journals require the authors of most articles to declare any competing financial interests in relation to the work described…”
Interesting how that applies to authors but apparently not to their own editorials.
Now, as to the meat of the subject matter presented–are science blogs going to replace science journalism? I have my doubts, which I’ll explain below. The whole thing reminded me of Clay Shirky’s recent article, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. While I’ve strongly disagreed with Shirky in the past, I thought this was a perceptive piece, and I particularly liked the open-endedness of his argument. Essentially what Shirky says is that things break quickly, then it takes a while for something new to develop to replace those things. There’s not an immediate fix on the horizon for our disappearing newspapers. I like that instead of the usual vague cliches most Web 2.0-proponents spout for suggestions on how to proceed, Shirky leaves the question up in the air and doesn’t try to pretend there’s an obvious answer:
“No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.”
The one caveat I’d add is that the article assumes that good journalism is something our society values enough to preserve, which may be more of an open question. Sometimes things don’t get fixed after a revolution, they get worse. Time will tell.
That said, some thoughts on why science blogging is a poor substitute for science journalism:
1) Journalism is a real profession that requires training and a difficult to master skill set when done properly, as I discussed in this posting. Scientists, and science bloggers are not trained in that skill set. One can certainly make the argument that what passes for science journalism these days is far from ideal, but replacing it with something equally flawed does not strike me as an improvement.
2) Aside from the obvious problems with newspapers’ economic models, the reason journalism is on the wane is the dropping quality. Newspapers have systematically tried to cut costs over recent years, placing economic pressures on reporters. This has resulted in much of what passes for journalism becoming regurgitation of press releases (see Churnalism). Given that many science blog entries are just links to other articles, isn’t this much the same thing? Furthermore, if the nature of so many blogs (often including this one) is to provide links and commentary on original published works, what are bloggers going to write about if those original stories no longer exist? Do away with published news articles about science and you do away with a huge chunk of the subject matter of the science blogosphere.
3) The other big problem with the current state of journalism is the substitution of opinion for factual reporting. As noted here:
“Journalists report much less than they used to, and much less than they should, as the papers have switched over to a reliance on columnists and opinion.”
I can’t think of a single blog that I’ve ever read that wasn’t opinionated. Blogs are more like the editorial page of a newspaper than the front page.
4) As Larry Moran recently pointed out, most scientists are never going to blog. Reading and writing blogs appeals to a limited percentage of people in general, scientists being no different. Start with the subset of scientists deeply interested in communication, education and outreach, and then remove those who don’t enjoy the blogging process and you’re left with science bloggers. Factor in Jakob Nielsen’s 90-9-1 rule (online content is created by 1% of users, 9% occasionally contribute a little, 90% never contribute) and you’re talking about a tiny fraction of scientists. Does this give a balanced view of science? Anyone who regularly reads science blogs can quickly point out some of the general biases and viewpoints held by most of the blogosphere. Remember also that those doing really interesting research, the people you’d most like to hear from, are the least likely to blog. They’re too busy doing that research.
5) The world of science blogging is filled with navel-gazing. I think this is one of the main reasons you don’t see the mainstream of scientists writing or reading science blogs. The vast majority of blog articles I see are either about blogging (or other online communication tools) or about what other bloggers are doing/blogging about. Another big chunk is about life as a scientist. Then there’s a small percentage of posts about actual science. All this is great for building community and feeling a part of a connected group, but I’m not sure how interested the general science reading public is going to be in these cliques.
Phew. I seem to have quite a few rants in me as of late. Bottom line, let’s all keep blogging. It’s fun (at least for those of us who are into it) and no doubt it serves a solid educational purpose and opens lines of communication between scientists and between scientists and non-scientists. But I don’t expect it to become a required activity for most scientists. And let’s be honest about what it really is. The majority of these enjoyable personal diaries and spaces for voicing our opinions are a far cry from well-researched, well-written professional journalism. And I’m with Shirky on this one. New business models and new forms of communication will emerge to continue the process of journalism. We just haven’t seen them yet.
Edited to add–the one point I forgot to add. It’s interesting that the tools that were originally being sold to us as a means for scientists to interact, to troubleshoot techniques and experiments, to find collaborations, are now being pitched as a means for scientists to educate the general public. I always thought the original plans were a bit far-fetched (if every graduate student starts posting daily blog entries about their experiments, who’s going to read them all, let alone offer advice?), and it goes to show you that no matter what your intentions when you create a tool, users often find it better suited for something else. Which I guess explains why a tool created to help college students know their fellow students is now used by grandparents to show pictures of children to their former high school classmates.
March 21, 2009 at 7:42 am
Don’t you think that 0.1% of scientists (estimated from the Jakob Nielsen’s 90-9-1 rule) is actually a HUGE number of people?
March 21, 2009 at 11:40 am
It would be an impressive number, but that’s not really what Nielsen is talking about. His numbers aren’t mean to apply to the general population as a whole. They’re meant to apply to the population of users at a given website. Meaning, for example, that the number of bloggers and regular commenters at a site like ScienceBlogs is about 1% of the total number of users of the site, with 9% occasionally adding something and 90% just lurking. So you’re not talking about the total number of scientists, you’re talking about the small subset of scientists who have an interest in writing or reading science blogs.
And if you look at the numbers, so far that’s a very small subset. ScienceBlogs has 79 blogs. The Nature Network has between 50 and 60 blogs active in the last month. I have no idea how many active commenters each site has, but even if you speculate that there are more commenters than bloggers, you’re still left with estimates of a total audience of 10-20,000 readers for each site (many of whom are not scientists). The total number of scientists in the US alone in 2006 was around 22 million according to the NSF. So even if you’re generous and assume all readers are scientists and you don’t factor in the increase in the total number of scientists since 2006, you’re talking about 0.1% of scientists reading a given blog site, and then you apply the 90-9-1 rule from there.
March 23, 2009 at 7:29 am
David,
On your point about blogs being opinionated: people like Terry Tao and Tim Gowers run superb blogs that are oriented primarily towards the underlying science, not opinions, gossip, or whatever. I’m also trying to do this, with my posts on things like MapReduce, statistical machine learning, and so on. I do some advocacy pieces on open science, which have more the flavour of an editorial, but I also do some pieces on open science which are reporting, and others which are analytical.
March 23, 2009 at 8:29 am
Micheal, yes, there are some blogs that are much less opinion pieces and stick more to the facts of the story, but these are few and far between. The vast majority are either opinion pieces, which are more fun to write which is probably why they’re more common, or link blogs, which rely on the reporting or opinions of others for content. I’m not saying it can’t be done, or that it’s never done, just that it’s kind of rare. Blogging is generally a very personal activity, which to me makes it more like the work of a columnist, rather than a reporter.
March 24, 2009 at 2:11 pm
David,
I agree with you in that scientist bloggers are not science journalists and should be seen as a replacement.
However I think the opinionated nature of most blogs (science or otherwise) is actually a good thing. We scientists are human after all and often it is our desires, hunches and opinions that drive the direction of our research. Provided the work itself is still judged on it’s merits via the peer review process and the science is communicated accurately, I think it’s a good idea to humanize the subject further via blogs and editorial style reporting.
In the end I guess it depends entirely on the goal of the blogging exercise: To communicate the work as dispassionately as possible to avoid biasing the reader; or to engage and incite involvement with the work: positive or negative.
Cheers
Patrick
March 24, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Patrick I absolutely agree that the keys to blogging are things like passion, strongly felt opinions and humor. That’s what makes a blog enjoyable to read and to write. The question here though, is whether this is an appropriate substitution for good journalism. Personally, I think that opinion is playing far too large a role in our news media already, as newspapers and television networks have cut down on reporting and rely more and more on columnists or commentators giving their own slant on things. The editorial page should remain separated from the front page.
So yes, science blogs are a good thing, and a good channel for communication, but no, they shouldn’t be seen as something that can replace dispassionate and accurate reporting.
March 24, 2009 at 11:32 pm
David, when I hear people complaining about blogger bias or twitter banality, my response is that they’re reading/following the wrong people. Sure there are tons of banal toilet-bloggers out there, but as Michael Nielsen points out, there are quite a few smart people, too, and there are more and more every day.
I can’t speak towards Nature’s motivations for encouraging blogging, but I do think they have something to gain from a more efficient peer-review process, and are sufficiently incentivized to encourage anything that looks like it might help. I made a comment on one of the Nature blogs regarding peer-review reform and someone found it and emailed me to ask if they could put it in the print issue as a correspondence, which is suggestive, at least, that someone there agrees with that sentiment. You can read the comment here.
So, yes, science blogs are a good thing, and a good channel for communication, and we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. Dispassionate and accurate journalism from people who studied journalism is all well and good, but they’ve mostly abdicated their responsibility to educate the public on scientific issues of which vaccines, evolution, and global warming are only recent examples. There’s little to be lauded about how professional reporters have covered science recently, so if actual scientists can’t fill that gap, I don’t know who will.
March 25, 2009 at 1:12 am
[…] colleague David Crotty has a rant at Bench Marks wherein he suggests that Nature’s blogging advocacy is just a shallow attempt to get more content for Nature Blogs, and that scientists blogging is just a fad that can’t replace mainstream media coverage of […]
March 25, 2009 at 3:24 am
Hi David,
To my mind blogs are fundamentally a platform for distribution. I don’t understand that there needs to be an opposition between science blogging and science journalism. It seems to me there were more scientists to have more channels into their work, an opinionated, expressive, or data driven blog for instance, then the role of the journalist may be made easier. I should stress the ‘may’ there. There are a host of issues each in themselves deserving of a good decade before they will shake themselves out (activity mining, semantic sorting of information, funding for journalism, time to blog vs quality of contributions, the list goes on), but I digress.
– Ian
(disclaimer, I work for Nature)
March 25, 2009 at 8:52 am
William and Ian,
The question is whether blogging is an appropriate substitute for the kind of professional science journalism that is disappearing if not totally missing from the scene these days. The problem isn’t that the writers have abdicated their responsibility at all. The problem is that the large corporations that own the newspapers and television networks are not interested in producing quality journalism. It doesn’t fit with their economic imperative. They’d rather appeal to the lowest common denominator, to the most people possible, to sensationalism, because that’s what brings in readers/viewers. One of the biggest problems is the ever-creeping dominance of opinion over fact, of columnists over news reporters. It’s less important to be accurate these days than it is to take a position (preferably one that appeals to the demographic of your readers). The other issue is the lack of original reporting, which costs money, and instead the regurgitation of press releases (see here for more on the subject).
And to me, those same phenomena are present in most, if not all blogs. I want to replace the failing journalism system with something better, not more of the same. What’s the difference between a news article that quotes a press release and a link blog that does the same? Not much. What’s the difference between a newspaper columnist declaring their opinions and a blogger doing the same? What’s needed are new models for journalism, new ways to fund professional quality reporting without the heavy-handed influence of corporate ownership (a point where I’m in agreement with Clay Shirky, I want to see more experimentation).
Blogging is generally a very personal affair. A blog with no personality, with no individual style, is a boring blog. That’s why they’re more akin to the editorial pages of a newspaper than they are the front page. Editorial pages are very valuable things. But they’re complementary to news reporting, not a substitute for it.
As for Nature’s motivations, they may truly believe what they’re saying, but they still have a financial horse in the race. If a scientist from Roche wants to publish a study on their latest wonder drug, they have to declare such interests. It doesn’t mean the study is inaccurate, but it alerts the reader to potential bias. All I’m asking is that Nature hold themselves to the same standards as their authors.
March 25, 2009 at 9:51 am
Further fuel for the fire here. Do you want your journalism to include pictures of the reporter’s children?
March 25, 2009 at 10:02 am
And Carl Zimmer give his opinion as well.
March 25, 2009 at 10:08 am
Chris Mooney’s response to Nature is here, and the Columbia Review of Journalism has an article up as well.
March 25, 2009 at 3:50 pm
The CJR article is a good one, and kinda makes the same point Ian does above.
Plenty of people have gotten full time jobs blogging since the last time we had this “blogging is replacing journalism” nonsense going around so Chris Mooney’s “blogging isn’t a real job for anyone” comment just makes him look clueless.
March 26, 2009 at 9:12 am
William, could you send along a list of the plenty of people you cite who are supporting themselves solely by blogging? I’d be very interested in looking into them and seeing the economics of what they’re doing. Recently, Dan Lyons (formerly Fake Steve Jobs) wrote an article about how hard it is to make any money blogging, and his blog was probably the hottest thing in the tech sphere for quite a while. If he can’t do it, I worry that some obscure postdoc blogging about signal transduction in trypanosomes doesn’t stand much chance.
March 27, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Of course, all this discussion helps drive traffic to Nature’s blogs, which is partly the point 😉
While all blogs and reporters follow Sturgeon’s Law (of which Nielsens’s observations appear to be a corollary), I think the good science blogs will be useful adjuncts for the 10% of the science journalists who can actually write well.
The major use I have found for many science blogs is that they provide great fact-checking of what others have written. There is nothing like reading a scientist who can write discuss the latest misbegotten copy of a press release found in the science section of the local paper.
April 14, 2009 at 11:13 am
I find it pretty amazing that so many scientists even have time to blog. Or the interest. It seems that some of them (like Larry Moran, who you mention) are no longer collecting data and haven’t published much in a long time (as in years). So I guess that makes sense that they’d be looking for other outlets for their navel-gazing. Although the worry there is that they are putting out a lot of crap. A lot of what Larry Moran writes is just plain wrong, or at least highly inaccurate, especially when it comes to the history of scientific ideas but also with respect to current thinking on a lot of issues. If his goal is to communicate about science, he kind of messes up a lot. Other bloggers make messes too. On the flip side, does it matter? The blogosphere is such a tiny and distorted reflection of reality, and most of the world is not interested (or doesn’t have access).
April 14, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Good points “just passing”. I agree strongly (and have written elsewhere on this blog) that those you’d most want to hear from are the least likely to ever write a blog. An early graduate student has a lot more time on their hands than a department chair, or someone who is doing groundbreaking cutting-edge research every day.
And it is very hard for most within the science blogosphere to get a sense of perspective on the importance and reach of their writing.