Science blogging: The essential guide - Christie Wilcox, Bethany Brookshire, Jason G. Goldman 2016

Blogging as an early career journalist

Colin Schultz

Starting out as a journalist means building a network of connections, developing a reputation, and gaining the trust of your readership. Blogging has forged a new road to picking up and honing journalistic skills. Colin Schultz, blog editor at Hakai Magazine, provides insight into how blogging can give a head start into the world of journalism.

As a profession, journalism operates on the basis of one thing: trust. This fixation is easy to see: Walter Cronkite, the CBS Evening News anchor, was heralded as “the most trusted man in America.” CNN bills itself as “The Most Trusted Name in News.”

As an early career journalist, building trust goes hand-in-hand with building your reputation—for being accurate, interesting, original, fast, and on deadline. Consistently proving yourself makes editors want to open your emails, or take a chance on a pitch they may otherwise ignore. A solid reputation can convince hesitant sources to open up, and your reputation can help people trust your work even when the story you’re writing seems unbelievable. People may or may not trust journalism, but if you have built a reputation for being honest, they will trust you.

For a budding journalist, blogging can be both a job and a way to build your reputation. The rise of blogging has created a new space for journalists to play in. It’s also spawned a new career option, the “journalistic blogger”—a writer who uses the conventions, styles, and tools of the web, along with his or her journalistic skills and values, to tell new types of stories.

Blogging to get a job

For both the science-inclined journalist and the researcher-turned-writer, there’s learning to be done all around.

When you’re new to journalism you have no reputation—no real reason for anyone to believe you can do what you say you can do. This is true whether you’re fresh from journalism school or you’re a scientist leaving the bench.

Journalism isn’t so much “a thing to be interested in” as a set of skills. Yet to be an effective journalist you need to have both—the curiosity and the passion to learn about the world, and the skills to turn that new knowledge into stories. A Ph.D. in hand may suggest you know your subject matter far better than most, but journalism is a different arena from academia, and it’s one that requires a different set of tools—ones you’ve yet to prove. Can you find an interesting story? Can you conduct an interview? Can you write?

Building your reputation requires demonstrating that you’ve picked up the requisite skills. But how you practice them, and how you show them off, are up to you.

Journalism is one of those rare professions that one can break into without any formal training. There are a few well-worn paths to gaining experience and exposure, such as taking on an (often unpaid) internship or enrolling in a journalism program. Even so, talking someone into taking a chance on you—with no experience and no clips—is difficult.

Blogging has added a new way to develop and showcase your abilities. It’s a way to build a portfolio of work without having to wait for anyone to let you do it. As a blogger you may often write for free, but compared to paying for school or having to move to a big city for an internship, it’s a path worth considering.

It’s also not necessarily an “either-or” decision so much as a “both-and” sort of choice. Blogging can complement other efforts to build your reputation and your journalistic portfolio.

Harnessing serendipity

In his 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, essayist and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduced the concept of “Black Swan events”—rare occurrences with outsized consequences that are impossible to see coming, but easy to explain after the fact.

Black Swan events shake up your life, either for good or for bad, and there’s almost nothing you can do to force them to happen. All you can do, Taleb suggests, is be open to what he calls the “envelope of serendipity,” and to be ready to leap when the opportunity strikes: “Remember that positive Black Swans have a necessary first step: you need to be exposed to them.”

To Taleb this means moving to a big city and going to lots of parties—you never know whom you’ll run into. For a budding journalist it also means being online: between blogging and social media, you never know who will run across your work.

When I was in journalism school I was working on an independent research project on science communication. As part of the project I conducted in-depth interviews with leading science journalists, trying to get their opinions on the state and direction of the field. The work could have easily rotted on my hard drive and in my adviser’s inbox. But I had these great interviews, and I was transcribing them anyway, so I thought, why not throw them on my blog?

I wasn’t really prepared for the attention I received. Soon my work was being shared and talked about not only by the journalists I’d interviewed, but also by others in the field. My project was highlighted by MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Tracker and by Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab. And a post on the project by MIT’s Charlie Petit caught the attention of the hiring manager at a position for which I was applying—leading to my first job as a science writer.

When you’re new and you have no reputation to lose, the positive possibilities of exposing your work to as many eyeballs as you can far outweigh the risks. After all, writes Taleb in The Black Swan: “Many people do not realize that they are getting a lucky break in life when they get it. If a big publisher (or a big art dealer or a movie executive or a hotshot banker or a big thinker) suggests an appointment, cancel anything you have planned: you may never see such a window open up again.”

Each path into journalism offers advantages. School gives formal training and a safe sphere in which to practice. An internship could theoretically transition into a job. But blogging gives you something different: freedom to play and experiment, to try things outside of the strictures of a course calendar or style guide—a chance to do something new, and to get noticed for it.

Blogging as a job

At its core, blogging offers independence and freedom—the freedom to write how and what and when you want. To a certain extent, this autonomy extends even to professional blogging jobs.

A blog, of course, is a medium, not a style. But the way blogging tends to fit into the standard mainstream media ecosystem right now is that blogs are quick hits. They’re the short, pithy pieces that writers use to respond to current events or highlight interesting nuggets. While much journalism is done in a hurry, blogging deadlines are measured in minutes or hours, not days, weeks, or months. And unlike other types of journalism, many of the support systems that journalists are used to working with—editors, copy editors, and fact-checkers—are gone.

As a blogger, ensuring the accuracy of what you’re writing, and the quality of the way it is written, usually falls entirely on your shoulders. As your own reputation grows, or as you come to work for more prominent employers, so too grows the potential for damage when you invariably make mistakes.

Writing in a hurry

The challenge when working as a paid blogger is to find ways to do interesting work that upholds your journalistic commitments while operating under incredible time pressure. There are various ways to tell interesting stories in a brief amount of time. With the benefit of a few years of experience working as a journalistic blogger, I’ve hit on a few strategies that seem to work for me. I’ve used these approaches to write about everything from art and politics to war, food, video games, and natural disasters. They are all particularly suitable to writing about science.

Tell the story around the story

Understandably, news writers put a premium on new things. But every event has context and background. Any important new study is built on previous work. For nearly every story you see in print, as obscure as the event may seem, a similar situation has probably played out at some point in history. Putting the news in historical or situational context is a way to enable people to not just read the news, but also understand it.

“Explainers” and “backgrounders,” stories that describe how we got “here” from “there,” are a powerful form of storytelling that is well suited to blogging. For examples of how well this can be done, look at outlets like the Washington Post’s WonkBlog, the Atlantic’s (now defunct) The Wire, or Vox to see the power of quick-turnaround context.

Combine existing facts in new ways

Working as a journalistic blogger means trying to strike a balance between the competing demands of novelty, accuracy, and time. Working on short deadlines puts limitations on how much research you can do. But the accuracy of your stories is fundamental, and ensuring that is the top priority.

In that vein, another way to tell interesting, accurate stories is to combine existing facts from other people’s already vetted work in new ways. Pulling a single thread out of a long feature here, adding some background from another story there—with a dash of color from your own experiences or a news peg from current events—is a great way to create something new from a handful of old parts.

Relying as a starting point on the work of other journalists or bloggers or institutions—those whom you know and trust to be accurate and who likely have more time for research and investigation than you do—can give you more confidence in the information underpinning your story. But beware the trap of reblogging, which is when a blogger takes someone else’s story, frame, and facts, and simply repackages them. This is the kind of work that gives blogging a bad name. Not surprisingly, it also doesn’t help your reputation as a journalist and doesn’t produce stories that tend to do very well.

Trust your own expertise

Everyone has passions and interests, things they know more about and keep tabs on. By trusting your own expertise or knowledge, you can find the stories that people less well-versed in your pet subject might have overlooked. This works especially well for writing about science—especially if you are a scientist-writer with a strong academic background. In just a fraction of the time it would take someone else to get brought up to speed, you can find, read, figure out, and write about a new piece of research.

This approach is a little bit slower, and a whole lot riskier, than the other two. Unlike writing about history or information already vetted by other journalists, generating stories in this way means that the onus of ensuring the story’s accuracy falls even more firmly on your shoulders. But with care, skepticism, and a heavy use of caveats, it’s possible to write something really new in a hurry.

Being a useful blogger

Blogging is more than just about commenting, snarking, and making lists of animated GIFs. It can be a very powerful medium. Because blogging’s emphasis is on speed and because it offers the freedom to tackle stories in creative ways that fall outside of the norms of traditional journalism, it can give journalistic writers a way to make valuable contributions to the news ecosystem. By finding and highlighting important or interesting stories, explaining and contextualizing discoveries or events, or using their expertise to dig up stories on topics with a niche appeal, bloggers can tell stories that would often have been left untold.

Blogging is not a surefire way to break into journalism. There is no one way to begin a career in any field. Yet whereas school and internships often keep aspiring writers within tight constraints, blogging is all about freedom. It’s a way to try new things, to showcase your skills, and to reap the rewards when you discover something that works. Blogging can be high risk and high reward, but those risks and rewards will be all yours.

Colin Schultz is an editor at Hakai Magazine. He has also written for Smithsonian Magazine and for the American Geophysical Union’s newspaper, Eos.

Colin is based in Ontario. Find him at his website, https://colinschultz.wordpress.com, or follow him on Twitter, @_ColinS_.