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

Institutional blogging

Karl Bates

Science blogging takes on a whole new dimension when it’s done from inside an institution. Public information officers can bring a valuable perspective to the science blogosphere. Karl Bates, director of research information at Duke University, shows us how science blogging can be used to enhance the reputation of a university and its research.

An institutional public information officer’s wildest, most wonderful dream fifteen years ago would have been the ability to tell campus stories in our own words, reach readers beyond the usual sphere of the campus community, and truly engage that audience in a conversation. Thanks to blogging, that’s no longer a dream. It’s real, it’s affordable, and we can all do it.

Blogging, and social media, give research institutions a flexible, affordable way to share their scene and their science directly with the public. The more relaxed voice and the sense of improvisation that have become a part of blog culture have put an authentic, human face on researchers and the student experience. Students, faculty, administration, and staff can show some passion and personality and be conversational, genuine, and connected to readers.

If you’re coming at this from a magazine or media relations perspective, it’s important to recognize what’s different about the blogging medium—it’s not a lecture, it’s not one-way. Anyone in the world can be part of your audience, and those who view blogs expect to be able to talk back and ask questions, whether through enabled comments or social media.

All institutional research blogs share a few basic needs. They have to be updated frequently to keep the attention and respect of both the readers and the search engines. The writing should be bright and engaging, not turgid and lecturish (hint—keeping posts short helps). And perhaps most important, every post should include something visual. Research institutions have some of the best eye candy anywhere on the Internet. Put it to use!

Staff blogs

Most institutional science blogging is done by a news office staff or by communicators in the various departments: the folks who publicize an institution’s research by writing press releases, newsletters, web content, and so on. A lot of these people are “recovering journalists” who have entered into blogging already knowing how to write a decent story.

Blogging gives these research communicators the remarkable new ability to speak directly to the public, rather than being stuck in the media relations rut. It’s a cheap and easy way to update campus news. It also gives the news office a chance to publish stories about personalities and the scientific process that would never make the cut with reporters but are precisely the kinds of science stories we really need in order to explain to the public what we do.

Most organizations also use blogs as a handy way to publish smaller, more informal news that isn’t worth an external press release or a spot in the campus newspaper or news site, like people winning awards or student accomplishments, small-but-cool findings, eye-candy images from an otherwise impenetrable paper, or events that would be of interest to only a subset of the campus community.

Although there are some very well-read blogs out there that feature magazine-length works, most blogs thrive on being both frequent and brief. It’s good to aim for maybe three posts a week, each shorter than four hundred words (that’s less than one page in Word), and to always have a photo of some sort. This high-frequency approach is more fun than creating longer clips less often, and it results in a much more compelling collection. Have more to say? Post more frequently. (Frequency, as we’ll discuss a little later, builds readership.) Try to get a new photo in every few paragraphs. The collective experience of these posts, when searchable and carefully tagged, creates a mosaic of your campus’s bigger research picture, much like a wall full of snapshots.

There are lots of ways to go about staffing an institutional research blog, but it’s pretty clear that the institution and the bloggers have to commit to regular posts: sporadic and halfway just won’t cut it. Some blogs are run by just one staffer who does it on his or her own, with uneven results. There are plenty of abandoned examples of these. Other blogs are formal, staff-driven publications that are integral to a larger communications strategy.

Representing what might be the outer limit of speed, copy volume, and staffing, the Stanford School of Medicine news office produces a massive and aptly named blog called Scope that publishes three to five times each day at about 250 words a pop. It has more than twenty regular authors and dozens more who contribute less frequently.

When it launched in 2008, Scope was aimed at a general audience, not just the media—which is still today a pretty radical notion for some news offices. “The blog gave us a way to fill a gap and promote our own work,” says Scope editor Michelle Brandt, associate director of digital communications and media relations at the Stanford School of Medicine. But its staff also made the gutsy decision to cover medical news beyond Stanford’s campus because “there weren’t tons of high-quality, medical/science-focused blogs and we wanted to serve as a curated source of medical/research news for our audience,” Brandt says. Scope does short coverage of research findings on and off campus; Q&A’s on timely topics; thought pieces from faculty, students, and even patients; and expert reactions on major medical news. They can also use the blog to offer live coverage of an event.

Multimedia producers Jessica Wheelock and Zak Long in the University of California’s Office of the President hit on the idea of using a Tumblr blog in early 2013 as a way to repurpose some of their video content and experiment with different ways of retelling research stories in general. The U.C. Research Tumblr (http://ucresearch.tumblr.com) currently has more than 130,000 followers, making it the largest social media product coming out of the Office of the President.

Tumblr is a more visual approach to blogging, which plays to one of the strengths of science news. And nearly half of the U.C. Research posts use an animated GIF, which makes the stories really jump off the page. The archive page showing months of colorful and intriguing scientific images dances around like Harry Potter’s newspaper.

The copy with each image, by contrast, is little more than a long caption that refers readers to the original material, whether that’s a news release on the UCLA news site, or animated photos of a science art installation done by a Cal Berkeley alumna. Tumblr hits a different community than traditional blogs or Facebook, attracts a strong audience for its science postings, and has an active culture of sharing and liking.

News officers around the University of California system can upload their content to the site or send it by email for Wheelock and Long to edit and post. That is, rather than have a group blog, they’ve chosen to keep editorial control central to maintain a consistent voice.

When the U.C. Research Tumblr is really cranking, it might carry two new posts a day, but on average the staff aims for one post a day, which takes about two hours of staff time every morning. In addition to curating visual research news that comes in from the news offices of the University of California system, Wheelock and Long also look at what’s popular on Tumblr and elsewhere each day to see if there are any potential University of California ties they might feature. “We began on a trial run and once the followers began accumulating, it became easy to get people on board,” Long says.

Even if you set your sights a little lower and stay within the confines of your campus, the blog can be a hungry beast. Try spicing things up with standing features like a mystery photo of the week or a throwback Thursday item from the archives. Heck, post a ton of photos and just write captions! Have a professor or grad student email serial updates from fieldwork in Antarctica or Kenya or Cleveland. Run a little contest of some sort.

There really are no rules, so you can experiment with different forms of coverage too. The Vector Blog at Boston Children’s Hospital covered an on-campus conference with a neat little roundup: “Five Cool Medical Innovations We Saw Last Week,” at just one paragraph and a small photo each. That’s the blog equivalent of a tasty little bowl of M&Ms.

For big stories, like a discovery in physics that leads to submissions from 1,500 authors from hundreds of institutions, your blog can draw local interest if it focuses tightly on just your person’s role in the bigger event. You might even find that other blogs and social media pick up these posts and give you more news credit than if you had tried to force a traditional mainstream pitch. (And while you’re at it, try live-tweeting the discussion from a room where the people you’re promoting are watching a remote event, like a teleconference from CERN or a Nobel Prize ceremony.)

Polishing your message

Do you need an editor? It’s a good idea to have one if your blog is seen as an institutional product, however informal, coming from your .edu or .org domain. (If you’re .gov, I figure you’re getting reviewed ten times as it is.) Some other person ought to look at a post before it goes live, mostly just to catch embarrassing word deletions or spelling errors, or to make sure the headline is composed of six or seven words that will absolutely sparkle and reel in the eyeballs. The editor will also make sure the post is appropriate to the institution. Give your writers a long leash to maintain their sense of ownership and the authenticity of their voices. But although you want them to be real, sloppiness—or too much self-referential, first-person writing—will reflect poorly on the institution. (And avoid my pet peeve mistake—date your posts and note the author if it’s a team blog.)

The rules are looser in blogs, but there still have to be some policies. Spend some time formulating expectations about appropriate language and content, and spell out any policies your campus might have about photography, unpublished data, and so on. Here’s a good one: student bloggers should always inform their principal investigator, tour leader, host family, or other supervising group that they are blogging. No surprises.

What about source review? For formal press releases that are meant to be the account of record (and are likely to be picked up wholesale by other media), public information officers are expected to run copy by their sources before publication for fact-checking and comfort level. In the interest of timely posts, many research blogs have dispensed with this step. Still, to avoid unpleasant surprises, bloggers should approach a speaker either before or after an event to ask whether they may blog about it, and students should show their profile subjects what they’ve done. Because this is not quite the same level of fact-checking rigor that one would expect of an institutional press release, you should talk about the issue with others at your institution and decide what the ground rules should be in each kind of situation.

Administrator blogs

Blogs from administrators are out there, and unfortunately most are about as compelling as that “message from the President/Dean/VP” you find just inside the cover of your campus magazines. Blogging is a great way to publish, and an even better way to engage an audience in conversation. But sometimes a blog isn’t really the right tool for the content you want to get out there. Just because it’s posted doesn’t mean it will get an audience.

If one of your administrators asks for a blog, have a serious conversation about what a whole year of content would look like—how frequently would new material be posted, how long would the entries be, who’s doing the work? Most importantly: who’s the intended audience and is a blog really the right way to reach those folks? Are you trying to start a conversation and willing to sustain it? Will the content be something the audience wants to engage with and maybe even share with their networks? Then do a little legwork to find analogous blogs being produced elsewhere and ask their managers both what the traffic is like and what they have learned about successful content. It will be time well spent.

Blogging by affiliates

In addition to staff bloggers, consider employing some work-study students as regular bloggers or inviting students, faculty, or staff to offer up one-time guest posts. Student bloggers gain by acquiring some really great content for their portfolios, and the news office benefits by having some very affordable eyes and ears in places that staff can’t get to often enough. Undergraduate student bloggers can provide an authentic view of research on your campus that will be catnip for some of your prospective students. Work-study students cost only a couple of bucks an hour and will essentially be paid to do what an undergraduate ought to be doing anyway: attending brown bag talks, seeing visiting Nobel laureates, or acquiring a deep understanding of a fellow undergrad’s research.

Another source of student copy is frustrated graduate students who want to see if this science writing thing could work for them. Because of the paperwork involved, you probably can’t pay for this help, but a little editing and coaching can prove to be acceptable compensation in some cases. Perhaps some of these students will become regular contributors; a couple might even go on to become science writers.

Casual blog voice can be a struggle for some students, especially as they become Serious Scholars of Science in the upper classes. Successful students have unfortunately been rewarded by their professors for writing ever longer and wordier class assignments, and a blog requires just about the opposite style. So don’t let them write term papers for you—insist on a conversational tone, lay vocabulary, and brevity. Then resist the temptation to overedit student blogger submissions; they’re best when they’re authentic.

Pictures are a must. Make sure that everybody who contributes to the blog understands what is and isn’t fair game (steer them toward Wikimedia Commons and explain Creative Commons) or have them snap smart phone images while they’re at an event or interview. Your bloggers should know the provenance of every image they post—Google image search can often turn up the real story.

Remember your audience

The one sure-fire way to ensure that your blog fails is to be infrequent and unreliable. “We’ve found that post frequency is really important,” says Tom Ulrich of the staff-written Vector Blog at Boston Children’s. When that blog’s writers were called off on another project, frequency fell off to two posts a week and traffic fell with it. (Just imagine what the dean’s three posts a year would be like!) Search engines use frequent updates as a proxy for knowing which blogs are engaging and active. If a human reader sees that you haven’t posted in two months, she probably won’t find it engaging or interesting either.

Think of your institutional blog as just one tool in the communications box. Like everything else you’re producing, the blog’s content should be repurposed into as many different channels as seem appropriate (campus news page, alumni email, admissions marketing, undergrad research office, Facebook, Instagram, and so on). Enlist the help and partnership of campus social media and publications and encourage them to feature your content. A Facebook post or a tweet will drive significant new readers to your blog. Make sure the campus newspaper folks are watching your feed, too—it can be another source of content for their hungry pages. You will see a definite traffic spike on the blog anytime a post is referenced somewhere else on campus.

Unless your institutional research blog is being used as your primary news outlet, however, it is probably not going to set the world on fire. So it’s important to keep the cost-benefit ratio in mind and not get carried away: instead make sure the resources you put into the blog are proportional to your overarching communications goals. If, for example, you have cheap student labor and more than one staffer, it might be reasonable to aim for three to five posts per week during the academic year. If you’re a solo practitioner spinning a lot of plates at once, three blog posts a week would probably eat up too much of your productivity.

A great post for the staff- and student-written Duke Research Blog is something that gets picked up on Twitter or arXive perhaps, and earns more than two thousand clicks. (The all-time champ as of this writing is 3,700.) The blog has about twelve thousand visitors per month, but a given post might garner only a few hundred clicks. Still, it’s offering new and different kinds of research coverage, providing a training ground for students, and building “the long tail” of posts that search engines will pull up months or years down the road. And yes, we sometimes get media pickups from the blog.

No matter how great you thought your old research magazine may have been, there’s just nothing like a blog for reaching new audiences and making them feel truly engaged. And compared with traditional print media, it’s ridiculously cheap to start and operate a blog. I encourage you to give it a try.

Karl LEIF Bates is the director of research communications at Duke University. He’s a former newspaper journalist and current public information officer.

Karl is based in Durham, N.C. Find him at research.duke.edu and the Duke Research Blog, sites.duke.edu/dukeresearch.