Afterword

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


Afterword

Paige Jarreau

In September 2014, I wrote a blog post listing over a hundred women scientists’ Twitter handles in reaction to a contentious article in the journal Science titled “The Top 50 Science Stars of Twitter.”1 As soon as it was published, Science’s article, itself a critical response to Neil Hall’s “Kardashian Index,” had prompted a storm of disapproving tweets, many using the hashtag #WomenTweet ScienceToo, and blog posts.2 The “top 50 science stars of Twitter,” it turns out, were overwhelmingly Caucasian and male. But the hundred women scientists were not alone: a large number of scientists and science communicators, both men and women, found Science’s list to be egregiously biased. Many, including myself, took to blogging not only to say so, but also to provide alternative lists and alternative ways of determining who the real science stars of Twitter were.

Even five years ago, the blog-based conversations around Science’s original list would likely have remained within the domain in which they began: the blogosphere. But in 2014, the dynamics and influence of science blogging are quite different from what they were then. Just a few weeks after I published my post “In Response to the Top 50 Science List” on scilogs.com, Science’s deputy news editor John Travis linked to it in a sequel to the original news article.3 In addition, the sequel’s revised and expanded list of top “science stars of Twitter” featured twenty women scientists compared to the original list’s four—all of whom, and many more, had been included in the list I had compiled in response.

This story is meaningful for two reasons. First, it was the first time that my relatively small science blog received the attention of, and importantly a link from, a prestigious scientific publication. The attention from Science was followed by a phone call from a reporter at the journal Nature, revealing that Science was not the only “big name” publication to follow the outrage in the blogosphere. Second, and more importantly, this story is meaningful because it is far from unique. Instead, it points to a broad increase in the influence of science blogs today. For science blogs are no longer relegated to critiquing science journalism from a niche corner of the Internet.4 Rather they are increasingly becoming integral components of science journalism and the science journalist’s work, even if they still serve their traditional roles of science media debunking, criticism, and community building among scientists. In short, science blogging has moved to the mainstream. And with this move has come science blogging’s professionalization—as well as growing professional responsibilities for science bloggers, especially those wishing to break into the big leagues.

Individual science blogs may never reach the readership levels of traditional science news publications, but they may surpass them in their importance to the progress of science journalism and to the growth and diversity of the science media ecosystem.5 Science bloggers are carefully choosing what they cover on their blogs according to shared goals of adding value, advancing the conversation, and writing what’s missing from science news coverage. Individual bloggers’ strategic choices to deep dive into the underreported science stories of the week are not only changing which stories are told, but also having far-reaching implications for science blogging itself.6 The shared goals of science blogging have led to an explosion in alternative coverage of science that has spread far and wide beyond the limited scientific topics and information sources featured in traditional news outlets. Science bloggers have decided they can do much more than play second fiddle to mainstream science journalism, and their efforts are paying off. Nearly every science blogger I have talked to recently has seen one or more of their blog posts picked up by a mainstream news outlet. Science bloggers today are serving as expert sources to traditional news stories, if not breaking stories themselves.

My research on science-blogging practices and values, while yet in its early stages, has yielded many insights that are key to understanding the nature, impact, and promise of science blogging. If you are reading this book, you are likely interested in starting a science blog yourself or improving one you already maintain. At the very least, you are interested in the phenomenon that is science blogging. So one of the most important lessons I can leave you with is that currently, across the sciences, and in every realm of scientific engagement—from bench and field scientists to professors and teachers, from fresh-faced graduate students to funding agencies, and every role and job in between—those participating in science today take science blogs seriously.

As traditional journalists, scientists, and readers alike begin to take blogging more seriously, science blog authors are realizing that they need to be more professional in their blogging practices. Transparency, accountability, and fact-checking are all standards that today sharply delineate the blogs we pay attention to, read, and promote. Sloppy, ranting, or uncareful prose just isn’t cutting it anymore. Blogging networks have become communities of science writers who not only bounce ideas off one another, but also send each other drafts of blog posts for editing and fact-checking. We’ve moved away from the phenomenon of blog posts as back-and-forth online discussion forums to blog posts as stand-alone, rigorous, in-depth, contextualized, even long-form journalistic and editorial pieces. This doesn’t mean that science blogs are any less interactive and discussion-oriented than they used to be, even if much of the “quick and dirty” discussions have moved to Twitter and other social networks. But it does mean that science blogs are being held to a higher standard. Clean interfaces and visual storytelling are also of rising importance to science blogging success, if we measure success by reader and media attention.

The professionalization of what we might call science “blogo-journalism”—an extension of rigorous forms of research blogging—is steadily raising the bar for what blogging about scientific research can look like.7 Professional science bloggers such as Ed Yong at National Geographic and Bethany Brookshire at ScienceNews have become pioneers in creating rigorous, fascinating, and beautifully written blog posts on breaking research. And yet journalists, scientists, and users alike are also taking other approaches to science blogging more seriously than ever before. From science outreach, to education, to public engagement, to strategic communication, to advocacy, to open peer review, to editorial writing, to scientific networking and collaboration, it seems that our current media ecosystem often looks to science bloggers as the first line of voices on important issues in the public and scientific spheres. Science bloggers today are our public intellectuals, our media revolutionaries, our scientific critics, our watchdogs, our specialized journalists. Not surprisingly, then, the reputation a science writer develops through blogging is increasingly following that writer wherever he or she goes on the web. And we expect that writer to act ethically, to write responsibly, to tell us what we haven’t considered, and to get it right.

So what does the changing nature of science blogging mean to you, as you continue developing your skills in the craft? It means that many of the promising aspects of science blogging you have read about here, from getting paid, to getting interactive, to measuring your impact, should be understood in terms of an increasingly professional and evidence-based approach to science blogging. Because today high-quality science blogging is much more than just blogging. It’s journalism. It’s watch-dogging. It’s public engagement. It’s open peer review. It’s science in progress. And the beautiful part is that your personal experience and expert opinion are more important than ever.

Paige Jarreau is a science blogger and blog manager at SciLogs.com, where she authors the blog From the Lab Bench. She has a Ph.D. from the Manship School of Mass Communication, where she studied science-blogging practices for her dissertation. She has been named the 2015—16 Lamar Visiting Scholar at the Manship School of Louisiana State University, where she will begin her postdoctoral work in science communication.

Paige is based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Find her blog at http://www.scilogs.com/from_the_lab_bench, or follow her on Twitter, @FromTheLabBench.

Notes

1. Jia You, “The Top 50 Science Stars of Twitter,” Science, September 17, 2014, http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2014/09/top-50-science-stars-twitter#full-list.

2. Paige Brown Jarreau, “In Response to the Top 50 Science List,” From the Lab Bench (blog), SciLogs, September 18, 2014, http://www.scilogs.com/from_the_lab _bench/in-response-to-the-top-50-science-list.

3. John Travis, “Twitter’s Science Stars, The Sequel,” Science, October 6, 2014, http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2014/10/twitters-science-stars-sequel.

4. Geoff Brumfiel, “Science Journalism: Supplanting the Old Media?,” Nature 458 (March 2009): 274—277.

5. Paige Brown, “An Explosion of Alternatives,” EMBO Reports 15, no. 8 (2014): 827—832; doi: 10.15252/embr.201439130.

6. Paige Brown Jarreau, “Do Science Bloggers Blog about What’s Popular? Or Not?,” From the Lab Bench (blog), SciLogs, June 5, 2014, http://www.scilogs.com/from_the_lab_bench/do-science-bloggers-blog-about-whats-popular-or-not.

7. Cornelius Puschmann and Merja Mahrt, “Scholarly Blogging: A New Form of Publishing or Science Journalism 2.0?,” Science and the Internet (2012): 171—181.