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

From page to pixel

A personal history of science blogging

Carl Zimmer

The Internet is relatively young, and science outreach on the Internet is even younger. Carl Zimmer, an award-winning author, journalist, and blogger at National Geographic, discusses the history of the blogosphere, implications for the future, and his own transition from traditional journalism to becoming one of the world’s best-known science bloggers.

Today blogging is one of the standard ways in which we tell the stories about science. This state of affairs is relatively new. For those of us who entered the science-writing world back in the twentieth century—as opposed to the twenty-first—the memories of a life before science blogging are still fairly fresh. Understanding the origins of science blogging can help us do it better now, and to push it into fruitful new experiments.

My own memories of life before science blogging start around 1990, when I got my first job in the journalism business—as an assistant copy editor at Discover. At the time, it was one of the biggest of the many magazines focused on science. It had a robust circulation of over a million readers. And it had no connection to the Internet whatsoever.

In that format, science writing had a simple one-way flow from writer to reader. A writer would research a story and write it. An editor would edit it, a fact-checker would make sure it was accurate, a designer would lay it out in an upcoming issue, a printer would produce millions of copies of the magazine, and truck drivers and ship captains would deliver it to the world.

In this one-way arrangement, it was rare for us writers to hear from our readers. Sometimes someone would sit down with pen and paper and write out a letter to the editor. But we had little sense of our audience. We had no way of knowing how many people read a given story, or how many of them talked about it with their friends.

The technology that would turn our journalistic world upside down already existed at the time. Though journalists had little idea that the Internet even existed, scientists had been using it since the 1970s. I stumbled across the Internet in 1994, when I was interviewing a scientist about his work on simulations of black holes. He explained to me that I could see his simulations on my own computer—and he wouldn’t have to send me a CD-ROM. I loaded Mosaic software onto my computer, and it carried me, to my astonishment, to the scientist’s web page. It was as if I had been hurled from New York and landed in a chair next to him in his office in Urbana, Illinois, thousands of miles away.

Even as I came to appreciate the web, it would have been hard to imagine then that my own stories would someday jump into the screen, that most people would read my work online rather than in print. The modems were too slow, the computer memories too infantile, the monitors too pixelated.

As a science writer, my own transition to the Internet was motivated by practicality. In 1999, I left Discover to become a full-time writer of books and articles. I wanted a place online where I could display my magazine articles in order to persuade editors that I could write for them. I also wanted to post information about books I had written and links to places where people could buy them. I discovered that no one had yet claimed carlzimmer.com and started to build a website. The site was useful, but it was also a lot of work. The primitive software of the day meant I ran a huge risk each time I wanted to make the slightest change. It was like replacing a jet engine at thirty thousand feet.

I was therefore amazed to discover that a few people had websites that they updated every day—and some of them were writing about science. The earliest of those science writers I can recall include Chris Mooney (writing on science and politics), Razib Khan (human genetics), P. Z. Myers (evolution and development), and Derek Lowe (drug development). Their topics and politics varied enormously, but they all shared the same lively, personal style.

The medium they used also gave them a power that print could not offer. As soon as something happened in the news, they could write a piece of commentary and post it within hours—or even minutes. Publishing was as simple as pressing a key. The bloggers, as they called themselves, could incorporate photographs easily into their text. To back up what they said, they could link to original sources. And they offered readers an opportunity to respond, by providing comment threads.

Intrigued, I started playing around with blog software. I was attracted to blogging because I wanted to write about things that weren’t very welcome in print publications, and I wanted to write in ways that didn’t fit their style. Because I was my own publisher, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to write what I wanted. In 2003, I launched my blog, which I dubbed The Loom (an obscure reference to a line in chapter 93 of Moby Dick). It’s been an intimate part of my writing life ever since.

In hindsight, I can see that my experience was just a small part of a turbulent chapter in the history of journalism. Print publishing was beginning to slide. In the 1990s, magazines and newspapers were so lucrative that corporations gobbled them up. Debts soared on the assumption that the good times would never end, and that print would always reign supreme. The New York Times spent over a billion dollars buying the Boston Globe, reportedly because they had the best color printing presses in the country. Color printing, not the Internet, was the future of journalism.

And then the crash came.

Corporations tried to pay off their debts by squeezing bigger profits out of their publications. When the profits weren’t forthcoming, they cut costs by slashing staffs. Special science sections vanished from newspapers; science writers were laid off. Editors became anxious about stories that wouldn’t grab as many people as possible. No essays about altruistic slime molds, please.

That editorial fretting didn’t stop newspapers and magazines from losing huge numbers of readers, many of whom shifted to the web. Meanwhile, the advertising that had buoyed magazines and newspapers began to evaporate. Classified ads migrated to Craig’s List. Luxury ads also moved online. Sadly, most print publications didn’t give serious thought to a better way to cope with the changes in journalism: by investing in good websites. For years, their websites were little more than copy-paste dumping grounds for their print edition.

Like other science writers, I did my best to tread water. I wrote freelance articles for magazines and newspapers, figuring out the sorts of stories that worked for each outlet. When I needed to write for myself, and for like-minded readers, I blogged.

The greatest pleasure I got from blogging was surprise. I would delve into strange corners of biology—a wasp that turns a cockroach into a zombie in which it can lay its eggs, for example. And I could see that people really did like to read about such stuff—and share it with their friends. The analytics for my blog showed me that I had readers from all over the world. I could see how other bloggers linked approvingly to the zombie post. Eventually the wasp ended up as a villain in a video game. A band posted a video on YouTube in which the members sang about the wasp’s attack as a metaphor for a romance gone especially bad. I could see the unpredictable ways in which the things I wrote spread through the maze of culture.

Blogging also let me jump right into the biggest science news stories of the day. In 2005, a judge in Pennsylvania was hearing a case brought by parents complaining that creationism—in its latest form, “intelligent design”—was being slipped into their local school. Judge John Jones delivered a devastating rejection of intelligent design and his decision was posted online. I grabbed a copy and read through it, blogging as I read. As I updated my post, readers were having their own discussion in the comment thread, making collective sense of this historic moment.

I sometimes responded to creationists on my own blog. Traditional publications didn’t see such responses as part of their mission. I disagreed, and used my blog to explain why creationist claims were wrong. By the time I had finished explaining how scientists know that the world is not just six thousand years old, I had explained geochronology—real science.

For the first few years of my experiments with blogging, some of my more distinguished colleagues in science journalism were baffled that I was “wasting” so much of my professional time. I was frustrated sometimes trying to explain why I enjoyed it so much. I couldn’t get them to see the possibilities that blogging—both the software and the cultural practice—opened up for science writing. They joked about how I was going to end up living in the basement of my mother’s house, blogging in my pajamas.

There’s a hostility laced into such jokes. Many journalists saw themselves as professional gatekeepers, who used careful judgment to decide what kinds of science should become part of the public record, and to decide how their stories should be told. Now anyone could launch a blog and make a mess of things.

Professional journalists didn’t just view bloggers as degrading the craft. They also viewed bloggers as an existential threat. By the mid-2000s, traditional science journalism was in a dire state. The pay that writers could get for their journalism fell. Instead of painstakingly researched investigations, editors seemed to favor superficial, quick blurbs—and lots of them. In addition to their print editions, these editors were now trying to fill their websites with what they now referred to as “content.”

Somehow, the bloggers must be to blame. They had flooded the market with reading material—material they had produced not for money, but for the sheer pleasure of blogging. They undermined the work of real science journalists, and the whole edifice collapsed.

The idea that some pajama-clad basement-lurkers could destroy a major sector of the media is absurd. The real reasons for the collapse of traditional science journalism are more complex, and they stretched back long before the rise of science blogging in the early 2000s.

Today, things have changed far beyond what I could have imagined when I started out in journalism. From 1950 to 2000, American newspapers tripled their revenue from advertising, to $48 billion a year. Since then, revenue has crashed to $22 billion—a level not seen since 1950. Today there are fewer people employed by newspapers than in 1947.

Science reporting has been utterly transformed by this industry-wide change. During the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. newspapers set up new science sections at a steady clip until they reached a peak of ninety-five. Since 2000 most of those sections are gone—only seventeen remain. Many prominent science magazines, like Omni and Science 80, shut down.

These statistics are an ugly reality for people whose mortgage depends on the economics of journalism. But they are also a distraction from the mission of science journalism. We should judge the success of science journalism not by how many people it employs, but by how well it supplies readers with the stories of science. And by that standard, it is a huge success.

Traditional media have finally taken the Internet seriously. They see their websites as the core of their operation, where they can deliver news quickly and efficiently. Readers can now sit down with a tablet and read about science in newspapers and magazines around the world, from the Guardian in England to the Jakarta Post in Indonesia. A quick Google search can deliver even pre-Internet articles from digital archives.

Newspapers and magazines have stopped looking at blogs as the enemy and have started seeing them as an opportunity. They now realize that they can use the format to report quickly, to give their writers a more personal presence, or to build a community of readers through forums and comment threads.

Science blogging, I would argue, has become so mainstream that the term is becoming obsolete. As I write this chapter in 2014, there’s an ongoing boom of new, innovative news operations—places like Vox, Fivethirtyeight, Matter, and Mosaic—that put science at the center of what they publish. These publications are purely digital and they use innovative ways to display information (interactive maps, for example), while hosting writers who don’t have to hide their voices or their obsessions. They follow the tradition of blogging without feeling the need to use the word.

Those who are starting out in science writing would do well to understand this history. Some scientists set up blogs to emulate their scientist-writer heroes. They may envision themselves as the next Stephen Jay Gould or Lewis Thomas, for example. But a scientist writing essays in 2015 is doing something fundamentally different from a scientist writing essays in 1975. Scientists like Gould and Thomas could take advantage of the one-way, bottlenecked flow of information, publishing their pieces in, respectively, Natural History and New England Journal of Medicine. Today a blog post will not march off and find its own audience, because the structure of publishing has changed so much in the past few decades.

Bloggers today may not have the special platforms that Gould or Thomas had. But they have many, many consolations provided by digital publishing. Most important, they can use their new tools to bring innovative, meaningful writing about science to desktops around the world.

Carl Zimmer is an award-winning freelance writer. He has written more than a dozen books about science including Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea and Parasite Rex, and has written for many outlets, including National Geographic, Wired, and the Atlantic. He writes a weekly column for the New York Times, and his blog is hosted by National Geographic. He also lectures at Yale University.

Carl is based in Connecticut. Find him on his website at http://carlzimmer.com or follow him on Twitter, @carlzimmer.