The following is a guest post from WIRED Science blogger Aaron Rowe. Aaron is a biochemistry graduate student at UC Santa Barbara (and a lovely, lovely person), whom I met at last years NC Science Blogging conference. On the WIRED Science blog, widely read by both scientists and the general public, Aaron writes about all things related to chemistry.
Aaron in lab
On the heels of Science Blogging 2008, his most perfectly-timed guest post addresses the differences in the ways that science journalists and science bloggers present science to the public, and the ways in which both could improve.
Reporters Must Be Weaned from Press Releases, Bloggers Should Learn to be Poets
Science news, for the most part, has degenerated into a ridiculous charade. Rather than conducting thorough investigations, many reporters simply rewrite press releases, which were written by press officers, who have a vested interest in making their employers look good. Far too often, the result is an entertaining tale that is neither thoughtful nor critical nor informative.
To break from that mold mainstream science bloggers, and reporters, would do well to take some cues from researchers who write for their peers.
The scope of mainstream science journalism is terribly narrow. Far too many stories are framed around big breakthroughs, amusing trivia, and
earthshaking discoveries. We need more coverage of incremental accomplishments, seemingly wry subjects, the odd and often amusing behavior of scientists, and arcane epistemological debates.
Science blogs, written by researchers for researchers, are a wonderful solution to that problem. They defy the appalling conventions of major media organizations and give exposure to worthy topics that are neglected by the press. Some were meant to entertain, while others exist to inform. Most lie somewhere in between.
Websites like reddit and digg allow niche blogs to reach a wide audience. In theory, they could democratize what we read. But mainstream science news — taken from press releases — has dominated their front pages quite effectively.
Nearly every single topic that appears on a niche science blog could appeal to a wide audience, if they are packaged properly. But many of those websites are thick with jargon, and they do not stop to explain things that a lay audience may not understand. Even worse, some of them are plagued by crass humor, profanity, name dropping, lots of jargon, and very little structure — things that would never fly at a big news outlet.
Each blogger must decide where to set the balance between carelessly written, whimsical, fun posts and serious reporting — presented in an organized fashion. For some, it is a form of catharsis, and for others, it is an academic pursuit. In a perfect world, all of them would carefully craft their prose and give professional journalists a run for their money.
Epilogue
If you have a science blog, and want to polish your writing, pick up a copy of The Art and Craft of Feature Writing, On Writing Well, A Field Guide for Science Writers, Follow the Story, and The Elements of Style, but don’t take everything they say as the gospel. Read lots of great writing, from the Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Wired, Discover, Scientific American, and Best American Science Writing books. Study the structure of each article. Ask everyone under the sun for feedback and advice — some of it will be bad.
Last updated:
Friday, 05 Sep
2008 - 18:51 UTC
This reminds me, did we ever have that “manners” discussion at Sci Blogging 08 that we intended to have? I don’t think so, in any focused sense. It’s an important issue, I think, not least in order for most scientists to see some value in “bothering to blog”. (I am not getting very far in persuading my targeted senior scientist to blog. I am considering the threat of divorce!)
This is great, thanks!
As you’ve outlined, a key problem with bloggers is that they often don’t have the writing skills of mainstream journalists, which makes their posts a challenging read and limits their reach.
I’m sure the resources you recommend will help, I’ll make sure to check some of them out myself.
Maxine – No, we didn’t address blogging style of blogo-manners, did we… That would have been very interesting. Some science blogs are too casual and too whiny in tone to be of use to the general public – I am as, if not more, guilty of this as anyone. However, I also don’t think that all science blogs need to target the public – scientists who blog for other scientists are equally important and interesting (I hope!!), though they are not the focus of Aaron’s post. I digress.
I have faith in your powers of persuasion!
Helen – Absolutely. Scientists are very used to writing for and speaking to a very limited pool of people with similar knowledge and background, and therefore feel no need to decode abstract terms and huge acronyms. That’s a big barrier to public understanding science from a scientist, necessitating the use of an interpreter, or journalist. If scientists themselves could translate science into English, we would be far better off. Beyond jargon, scientists simply are not taught to write well, or even coherently!
Anna, your blog is extremely unwhiny. It is both unwhiny in its own right and by comparison with certain other blogs that shall Not Be Named.
You certainly cover some of the challenges and tribulations of life as well as the pleasures, but this is different from whining in my opinion. Now, I am sitting at home and can’t log into the journal I work for. I could whine about that for a while, but I will spare you – however, that would certainly show you what a whine could be like when one really gets going!
Very interesting post from Aaron – and thanks for the book recommendations.
Anna – very nice to meet you, albeit briefly, at the conference!
Thanks for the great blog post Anna and Aaron. In the discussions at and after the science blogging conference we didn’t talk much about how science blogs can be better promoted to a wider audience. You mention digg and reddit, we have blogging networks such as Nature Network and scienceblogs.com, Maxine writes a column in Nature, but is there something else we can do?
Conference reports, as discussed previously, seem to be a good format for the medium of blogs. The FF livebloggingn of SciBlog08, Cameron’s Southampton workshop and Science21 are good current examples. As is Bob O’Hara’s current blogging at Nature Network of an ecology conference he’s attending in York – a couple of really nice, digestible scientific posts (so far).
Is there a way to use the conference/blog format in this regard?
This is a big, big problem. Some journalists I know rail and fume against the culture of embargoed press releases, and they may have a point (not that I agree with them). My beef is that the people who write press releases are often untrained in science, or even in writing, and often come from the vague murk known as ‘PR’. There is an attitude in some quarters that writing press releases is a task that can be devolved to the most junior or least experienced writer in any outfit, or indeed to anyone who just fancies ‘having a go’ — as if getting the right message out to people, in a targeted way, is a task that many people think beneath their dignity.
A lot of the University press release writers I have come across seem to be ex-journalists, though not often with science backgrounds. However, the things we (academics) usually get told by the PR / media relations people are:
“The first line MUST persuade the journalists it’s worth reading the rest, so the “hook” has to be in there"
(And, by implication, the first line must “big the story up”, I would say)
And: “Keep it straightforward, light on caveats and nuanced messages”
(Don’t zone them out with the complicated stuff)
As Aaron also said in the original post, the press release writers also have a vested interest in promoting their employers, who pay their wages. I wouldn’t say this colours the message that much in my experience (beyond what I’ve already said above) – and usually the scientists have a chance to comment on the release – but it is clear that the major driver of the way the press release is written is “write something that will get read and turned into a story”. The Univ PR guy’s “performance target” is the number of stories they get into the media.
Tim Radford said something that summarized this well a few years back: paraphrasing, he said that, for a scientist, “the point of writing was to be right (i.e. correct)”, while for a journalist “the point of writing was to be read”. Clearly PR folk are almost by definition on the “to be read” side of this divide.
An interesting aspect of science blogging, which I guess is part of what Aaron is saying, is that scientists blogging might hope to be both right (or “not inaccurate”) AND read (since bloggers hope someone is reading their work!). (Personally I would love to know how to be more read…)
For a lot of bloggers (like me!), a blog is rather a personal mish-mash of different bits and pieces, so I doubt many individual bloggers will end up being “the science blogger you read for the facts”. Perhaps the group blogs are a potential solution to this: they can have a theme (e.g. “the reality behind media neuroscience stories” but could have many writers. An example of this in the “debunking Alternative Medicine” arena is the group blog Science-based medicine.
Stephen – Great pleasure meeting you as well! Hope we will have the chance to meet again at next year’s conference.
Martin – I think there are two equally important problems here. One is publicizing science blogs in places where more non-science people may come across them (a column in a scientific publication may not be the answer – a column/blog on the publisher’s webpage, on the other hand, is a better candidate). The second is making the content of the science blogs more accessible. There are tons of science blogs that I, as a scientist, cannot hope to understand. And I think that’s fine. If a science blogger wants to appeal to the general public, than the resources Aaron listed above are a must – they outline how to write well for people outside one’s field. So there is a need for more of these types of bloggers, and a need for bloggers to tune their style to their desired audience.
Maxine – If only more scientists would blog their conferences!
Henry – So very strange that press releases would be considered a low priority task! They seem absolutely crucial to me. Where then does this attitude come from? It seems really destructive and self-defeating to assign the task of disseminating new science to someone unqualified to do it. Crazy.
Austin – I think I would have a great deal of trouble making the transition to science journalism. Science very rarely has concrete answers that can be easily and neatly summed up, as you say. Journalists excel at looking past all the caveats to the bigger message. They also have to be impartial and keep their opinions off the page. That is the exact opposite of what bloggers do. Successful bloggers often have a clear voice and perspective, and opinions which you either agree or disagree with. For that reason, I think you are really onto something – group blogs allow many perspectives and many different opinions that can (hopefully) be averaged out into something which can be treated as fact.
Some of you may be missing the point that most science bloggers do not have the intention of becoming science journalists at all, and are communicating to a narrowly defined niche audience who knows their jargon, the names they drop and perhaps are amused by their profanity (I caught a glimpse of a justifiably reproving Maxine in one comment thread earlier).
Blogs are much more like editorials than like news stories. They can distill and perhaps go into depth on certain facts, but they are by nature overtly opinionated. The comments thread are like the letters to the editor.
So I still see a place for conscientious science journalists. Manners are another story – you can only show by example, and choose the company you keep.
Excellent guest post for an excellent hostess.
Yes, bloggers are closer in spirit to what the newspapers in the UK badge as Columnists, Anna. [UK newspapers also make this distinction for reasons to do with the idiotic UK Libel laws]
Though – one of the things that drives the “Bad Science” bloggers really mad is limp press-release regurgitating work when 10 minutes Googling would have revealed that the story is a crock – e.g. see an example here. So there is a certainly a bit of “reporter-ing” in some of the blogs.
@Austin “Jim Radford said something that summarized this well a few years back: paraphrasing, he said that, for a scientist, “the point of writing was to be right (i.e. correct)”, while for a journalist “the point of writing was to be read”. Clearly PR folk are almost by definition on the “to be read” side of this divide.”
Not sure about these paraphrases – I think it’s vitally important for scientists to be correct and widely read, for a whole bunch of reasons (impact factors and citation rates can help in job/funding applications to start with). I’d rather read (and write) a hard core theory paper that is engaging, than get frustrated and give up without getting the message – or frustrate my readers and risk them not citing me!
Something that really bugs me is a paper written in sexy, pseudo reader friendly style with NO SUBSTANCE. Grrrrr. Hulk angry.
And after all that, I forgot to mention that there’s no such thing as a UK law. There’s English and Scots law (which might also include the word boke). Might even be Welsh & Norn Irish for all I know.
For once, I’m getting arsey about someone lumping us all together as one happy -rainy-rainbow nation (with daft libel laws), rather than referring to the whole UK as “England”. Sorry.
Point taken, Mike. I think Radford’s argument was that if the paper was published in a worthy professional journal, it would serve its purposes (which explicitly included “advancing authoring scientist’s career”) even if almost nobody read it, and certainly nobody outside “the academy”.
Of course, how often a paper is cited does make a difference, but that is a whole other argument (don’t get me started on impact factors and other bibliometrics!). Counting citations of individual papers is the only thing even vaguely useful, but even that is obviously seriously flawed. For an outspoken view of this see Prof David Colquhoun’s blog here, where he specifically makes the point about “trendy but thin”. There was also an interesting discussion on some of this in the comments thread of a blogpost about peer review over at scienceblogs.