Comments on: Will Science Blogs Fill Void Left By Departing Journalists?

By: Médias (28/03/09) « pintiniblog

Médias (28/03/09) « pintiniblog — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:59:07 +0000

[...] Will Science Blogs Fill Void Left By Departing Journalists? (source: The Scholarly Kitchen, 24/03/09) “Science journalism is quickly vanishing. Will [...]

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:03:45 +0000

They’ve run 3 articles in the last month in 2 different journals entreating scientists to blog. It certainly raised my cynicism a bit, and seems like a coordinated effort to try to get the community behind providing the content that they need for their own network. I think the articles deliberately did not mention the Nature Network as that would have made things a bit too obvious. They may honestly feel that blogging is of great importance, but one must question the motivation behind such articles when they stand to benefit directly from the outcome. Just as Nature requires authors to declare any financial interests in research papers, I’d like to see them follow the same policy for editorials and be a little more up front about things.

By: Philip Davis

Philip Davis — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:06:40 +0000

David,
You make an excellent point. Nature has invested a lot of resources — not to mention the time of their writers — in creating their own Nature blogspace http://blogs.nature.com/

While this may create a ripe opportunity to toot their own horn, they don’t. In fact, they advertise their competitors: Wired, Seed, Discover, and PLoS.

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:25:12 +0000

Surely Nature’s viewpoint is completely unbiased here, and they have no vested interest in promoting blogging. It’s not like they’ve invested hugely in some sort of Network to enable users to blog, right?

The strongly opinionated nature of most blogs makes them a poor substitute for quality journalism (among other problems) as I’ve noted here:
http://www.cshblogs.org/cshprotocols/2009/03/20/begging-for-bloggers/