The conservatism of science journalism
It is difficult to believe, but when Gustav Holmberg, Malin Sandström and I organised a session on science communication and social web media at the 10th conference of The International Network on Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST-10) two years ago, ours was the only session which discussed social web media (especially blogging) in relation to traditional science communication. The rest of the PCST-10 was about traditional paper and ether media; the venue was filled with journalists and media scholars interested in traditional media.
Coming from the social web media world, we wrongy believed that the traditional science communication discourse was in decline. But science journalists is a conservative profession; they still largely believe science communication is about science journalism. For example, even when the Media for Science Forum 2010 starts a blog, it is all about science journalism in traditional media. I had expected a blog about science communication to involve discussions about social web media, but the journalism scenario lingers on.
17 Apr 2010 Thomas
[...] The Conservatism of science journalism [...]
Dear Thomas,
I am happy to say you are not right this time. There are in fact several references and articles on blogging and twitter and other new ways of communication. You cannot judge the whole blog on what they write the first few days.
I think blogging is fine. Unfortunately it is very difficult to make a living from blogging as the expectation from most users and blog providers is that it should be a free service or the bloggers should be paid very little. Do you have any ideas or examples on how bloggers could be paid a professional salary for their work?
Dear Jens, sorry for this late reply (for some reason your comment was sent to the spam folder and I only saved it a few minutes ago during my weekly cleaning).
Maybe I was too quick on the trigger re. the lack of comments on social web media on the Media for Science Forum blog — on the other hand, the recent posts about blogging and Twitter on their blog only appeared after I criticised them :-) Cause and effect?
I don’t believe that the question of making a living from blogging is particularly important for the discussion of the future of science communication. What many professional science journalists don’t like (or refuse to acknowledge) is that the blog medium and other social web media provide an opportunity for scientists to establish a direct interactive contact with the public, instead of having the content mediated by journalists.
Make a thought experiment — would we have had the many thousands of high quality articles about science, technology and medicine on Wikipedia at our disposal if we should have waited for professional, paid authors to write them?