Clay Shirky and Nick Carr: A Tangent on Science Blogging

HolfordWatch is considering the weighty proposition: Will Science Blogging Absolve the Mainstream Media of the Need to Provide Science Coverage? It’s a fairly wide-ranging discussion that discusses the common understanding that there is something amiss with the current state of science journalism. As it stands, science and health journalism mostly fails to meet the needs of either a specialist or general audience. However, most media proprietors seem to be unconcerned about this because, unlike other specialist interests, such as darts, or gardening, there is little to be gained from advertising sales. In an unvirtuous circle, this lack of potential advertising revenue means that there is little economic rationale for maintaining a staff with specialist knowledge. Res ipse loquitur as someone, somewhere, will be saying.

HolfordWatch takes Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News as a point of departure. One of the frequent criticisms of Davies’ book is that is nostalgia for a golden age of journalism that never really existed. Clay Shirky offers a powerful argument against such yearnings in: What Newspapers and Journalism Need Now: Experimentation, Not Nostalgia. Shirky argues that the professional standards that were once the strength of journalists can now be found in sceptical and dogged bloggers.

These are investigative endeavors where the net-native media is outperforming print; we should be figuring out how create or support more.

Aside from rare exceptions like 60 Minutes, good journalism needs to be subsidized in order to thrive. There is no obvious reason, however, that those subsidies have to continue to come from Bloomingdales and Bell South; what journalism needs now is not nostalgia but experimentation. It’s time to get on with the essential task of trying everything we can think of to create effective new models of reporting, ones that take the existing capabilities of the Internet for granted. [1, 2]

So, maybe there isn’t a definitive solution to the problem of inadequate science and health journalism. But, Shirky is probably right that we should be experimenting with new solutions and ready to see what survives. And part of that solution probably involves science blogging and a willingness of news makers to engage with it. And the willingness and technical competence of science bloggers to meet the need for more accessible accounts of science that take full advantage of internet technology. Yet, that probably needs centralised access to some technical expertise. A centralisation that might sound very much like a traditional newspaper or news agency model.

This is starting to sound like a re-hash of the inadequate economics model that depresses good mainstream coverage of science issues. A familiar difficulty that Nick Carr alludes to in the comments to Shirky’s post:

Clay Shirky is right on at least two counts: (1) new ways to subsidize hard journalism may emerge on the Internet; (2) new ways to subsidize hard journalism may not arise on the Internet. Let’s hope that the experiments with new methods of producing investigative reports and other hard journalism succeed, but let’s also admit that the experiments with ‘citizen journalism” and other alternatives to traditional reporting have, to date, produced little in the way of encouraging results. Experimentation follows the paths laid down by economics, which do not necessarily run in the directions we would wish for.

Yes, it is much cheaper to adopt what Davies characterises as churnalism or to re-write press releases. Appropriate investigation can take time, money and resources. Also, in the comments, James Levy argues that the new reporting (whether in mainstream media or (arguably) blogs) will gain trust by making their sources transparent.

Levy’s argument sounds impeccable yet it overlooks a strategy that has been used, to some effect, by people who want to duck discussion of their public pronouncements or published work. That of affecting to believe that science is a matter of opinion and agenda rather more than it is fact. Or that, like calories consumed while standing up in front of the fridge, criticism from blogs doesn’t count. Or even that it is best settled by legal-sounding letters and phone calls. A problem that is particularly more difficult for bloggers than mainstream media as the case of Kathleen Seidel and the Shoemaker subpoena shows us. It is the more nonsensical when bloggers such as Seidel are the subject of such actions when she is a byword for impeccable research and fairness. Research that is so demonstrably good and thorough that it seems as if some people find it difficult to believe that she is doing this without outside resources or incentives. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, both for bloggers and the cause of accurate science blogging and commentary.

Notes

[1] Seth Finkelstein takes issue with the ‘convenient fantasy’ of the “those-darn-bloggers!” story in the comments. Oddly, there are some examples in the UK where bloggers broke a story that the mainstream media then followed up, without much crediting the bloggers. E.g., Dr Crippen on the MTAS security problems; Guido on Peter Hains.

[2] Ben Goldacre is in the quasi-blogger/commentator no man’s land that probably explains why he has been highlighting the absurdities of Brain Gym since 2003 but his concerns have only just received wider coverage in mainstream media. SkeptoBot and Education Watch have more detail.