Can science blogs save science journalism?

Journalists and scientists at Monday’s Scientific American sponsored panel discussion, “Does Science Get a Fair Shake in the Media?,” hosted at USC Annenberg, unanimously agreed that while the public is consuming more science reporting now than ever before, mainstream journalism is doing a lousier job of covering the field.

Pronouncing the situation “dire,” USC biological sciences professor Michael Quick declared right off the bat, “We need a revolution… a whole sea change… nobody is going to solve this overnight by writing a better article about biotechnology or the environment.”

Why is the state of science reporting so deplorable? Are the problems systemic? How will the field evolve with the advent of new media technologies?

The problem is everybody

The general populace, though overall showing more interest in science than in sports, has quite a poor understanding of science, according to author and USC journalism professor K.C. Cole.

Many simply regard the field as “a form of magic,” Quick quipped.

The media isn’t doing its job to educate the public – most journalists have little to no background in science and statistics, either.

“Every beat I’ve ever had, I haven’t had a clue when I started,” said Reuters biotechnology reporter Lisa Baertlein.

Furthermore, due to traditional media’s budget considerations, a science reporter is often responsible for several scientific disciplines, and that inevitably leads to a lack of intelligent, dependable coverage, or worse, over-coverage of wacky, pseudoscientific studies such as Jessica Alba’s score in an index of female desirability.

On the other hand, many scientists cannot talk in layman’s terms about what they do. Neither are they trained to do so.

“No effort has been made to help us reach out or learn to talk to the media and to the public,” Quick said, admitting that scientists as a group are “very bad” at communicating.

What’s “news” in science?

To approach science reporting with a traditional journalistic judgment of newsworthiness and objectivity is fundamentally incompatible with how science works, according to the panelists.

As it stands, an overwhelming number of science pieces are outgrowths of PR memos detailing the latest discoveries or “eureka!” moments of studies published in reputable journals. NASA has particularly well-oiled machine and that leads directly to more media coverage, said Cole.

But without proper framing and context, an article whose sole premise is “An important study was published today…” is just parroted PR.

At the point of publication, most individual papers have “had almost no impact on thinking,” said Scientific American Editor in Chief and discussion moderator John Rennie. Many papers are later proven wrong.

“Science is the field of qualifications,” Quick noted, and that “doesn’t come through in the reporting.”

In certain fields, especially the environment, a high proportion of studies are controversial and industry-funded, according to author and environmental journalist Marla Cone, making for “very tricky” reporting.

But journalism loves the conflict and drama of topics such as global warming, intelligent design, and stem cell research, and editors are biased in favor of interesting stories.

“Instead of reporting what is true, people report sides,” said Cole.

So why doesn’t the media build a new model of reporting that focuses less on discrete observations and more on the “bodies of work taking shape” in various fields?, Rennie asked.

Scientists are blogging. Why aren’t journalists listening?

Journalism may very well be on the cusp of a momentous change whereby it redefines the paradigm within which it approaches science reporting.

The proliferation of blogs written by scientists (biology blogs being the most popular, followed by physics and climatology) means that the scientific discourse that used to take place behind lab doors is now open to everyone.

The blogs present an opportunity for journalists to bring scientists into the story writing process much earlier on. Everyone agreed that this is necessary, but are journalists using science blogs to immerse themselves in the scientific community – as a resource to hear directly what scientists are talking about and as an opportunity to talk directly to scientists?

“Most of it is too much ‘inside baseball,'” Cone said. For inexperienced science reporters, reading just one scientist’s blog “can easily lead them in the wrong direction.”

The most popular science blogs are admittedly peppered with politics.

“I wouldn’t trust them for reporting,” Cone said. Blogs should be used to gather background, as “a tip in the right direction.”

Ironically, scientists are the ones eager to reach out to reluctant journalists, who tend to “lurk” and “watch” science blogs from the shadows, according to USC astronomy and physics professor Clifford Johnson (his blog on physics and life is at Asymptotia.com).

Very few science bloggers know that their writing is being read. “The older generation who read blogs don’t say so,” said Johnson. “I usually end up talking to journalists for some other reason when it becomes apparent that they’ve read the blog.”

Every time a blog get cited in mainstream media, Johnson said, the science blogger community feels more legitimized.

“I would hope that editors and journalists would seize this opportunity to help guide the bloggers and help bring out a little bit the quality of writing,” Johnson said. “There are an awful lot of people doing great work out there. Feedback might help.”

Mortgage crisis no surprise to 'Housing Bubble Blog' community

Living in Southern California, I’ve been watching home prices explode over the past six years. My wife and I once wondered how people that we knew were making far less than we were could afford to buy homes for many hundreds of thousands of dollars more than traditional “home affordability” calculators said that we could afford.

We found the answer, of course, online. Lenders had abandoned traditional guidelines for mortgage lending, creating interest-only, negative amortization, no-money-down and “teaser rate” loans, which allowed people to get into homes far more expensive than a traditional fixed-rate mortgage with hefty down payment would have allowed them to buy.

When all this easy money poured into the market, the predictable price inflation allowed lenders to justify expanding the market to sub-prime buyers — anyone with a pulse, really — since inflating home values would allow any buyer, even one not even paying the accumulating interest on their loan, to build thousands of dollars in new equity each year.

For the past three years, Ben Jones’ Housing Bubble Blog has provided an online home for skeptics who knew that this bubble could not last. Several times a day, Jones posts from his northern Arizona home a round-up of real estate news from newspaper and television websites, to which a virtual army of loyal readers responds with comments and observations about their local real estate markets.

Jones’ blog provides another point of evidence for the assertion that there is a blog well covering every issue online. Readers of Jones’ blog saw the crash coming, before it happened. Many have posted emotional “thank you”s to the blog, detailing how reading the blog convinced them not to buy, while friends and family members took on option ARMs and other non-traditional loans, only to face foreclosure and bankruptcy today.

Like many successful blogs, the HBB includes reader comments that might make traditional news editors uncomfortable. One can find plenty of racism, xenophobia, vindictiveness and gloating within HBB readers’ posts. But one also can find hard data and well-documented research that skewers the frequently unchallenged quotes from sources in newspapers’ real estate reports. Above all, an HBB reader encounters passion — raw emotion that is too often missing from dry, robotic real estate reporting in the traditional press.

I swapped e-mails with Jones last week, asking him about his blog and what it lessons other news reporters could learn from it.

OJR: Please describe the Housing Bubble Blog and tell us when — and why — you started it.

Jones: It is a blog where I aggregate housing bubble news and edit it for context. I first put together posts on the housing bubble in November 2004. I started my first blog dedicated to the subject in December 2004. I did that because I didn’t feel the press was giving the matter the attention it deserved, considering the risks involved.

The comments from readership are a major part of this blog. Many return frequently and we all have gotten to know a lot about each other. Posters bring their individual perspective and knowledge to the group, making it a very rich and interesting view of the subject at hand. I use, or make a place for, a good deal of reader-generated subject matter, which has become as popular as any material I find and post.

OJR: How many people read the blog on a typical day?

Jones: On a weekday, the software tells me 40-50,000 unique viewers.

OJR: How did you build that audience?

Jones: With years of hard work, consistency and attention to the needs of a potential poster at any point in the day. Plus most are returning to interact with the group itself, so I get out of their way and let them at it.

OJR: Much of the content on HBB comes from reader comments. Are you happy with the quantity and quality of comments you get on HBB? (If not, what would you like to do about that?)

Jones: It has really grown in the past two years. Comments are two- to ten-times my word counts on any given thread. I couldn’t be happier with the folks that hang out on my blogs. Obviously, they are a bright group and they attract similar posters and lurkers.

Sometimes, when the number of comments gets up over three hundred, it loses a bit of readability, but that’s alright because by then I have something new up, usually.

OJR: What would you tell other bloggers and online publishers to do to help build robust and useful comment sections on their sites?

Jones: Like most of these questions, this is addressed more completely in the book I am working on and hope to have published next year. I consider facilitating comment flow to be the single most important thing I do. A lot goes into that, from subject matter, timing, software and the manual moderation effort.

I also adopted a sort of hands off approach early on. I do the posts, they do the comments. I treat the posters as adults, and I prefer to let them sort out their own differences. Sometimes this causes a thread to turn into a train-wreck, but overall it has served me well.

OJR: What is your “day job”? How much income does HBB bring in, relative to your other income?

Jones: I am a full-time blogger. It pays my bills and obviously I continue to do it because I want to. But I could be making more money doing other things, so it is a labor of love.

OJR: How long do you see yourself running HBB?

Jones: I feel a responsibility to the readership to see this thing through to a logical end. I look forward to the day when housing prices aren’t a big issue anymore.

OJR: Do you think that HBB can become a long-running, self-supporting publishing business?

Jones: I think it already has.

OJR: What do you think of the job that journalists working for major newspapers and TV have done covering real estate over the past decade?

Jones: Like many of the checks and balances surrounding the housing price boom, the media failed the public to a large degree. Having done some writing, I am well aware that journalist don’t have a final say on what gets covered and how. And having done many interviews, I can say that most journalists I have interacted with are very level-headed and practical about economic matters in private.

In my opinion, the biggest failure of the press regarding the housing bubble in 2004-2006 was a lack of objectivity and ‘professional skepticism,’ as we called it in my auditing classes. Over and over, the print or Web media would turn to a trade group for analysis of some new statistic.

This was often the case when this same organization provided the data. These people are paid to provide a slant to the news, yet they were interviewed as an unbiased observer, and their answers were rarely challenged in those years.

For example, in the spring of 2005, the Realtors’ trade group reported some very high percentages of speculative and second-home purchases for the year 2004. At first they were a little taken aback. But within a few days they had regrouped and created several new theories to explain this disturbing data. We were told; baby boomers were going to own many homes, and people are speculating because it is a new investment class. Also there was the ongoing ‘shortage of land’ mantra the industry made up. And we were told, that September 11th had made the nation feel differently about housing; some sort of comfort aid.

All new paradigm stuff and all made up after the fact to explain away some trends that we now know to be the source of many industry ills.

If I could see this from my humble desk in Arizona, why didn’t the media pick up on it? They weren’t skeptical enough when it counted. And this is just one example of hundreds.

OJR: Given your experience with HBB, what advice would you give these “mainstream” journalists on how better to cover real estate?

Jones: As the bubble was topping out, I often saw reporters mention seeing a glass half-empty or half-full. I don’t think that has a place in financial journalism. And being objective means being skeptical, in my opinion. When someone says, ‘I think the market will turn around this spring,’ it should be followed up with, ‘what is the basis for that prediction?’ And saying, ‘because it always has’ isn’t good enough. As the last two springs have demonstrated, sometimes it doesn’t.

Are blogs a 'parasitic' medium?

Over the past months, I’ve heard several journalists make the same comment at various industry forums: That blogs are a “parasitic” medium that wouldn’t be able to exist without the reporting done at newspapers.

I hear the frustration behind the comment. You bust your rear to get stories in the paper, then watch bloggers grab traffic talking about your work. All the while your bosses are laying off other reporters, citing circulation declines, as analysts talk about newspapers losing audience to the Web. It’s not hard to understand why many newspaper journalists would come to view blogs as parasites, sucking the life from their newsrooms.

Still, the charge riles me every time I hear it. To me, it’s a poorly informed insult of many hard-working Web publishers who are doing fresh, informative and original work. And by dismissing blogs as “parasitic,” newspaper journalists make themselves blind to the opportunities that blogging, as well as independent Web publishing in general, offer to both the newspaper industry and newspaper journalists.

I wanted to hear what other Web professionals I respect thought. So I e-mailed several bloggers, academics and newspaper editors. No one who I’ve heard make the charge responded. But others replied with insightful remarks.

“People who say blogs are ‘parasitic’ are referring, really, to only a subset of blogs — those that refer to, and comment on, matters of public interest that are typically covered by mainstream media,” Rich Gordon, Associate Professor and Director of Digital Technology in Education at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, responded.

“There are many, many blogs that address topics that aren’t covered by mainstream media at all. Those who write these blogs do original reporting, at least based on what they see around them. So even to the degree this criticism has a basis in fact, it refers only to a fraction of all blogs.”

Let’s not forget, either, that even “parasitic” blogs provide value beyond the original news reports they cite. Blogs animate the news for readers that newspapers alone don’t always reach.

“I find some of these parasitic-ish blogs particularly useful – because they spotlight things I might miss,” wrote Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Professor Sree Sreenivasan. “A great example is Romenesko. It’s my first visit every day. Lots of old-school journos, who don’t like blogs, read it religiously, without knowing it’s a blog!”

Gordon reminded that bloggers are not alone in referencing reporter’s work.

“There is a long tradition *within journalism* of publishing and broadcasting the work of people whose primary contribution to discourse is opinion and analysis. Bloggers fall squarely within this tradition. They are parasitic only if your definition of journalism consists only of original reporting.”

Lisa Stone, co-founder of BlogHer.org, made that point even more bluntly.

“Baloney,” she wrote in response to my question. “An opinion editorialist doesn’t have to break news herself to provide amazing, fresh perspective on world events — whether she’s published on the New York Times Op-Ed page or on her own blog. Sounds like these folks are less interested in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the public discourse upon which American democracy is based than they are with Machiavellian divine right.”

Neil Budde, Vice President and Editor in Chief of Yahoo! News, wrote that newspapers’ own websites and partners could have been called parasites, at least by one definition of the term.

“In my days at WSJ.com, I’m sure some in the print newsroom considered us parasites. Now working for a search engine/portal like Yahoo!, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear this definition attached to our role. But at Yahoo! News we’re working with publishers and broadcasters to ensure that we co-exist over a prolonged period of time with them and that their lifetime is not shortened by it.”

Original reporting

“Many blogs exist without ever quoting or referring to other news items and contain original content,” Brett Tabke, editor of Webmaster World wrote. “There is such a wide range of blog types today; such an all encompassing statement is suspect.”

“Most bloggers started blogging because they had something to say,” Gordon wrote. “They would not go mute just because there was less MSM [mainstream media] content available.”

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of BoingBoing, agreed.

“If MSM didn’t exist, we’d just invent ’em (as metrobloggers have done) — we’d go out and take pictures and write about stuff as it happened.

“That’s already happening with governmental material — I can summarize C-SPAN just as well as NBC’s hacks.”

Stone cited examples of independent websites that provide original reporting.

“If anyone is looking for sites where bloggers use blogs to break news, I recommend Global Voices Online, Sunlight Foundation and BlogHer.”

Finally, Gordon suggested that blogs actually bring readers and income to newspaper and TV websites:

“If you’re associated with [traditional media] and think bloggers are parasitic, let me suggest you check your site’s metrics system to see how much traffic comes your way now because of blog links. If the number is low, you have nothing to worry about. If it’s high, your site is earning income because of these parasites. The relevant scientific term is (or, at least, should be) ‘symbiotic,’ not “parasitic.'”

I like Gordon’s reference to referrer logs, but for another reason. Too often, newspaper journalists’ familiarity with blogs and other independent websites extend only to those sites that link to their work. Of course, then, those journalists would believe blogs to be parasitic.

But, as Gordon wrote before, there exist thousands of blogs and websites devoted to topics that so-called “mainstream” media fails to cover. By dismissing all blogs as derivative of their own coverage, newspaper journalists reaffirm the cultural myopia that has caused them to miss issues and passions that are of deeply felt interest to so many former, or potential, newspaper readers.

That’s why the “parasite” charge bothers me so much. It perpetuates a bad attitude toward readers that led so many of those readers to the blogosphere in the first place. If some blogs are parasitic, sucking value from others’ work and offering little insight or knowledge in return, so too are many newspaper columnists, editorial pages and television talking heads.

Instead of dismissing the blogs and websites to which their former readers and viewers are flocking, newspaper and TV journalists ought to be asking themselves what those blogs are doing that *they* could be doing to get those readers back.