This post is part of my coverage of the Science Online 2010 conference.

Four prominent journalists, Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, John Timmer, and David Dobbs, shared their views and opinions on the state of the field in this panel discussion. I was glad to have Yong announce that the “blogger versus journalist” debate was put to sleep four years ago (waaaaay back in Science Online 2007) and that everyone was mostly in agreement that journalism is now defined as a set of values, such as commitment to accuracy and fact-checking, rather than just a paid profession.

Timmer brought up the advantage large newspapers have in bringing science to non-scientists, as most people read the NYT’s for general articles, and are introduced to science news incidentally through the periodical. In contrast, Ars Technica’s readers come to the site because they are looking specifically for science and technology news. Bora made a very insightful observation about push vs pull media, where blogs are the pull and newspapers are the push because the “audience is already there and can’t escape.”

Zimmer and Dobbs Before the Session
Credit: Moi

Dobbs’ talked about his experience writing lengthy, well-researched articles, the very satisfying kind I love to read in the New Yorker, and how such articles are impossible without funding. With New Scientist gone to a metered system, the Wall Street Journal gone subscription-only, and now the New York Times apparently about to go metered, for-profit support was in question, leading Dobbs to speculate on whether fellowships or other means of supporting the practice would emerge.

Zimmer, who has a foot in MSM and the blogmos, talked about how, after the NYT’s passed on it, his posting videos of duck sex with artificial duck vaginas went viral. This reminded me of the fact that my all-time greatest hit on flickr is a picture titled “Elephant Clitoris, Lion Penis, and Ostrich Penis,” which makes me wonder how many of Zimmer’s hits were people searching for something else.

Debate Over Futurity.org

After someone solicited their opinions on this website, which, like EurekAlert and PhysOrg, publishes raw University press releases in a pretty, newspaperish format, the panelists were in agreement that they thought the site was misleading and damaging to science news, as there was no journalist to fact-check the Universities’ claims and solicit the perspectives of other scientists. When a representative of Futurity in the audience objected to the criticisms, an interesting debate broke out about what constitutes “news” and proper “fact checking.” One audience member said she never trusted anything written about science from any source until she got to read the research paper herself, while a writer from the New Yorker argued that was impossible and that journalistic “filters” were needed to break science news down for the layperson.

My own perspective on this debate, as someone who links to these sites regularly, is that I don’t see much change between the press releases and the MSM article publications, except that the MSM provides much more background and context. As for the fact-checking part of the issue, regular readers of the press-release sites know that, if other scientists object to another researcher’s claims, they will release their own press release debunking it. Whenever I link to a story on this blog in my daily links, I always make sure to run objections and counter-findings of other researchers.

Ida
Credit: Ragnar Singsaas

Besides, it’s not like the MSM does the best job of vetting stories anyways. Bora brought up the story of Ida, the missing link, as a great example of a story that inspired the public, even if they didn’t know much about the significance of the fossil; however, it could be argued that this story was an example of the MSM publishing the claims of researchers unquestioningly, as counter-research claimed Ida was a dead-end branch on the evolutionary tree, not a human ancestor. Healthy debate and conflicting research is part of the excitement of science, and I do see this in the chains of press-releases Universities put out, especially research countering another University’s findings.

Additional:

See the wiki for this session, which has links to additional resources.

You can see a PDF of my raw notes from this session here.