Writing

The current issue of Science has a report with some reassuring findings for my profession:

Scientists and journalists get along much better than the anecdotal 'horror stories' would lead us to believe, according to new research published today in the journal Science, which has found that 57% of researchers were 'mostly pleased' with their media interaction, while only 6% percent were 'mostly dissatisfied'.

Previous research as well as anecdotal evidence has tended to focus on the negative aspects of scientists' media interaction, but today's survey, based on the responses of 1354 scientists working in the high-profile research fields of epidemiology and stem cell research in the UK, US, France, Germany and Japan, suggests that, for the most part, scientists are comfortable dealing with journalists.

This aligns well with my own experience, but I wasn't sure that the phenomenon was so widespread. When I contact researchers, it's usually for a trade magazine or research journal they already trust, and of course those letters after my name don't hurt either. It's good to know that the lay press gets similarly collegial treatment, because communicating with them means communicating with the general public - which, after all, is paying for much of this cool science.

When I started blogging a couple of years ago, I vowed that I would keep the site focused on substance, rather than veering into the infinitely recursive trap of metablogging, or posting essays about posting essays. This introduction shows where that can lead; right now, I'm writing about writing about writing. Who wants to read that?

Nonetheless, science blogs face some peculiar challenges, and I've noticed some of my blogging colleagues struggling with them as well. The crux of the problem is that science bloggers, unlike political, social, or personal bloggers, must confront a genuine information glut. When you boil politics, social groups, or your personal life down to bare facts, the sad truth is that very little is really happening from day to day. A political blogger, for example, simply needs to read the day's top few headlines - which can probably be summarized in a sentence or less - and then spin them according to a defined agenda.

Science is much harder to cover. On any given weekday, I receive upwards of 50 press releases and have access to hundreds more. If I'm motivated, I can also scan the tables of contents of dozens of top journals, and if I were really motivated, I could read full papers from any of them. Unlike most news items, these papers are not mere echoes of each other. Each is a nugget of pure, original information never before known by anyone.

One approach to this deluge is the mile-wide foot-deep strategy. To do that, I would sift the vast crop of current papers through my limited interests and skills, focusing on just the truly significant work that I could understand well enough to explain clearly. That would leave me with more than a dozen original stories a day, so the postings would have to be very brief. There are many science news outlets that do just that, usually with a team of contributors sending out a stream of postings, so dovdox.com would simply become another voice in this wilderness of data.

The other extreme is the pure essay blog, in which a poster cites some new work, then discusses it at length, preferably adding a new dimension to the discussion and bringing up ideas that even the original authors might not have considered. Elio Schaechter at Small Things Considered is a master of this focused approach. He only posts a few times a month on average, and his choices can seem odd sometimes, but nearly every post is interesting and informative.

I've generally leaned toward the essay end of the spectrum, but there's an added complication for me: it feels like work. Writing in-depth coverage of specific research areas is how I've been paying the bills for the past ten years. Occasionally, I'll post something to the blog to plug a story I've recently sent to press, or to add information that wouldn't fit in the final draft, but many of the pieces I write don't really lend themselves to that. Though it may not be obvious, I also practice a fair amount of self-censorship - for every post that seems intemperate or off-topic, there were ten others that were even worse.

My little blog isn't the only one with these challenges. In fact, I was heartened to see that the very smart and talented editorial crew at Nature Medicine is wrestling with exactly the same issues on their recently launched blog. That site got off to a strong start, then went nearly dormant for awhile, and has recently had a resurgence of postings. Besides fluctuating in volume, their postings, like mine, have also been casting about for an editorial voice. Sometimes they're writing about a specific research paper, while other times they're commenting on the state of childcare facilities at conferences.

Market research isn't much help here, either. Reviewing the logs for dovdox.com, I find that the postings that have received the most hits and comments are all over the map. By either measure, the top item by far is Callsign Search Widget Fixed, in which I posted a patch for a very obscure piece of software. Vying for a distant second place are postings about pesticides, microbiology, and a building demolition in New Haven.

Or perhaps that's the answer: there's no telling what will interest readers of this blog, so I might as well post whatever comes to mind. The corollary is that nobody's paying much attention to consistency or editorial voice, so I shouldn't bother with those things, either. In other words, the last thing blog readers want to ponder is ... metablogging.