Why Science Blogging Needs Saving

You would never guess from reading the newspaper, but much of the very best investigative science journalism today actually originates from blogs. Science blogs serve as an intersection between journalists and the dense and impenetrable language of academic journals. Sadly, journalists in most newsrooms simply don’t have the time, incentive, knowledge or backing to do their own investigative work anymore, high quality science blogs help fill that void.

Blogs provide an open forum where scientists can publicly wade into discussions and question and debate each others' work under the watchful eye of their peers. Sadly the science blogosphere is now nearly downright dead and much of that discussion has moved to private groups where academics now largely exist in echo chambers populated by only their own narrow subdiscipline.

I came of age in the glory days of science blogging. In 2011, my poxy self-built, self-hosted blog got 10,000 hits a month and was quickly cited by a laundry list of publications and used without any credit by even more. That didn't pay the bills but it lit a spark in my mind that let me dream that one day my writing really could change the world and perhaps pay my bills. Fast-forward a few years and I'd signed a contract to move my blog to a platform where eventually it was getting over 100,000 hits a month and by then it really was both paying my bills and playing an active role in the science news cycle, but it wasn't the money that excited me, it was the impact I saw it have and the conversations I watched it ignite among people around the world.

But those days are over. Google ad rates plummeted and Facebook stopped being a useful distribution medium for creators to reach their audience. Platform after platform went bankrupt or shut their doors. I was offered over a 1000% pay cut and told to take it or leave it. I left.

I fled to the mainstream media. Anyone who hadn't had the experience I had would see this as a massive step up. Better recognition, better pay, a bigger audience and more stable income. It was all of those things and more but at the same time I saw it as quite the opposite.

While writing for a range of highly regarded publications, I always ran into the same problems. I could no longer really use images as I used to. I was no longer free to pepper my pieces with hyperlinks and references. I typically now had to squeeze everything into a tiny word count. The threat of lawsuits became a constant consideration and led to ideas I’d have previously merrily blogged about getting spiked because publishers are terrified of getting sued. Even when my work was technically meant to be opinion, my ability to opine was necessarily restricted. I was now at the mercy of an editor. My stories now had to be pitched, meaning I had to convince an editor that my ideas were good enough to garner a big mainstream readership before I'd even started writing them. To me this was insane. This just wasn't how I operated.

None of this should be seen as a slight on the excellent journalists I’ve been lucky to work with. Journalism is vital, it has its place and blogging isn’t going to replace it. I’m not going to stop doing journalism but journalism isn’t blogging and it never will be.

Another thing I lost as I transitioned from blogging to journalism was my comment section. While most journalists hate comment sections with a passion, I loved mine. I saw it as a place for a form of what scientists call “peer review”. Scientists currently rely on a system of pre-publication peer review, a hellish system (in its current form) that routinely delays good scientific papers by years because there is practically zero incentive for scientists to review each other’s work as it is done anonymously for no reward, with the profits being taking by the owners of journals. I never had to submit my blog posts to peer reviewers but if I ever made the tiniest error you could bet your bottom dollar that within ten minutes flat I'd know about it in a comment that sure as hell would get upvoted to the top of the page, exactly where it belonged.

Often my posts would ignite fascinating sprawling discussions in the comment section between scientists and people from different walks of life on every corner of the globe, these debates were sometimes far more interesting than my actual posts. I felt like a cupid for ideas, an intellectual matchmaker. Under my articles, different viewpoints would battle it out and minds would be changed. Discussion was almost always civil and constructive, I suspect because I had set the tone and because I always made a big effort to deconstruct the straw men that trolls rely on before the trolls had a chance to arrive.

All of that discussion disappeared in a flash when the owners of the blog platform I wrote on decided to abolish all comment sections after I had left, a decision that was also taken by countless other publishers. All of that valuable discourse is now gone forever. The owners of the platform also came up with the idea of removing all the dates from the content so it's now impossible to tell when anything I wrote over the several years I was there was actually written. I frequently now get emails from people about things I wrote five years ago as if they’d been written yesterday.

I say all this to highlight the problems of relying on privately owned media platforms. They are owned by people who can choose to do whatever they want with them. They can alter, paywall, or destroy them at a later date. This was made all too apparent when Google inexplicably shuttered the backbone of global blog networks, Google Reader, almost overnight in 2013. These things can’t happen nearly so easily on a blockchain as blockchains are decentralised by definition and function democratically. The Steem blockchain (that I’m writing this blog post on) could create a network between blogs similar to the one we used to have with Google Reader.

If I’ve whet your appetite, starting blogging on here doesn’t have to be hard. Account setup only takes a second and then after a short approval period you’re ready to go. While it might sound insanely complicated behind the scenes–and it is–actually using this platform is a breeze for even the most tech illiterate. Don’t let the word blockchain scare you off.

What about blogging? Where do you begin? The way I work is simple. I start putting notes together when an idea I think I might want to write about lands on my desk. I let ideas evolve as I research them, reading the relevant scientific papers and speaking to the relevant experts. I let them keep ticking along until such a time when it feels right to hit publish. Sometimes that is days later, other times it is years later, sometimes it is never but that’s pretty rare. If an idea is interesting enough to make me want to write it down then sooner or later a new piece of information almost always comes along that is the boost needed to make the idea make the cut. Somehow, this is almost always sooner than expected, which never fails to surprise me. If the idea needs building on after the fact, I just string posts together in a series.

Another big advantage of blogging is that by using hyperlinks to the best external sources to provide references and background, you don’t have to have to tell every single story from the very beginning. Nor do you have to rely on only one publication’s content, as is typically favoured at news publications that rely on keeping readers within their own walled gardens. I find this freedom provides far more potential for interesting content and deep dives into complex topics than I can achieve with a typical journalistic piece as I don’t have to waste time rehashing content that’s already been covered perfectly well elsewhere.

Pro-tip: already blog on Wordpress? Use Steempress to port your blog into Steem for free and reap the rewards of Steem while blogging as normal!

There are also some weirdly useful benefits from blogging that people probably don’t know about. For instance, blogging has given me a superhuman external memory, if I ever need to remember anything to do with something I’ve blogged about, all I need to do is Google the name of my blog plus any word to do with whatever obscure fact is on the tip of my tongue and voila, up pops my reference. It’s also led me to meet a whole host of amazing and inspiring people in every corner of the world.

The freedom and joy of earning a living this way was like nothing I have ever known and going from that to working within the constraints of traditional publishing models was suffocating. I hope Steemit will be my solution, and I hope you'll join me.

This is part three in a four part series. Come back tomorrow for the final part where I’ll look at how blockchains could fix the broken scientific publication process.

PART 1: I Have a Dream for Science on Steem
PART 2: What Is Steem and Why Do I Think It Could Be Revolutionary?
PART 3: Why Science Blogging Needs Saving
PART 4: How Blockchains Could Fix Science

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Full Disclosure: I’ve made what seems to be ballooning into a substantial investment in Steem Power so I can help encourage and reward the best science content on here and earn curation rewards for myself in the process. I’ll be using some of that investment to promote this series however that’s something I won’t be doing in future. I’m going to promote each post a few hours after it’s released to give you hard working science curators out there a good shot at the curation rewards. If that was gobbledegook to you, then read yesterday’s post where I explain how this all works.