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Blog lines

01 Nov 2007

Science blogs are a welcome phenomenon, but science journalism is still essential

Blog lines

“In an age of blogs there are seemingly no secrets.” Those are not the words of some obscure young postdoc tapping away on their keyboard, but of Robert Aymar, the 71-year-old director general of the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva. Aymar wrote the comments in his column in CERN’s internal newsletter last month after rumours surfaced on various blogs of a potential delay to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) following problems with electrical connections between the accelerator’s magnets (see p8, print edition only).

Although CERN says that the problems, which were genuine, are being resolved and that the LHC will produce its first physics results next year as planned, Aymar’s comments highlight the impact of blogs on how scientific news emerges. Earlier this year, for example, a particle physicist from the CDF collaboration at Fermilab in the US got into hot water after he discussed on his blog possible evidence for the Higgs boson, before the data in question had been fully scrutinized and made public by the rest of the 600-strong team (see “The tale of the blogs’ boson”). The fact that Fermilab may have scooped CERN in the race for the Higgs made a great story that was enthusiastically reported in mainstream publications.

The incident illustrates the overlap between conventional journalism and blogging, which both seek to describe and discuss the latest scientific breakthroughs. But blogs and journalism are different. Blogs are usually aimed at a narrow, specialist group of readers, and there is no onus on bloggers to be balanced in what they say. Unlike professional journalists, bloggers are not expected to put their claims in context, report all sides of a controversy, or write in a way that is as clear or as understandable as possible. Moreover, it is not always possible to tell if bloggers have a hidden agenda.

On the other hand, as the CERN incident makes clear, science blog can sometimes be first with the news, even if their information is sparse, based on rumours or in the form of comments posted anonymously. Blogs are a welcome phenomenon on the scientific scene, particularly in giving non-scientists a direct insight into how science works. But by seeking to explain science to a broad readership in a balanced, clear and independent way, science journalism still has much to commend it.

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