Author: Bethany Brookshire / Source: Science News
To blog, or not to blog?
Young scientists and aspiring writers and communicators ask me this question frequently. If they want to try their hand at science writing, science communication and science journalism, shouldn’t they start a blog?
Shouldn’t they start producing content immediately? After all, the best way to learn to write is to write.I understand why they think starting a blog is the thing to do. That’s what I did. In 2008, while I was getting my Ph.D., I started a blog as my writing laboratory. I wrote and wrote. And now, after 10 years of keyboard-hammering and more than 1,300 blog posts, that experiment is at an end. This will be the last Scicurious blog post.
But to blog, or not to blog?
That is not the question.
A better question might be this: What is a blog anyway?
In theory, I know what a science blog is. After all, I helped to write the book on it. Literally. I’m writing a blog post right now. But a blog isn’t any one thing. A blog is a platform. A blog is an empty site waiting to be filled.
In the early 2000s, a blog was a word with a mildly shameful, immature aura (much like people view Instagram or Snapchat as being narcissistic now). Blogs were chatty, diary-like sites, with breakfast details and poor grammar. By the late 2000s, professionals in all corners — including scientists, science journalists and science communicators — recognized the genius of starting up a blog to post their own unedited content. They began using a more casual tone to take a look at life in science, the latest findings, and behind-the-scenes controversies and disagreements. Science blogs became places to build communication skills and networks of other writers and scientists. Bloggers built up audiences of people who followed them, who cared about what they had to say.
But by 2011, when science bloggers fled ScienceBlogs, one of the…
The post This blog is dead. Long live the blog. appeared first on FeedBox.