Go or No to Science Blogging

An article on the Nat Geo website was like a science textbook. The only difference is that it is published, not by a printing press but published in the world wide web. There has been a noticeable trend of journalism being practiced via the internet and surprisingly, it centers on science and its recent developments.

In Airships: A Second Age, engineers are now reported to release their designs of new aircrafts. This recent news about aircraft innovation and other related scientific topics are fresh cuts for journalists. Although websites like ScienceBlogs show a rather surprising number of journalists-turned-bloggers, this number is relatively small in comparison to journalists who stay out of science blogging.

Journalists who venture into the realm of science journalism encounter more problems than they did when they were ordinary journalists. In an article found in ScienceBlogs, a one-liner captures the struggle of journalists with experience in blogging about science. Our lack of tech support, combined with our lack of paychecks and a total blackout on any and all forms of communication has demoralized the entire community. For some journalists, this poses doubt whether writing about science is a good idea. Should we leave science writing to scientists who blog about recent scientific research and progress? Despite these problems, a blogger of ScienceBlogs gave readers some reasons why blogging about science is a hard task to stop. Readers of ScienceBlogs has shown importance to those few journalists who write about science. Journalists can easily find higher-paying writing jobs that give twice as much training as science blogging. As journalists, it is on rare instances where we find ourselves being given such importance by our readers.

Whether we should go for or avoid the realm of writing about science remains unanswered. As a future journalist, I can still see journalism flourishing in the world of science and technology. Like any other job, being a writer or blogger for science entails problems. Low and late pay and other occasional work-related problems are all part of a job and these are all part of journalism. The tip is to find ways on how to put a stop to these problems inside the office or workplace, not to avoid and leave science blogging to scientists. Journalists should find ways to survive as science bloggers and keep blogs about science alive and kicking.