BLOGGING FROM THE NICHES

Abstract

Digital media lower barriers to entry and offer a “long tail” of specialized subject matter, providing scientist bloggers with the ability to contest traditional science news norms, thereby overcoming challenges associated with sourcing practices in science journalism. This study analyzes the sources of 41 science bloggers that discussed two different topics, global warming and intelligent design, between 2004 and 2007. The 3576 sources in these 300 posts are hand-coded by type of website. Results indicate that science bloggers often link to blogs and the online articles of traditional news media, similar to political bloggers writing about the same topics. Science bloggers also link heavily to academic and non-profit sources, differing from political bloggers in this study as well as previous research. In conclusion, science bloggers writing about science topics rely on conventional blog linking practices while expanding those voices which get heard online, adding complexity to online science news.

Keywords:

• blogs
• hyperlinks
• science journalism
• sourcing

Acknowledgements

We thank our coder, Candace Wells. We give special thanks to the School of Communication and the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University for funding this research. We are also indebted to Professor James Ettema and Professor Peter Miller for providing helpful feedback and supporting our project.

Notes

1. For the purpose of this study, we define weblogs, or blogs, as online publications consisting of a series of entries or posts usually presented in reverse-chronological order. In addition, blogs allow visitors to publicly comment on these entries or posts.

2. See http://www.dailykos.com/, accessed 30 May 2009; http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/, accessed 30 May 2009.

3. The authors also ran analyses with hyperlinked sources only. Although adding non-hyperlinked sources slightly changed the reported means, there were no differences in significance tests.