All the Science That’s Fit to Blog - Presenting at ARCS!

Post originally written for Advancing Research Communication & Scholarship 2015 conference blog.

Since the 1980's, social science and mass communication researchers have been peeling back the sociological layers of the news process. Galtung and Ruge's 1973 exploration of news values, or the qualitative aspects by which news gatekeepers evaluate potential news stories, is cited to this day by researchers studying journalists' and editors' news judgments.

In the 1990s, with updates since, Shoemaker and Reese suggested an interesting framework by which researchers and practitioners could understand the factors that influence mass media content: the Hierarchy of Influences model.

Using this model, researchers could begin to tease apart the different factors that influence media content, from journalists' individual interests and beliefs, to media routines including news values, to extramedia or social institution forces such as markets, audiences, research paper embargoes and press release content. At the highest level, social systems or ideologies of societies also guide the form and content of media products.

 

Shoemaker & Reese's Hierarchy of Influences model

But what about science blogs? How can we understand the framework in which science bloggers make decisions about their content, what it will look like and what it will cover? What is blogworthy, in a sense? And is blogworthiness guided only by the individual interests of the blogger, or also by emergent blog routines and forces beyond the blog, including both traditional news values as well as scientific and academic publishing values?

Bloggers, like online journalists, probably exert more influence on the blog product as individuals.

"In online journalism, routines remain […] unsolidified — perhaps because early enthusiasm for the Internet's potential for hypertextuality, multimediality and interactivity has not yet been matched by what journalism organizations actually do on the Web. […] it seems likely that there are increasingly situations where a lack of the sort of established routines that Shoemaker and Reese describe allows individuals to have greater influence on newer media than was originally foreseen in the hierarchy of influences model" – Susan Keith

 

Shoemaker & Reese's Hierarchy of Influences model, Adapted for Blogs?

These questions about the factors that guide blog content, including the individual beliefs and values of the blogger, blog routines and norms, and potential blog community factors, are the kind of questions I'm trying to address with my dissertation research at the Manship School of Mass Communication, Louisiana State University.

With my dissertation underway (now officially titled All the Science That's Fit to Blog), I've been interviewing and surveying science bloggers about their practices. So far, I've interviewed 51 science bloggers, from a range of independent blogs and blog networks. I've also conducted a survey of over 600 science bloggers to extend and quantify some of the observations made from the 51 qualitative interviews.

There do in fact seem to be a range of factors that influence blog content, from multiple levels of the Hierarchy of Influences model.

"I think that's one of the huge benefits of blogging, is, it's really a reflection of me. And unlike science, where the human side, the "I am a human" scientist gets left out sometimes, and newspapers or magazines where the magazine has the identity of the author, like, this is coming from me." - #MySciBlog Interview Transcript

I'm excited to be presenting results of my dissertation work, including qualitative analysis results of my interviews with science bloggers and #MySciBlog survey results, at ARCS conference.

ARCS will be held in Philadelphia, April 26 - 28, 2015, so if you are interested in hearing about my dissertation research, or participating in a conversation about the future of science blogging for both science journalism and scholarly communication, be sure to show up!

 Registration for ARCS is open through March 30th, 2015. While the call for workshops and round table sessions has closed, organizers are still accepting proposals for posters and 24X7 (short) talks.

Have questions about the future of science blogging and social media more broadly for scholarly as well as popular communication of science? I'll also be moderating a round-table at ARCS on this topic, so submit your questions to me here or on Twitter, and I'll be sure to address them to our round-table panel members.