I’ve onoy recently realized is the fact that while scienceblogs has a sort of unofficial mantra of sciencebloggers good, science journalists bad there is failure to recognise that bloggers are also journalists to some extent.

Bloggers have a reputation of being biased amateurs of variable skill and dubious reliability. Traditional reporters have a reputation for being highly skilled professionals, of impeccable reliability, who practise ‘balanced’ reporting.

In other words – bloggers have the reputation they deserve, and are thus treated with a slightly more appropriate degree of skepticism. Traditional reporters, on the other hand, have a wholly undeserved reputation.

Never finished Gould – teaching and real life kept getting in the way

I don’t think I’m ready to say why I left Sb beyond noting a general feeling that it was time to move on after over three years.

Doh!

I’ve frequented the scienceblogs site for a few years but have started to get somewhat disillusioned with it of late.
There is the inevitable problem inherent to any popular messageboard that cliques form that cannot stand dissent (just try criticising something that PZ has posted and see how long it takes for you to get labelled a ‘concern troll’ and attacked by his sycophants. The second problem is that, while the idea of a popular science messageboard is good in principle it doesnt work in practice. Many debates inevitably stray away from empirical data towards political opinions. Its impossible to have a straighforward discussion in such a circumstance since the participants are using different groundrules. And finally one thing I’ve onoy recently realized is the fact that while scienceblogs has a sort of unofficial mantra of sciencebloggers good, science journalists bad there is failure to recognise that bloggers are also journalists to some extent. Quite often bloggers are just as guilty of the sort of misdemeanors that they accuse journalists of doing (sloppy reading of manuscripts, bad statistical analysis, failure to fact-check etc). And yet blogging exposes their shoddy work to far more people than would ever read the original manuscript.
Good journalism has at least some sort of (editorial) review before its published (well at least thats the theory). Science bloggers have no such quality control mechanism and quite often it shows up in their work.

I confess I’m curious, however, why you left Scienceblogs.

Hey — did you ever finish reading Gould’s Structure of Ev Theory?

Ted