This week’s Science Saturday on bloggingheads.tv features Carl Zimmer and Phil “Bad Astronomy” Plait:
It’s a wide-ranging conversation, covering topics in astronomy, why people believe crazy things, how the Internet can help, and the death of newspapers and their eventual replacement by blogs. Plait is really energetic (he spends a couple of minutes talking over Zimmer without even noticing), making it a livelier-than-usual conversation.
I’m not sure I agree with him about newspapers, though. What he rattles off is more or less the standard triumphalist-blogger line– newspapers are too slow, journalists don’t know enough about what they right, bloggers can do better– and it suffers from the standard triumphalist-blogger flaws.
Chef among these is the casual way in which he brushes off the idea of dedicated reporting staff. While it’s true that there are situations in which you can get all the information you need from volunteer bloggers, I think this results in really spotty coverage. On-the-scene reporting from countries without widespread broadband Internet is going to be lacking, and some of those places are awfully important. And even if you restrict the discussion to science journalism (which is how the topic came up), trying to replace science journalists with blogging scientists will result in dramatically skewed coverage, depending on where the bloggers are. Look at the science blogosphere now, for example: you get excellent coverage of fields in which crazy people abound– evolutionary biology, public health, climate change– and really spotty coverage of anything else.
(OK, fine, that’s not too different from the Science Times, but I’d like to think we could do better)
I also don’t buy the line that newspapers are dying because they can’t keep up with the lean, mean blogosphere. What really killed the newspaper business is complicated, but I tend to agree with Fred Clark’s take, which puts a lot of blame on Wall Street, for demanding unreasonable returns on investment from a business that has never worked that way.
Those quibbles aside, it’s a good episode, and there’s a lot of fun stuff in the conversation. There are worse ways to kill time on a Sunday.