Science bloggers find new homes, but ad controversies continue
In July, as we noted here, a controversy over corporate blogs masquerading as news sent some of the smartest folks at ScienceBlogs fleeing to other nests. Most have now settled down somewhere, and, I’m happy to say, are back at work. David Dobbs and Maryn McKenna are now at Wired Science. Deb Blum is blogging at PLoS. Rebecca Skloot, as far as we can tell, is still touring for her book and has not resurfaced with a blog, although I do see her on Twitter.
Other science bloggers have moved around, too. Dobbs sent me a pdf from somewhere that tracked these movements, and it looks like one of those impossibly complex biological-pathway flow charts, or a Venn diagram from hell. Check out Carl Zimmer‘s list to see where your favorite science bloggers can be found. And see this update from Phil Yam at Scientific American.
Be careful if you’re looking for others on Google; the links to their old blogs will, of course, still be there, as I found out when I inserted an incorrect link recently for Bora Zivkovic, who is now moderating the science-blogging community at Scientific American.
Sadly, however, the problem of corporate public relations masquerading as news–as at ScienceBlogs–continues. The Forbes blog site, which I recently praised here for its medical coverage, is now going to be running corporate blogs, as Advertising Age reports in a story entitled “Forbes’ New Advertising Pitch: Wanna Buy a Blog?”
“This isn’t the ‘sponsored post’ of yore; rather, it is giving advocacy groups or corporations such as Ford or Pfizer the same voice and same distribution tools as Forbes staffers, not to mention the Forbes brand,” Michael Learmonth reports.
As a result, I’m no longer bullish on Forbes blogs. If Prizer or United Healthcare, or some similar leviathan can run a blog on Forbes, then I no longer trust the site’s medical coverage. Forbes reporters would find it difficult, I imagine, to post an item critical of a company that has bought its own blog on the site.
Maybe I’m wrong, but we can’t know. And, therefore, we can’t trust the reporting.
- Paul Raeburn
September 29th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Paul, I’d hate to see you flush Matthew Herper with the corporate bilge. He knows pharma better than most and I’ve never known him to pull a punch.
Steve
September 29th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
Steve,
You’re right about Herper. But he’s in a tricky situation now. I suppose Forbes might develop a good track record and persuade me I shouldn’t have worried.
Forbes has a distinct political outlook; we’ve always known that. But making an ad look exactly like a news story–which is what Forbes is doing with its blogs–is troubling.