Daniel Schorr
Image c/o Gawker.com

Today I was going through my listserv emails (which I am terribly behind on), and one from the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) featured a link to an obituary in the New York Times about Daniel Schorr.  I had never heard of Schorr, but the presence of his obituary on the SEJ listserv meant he must have been a big deal, so I was inspired to check it out.

Below is an excerpt from the obituary:

At CBS, Mr. Schorr won three Emmy Awards for his coverage of the Watergate scandal and took pride in his often blunt reporting on the administration. In one instance he hurriedly began broadcasting after acquiring a copy of Nixon’s notorious “enemies list” only to discover in reading the names aloud that his was No. 17.

Nixon was so angered by Mr. Schorr’s reporting that he was said to have ordered the F.B.I. to investigate him.
“I consider my presence on the enemies list,” he said in a 2009 interview with The Gazette of Montgomery County, Md., “a greater tribute than the Emmys list.”

What Schorr said about being on the enemies list really struck a cord for me.  Schorr was right- his presence on the enemies list was a sign of a job well done, a testament to his aggressive reporting, and telling a story that needed to be told– no matter the cost.  Veracity, accuracy and intellectual honesty are some of the founding
pillars of journalism.  Although journalists may have a bad rap nowadays because there are those who do not abide by these principles, I believe very strongly in journalism in its purest form.  Call me an idealist.

Joan Root
Image c/o Adelaide Now

Schorr’s attitude makes him a hero in my eyes.  He believed so strongly in a story, that he pursued it, no matter the cost, no matter the consequences.  It is the mark of a great investigative reporter.  It is the mark of a hero in my eyes.  Growing up as a kid interested in the animals and environments of our planet, I read a lot of magazines and watched a lot of TV shows that featured the work of conservationists.  I saw stories on people like Joan Root and Dian Fossey- people who died because they wouldn’t give up on a cause they believed in, no matter how many threats they received, or how dangerous it was to continue their work.  Nothing could deter them from what needed to be done, what they believed in.  It became the sign of a hero for me.

Dian Fossey
Image c/o CenterBlog

As I now find myself straddling journalism and conservation, I find that the ideals I most revere in both disciplines are one and the same.  Tell a story that needs to be told, uncover wrongdoings and expose those responsible, and pursue what you believe in no matter the cost.

It’s also my impression that the folks who have picked up their marbles and left the scene are mostly journalists too. The journos are folks who know all about the church-state wall between editorial and advertising, know why it exists, know why that wall is crucial to establishing and nurturing trust in what they write. Bloggers who have decided to remain tend to be scientists who have made their reputations in other venues and see blogging as a hobby.

Whereas scientists get their panties in a twist over science vs. pseudoscience, it is the journalists that get all knotted up over editorial vs. advertising.  Both pseudoscience and advertorial writing are one and the same- they are both a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  At the end of the day it comes down to ethics and integrity.

Yellow Mongooses mating, image c/o Wikimedia Commons

It’s sex week on The Loom. Carl Zimmer has a stack of papers on the evolution of sex that need blogging, so he will be covering the topic all week long.  Now, if you haven’t read any of  his stuff on sex, you may want to begin by delving into the world of kinky duck sex.  I owe Carl a special thank you for his Science Online 2010 discussion on duck genitalia, for it not, I may not have been the fasted tweeter in the South to respond to a trivia question regarding the shape of a duck’s penis, and thereby would never have won a copy of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (which, by the way, is a FANTASTIC read!)

Yes, journalism, especially print media, has been in trouble.  With the evolution of journalism from print to web, things can get confusing, and many media organizations are still adapting.  These organizations are still learning how to profit on the web, such as charging for content versus giving it away for free.  In print media, most of the funds come from advertising, and not from the fee you pay for your morning paper.  In print, it is usually easier to tell an ad from an editorial piece, but with web layouts and dynamic pages, sometimes things can get a bit murky.  Responsible media organizations need to make sure the reader knows when editorial content ends and advertising content begins.

In a leaked letter from Adam Bly to the Sciblings, he explains the importance of advertising to Seed Media, and the industry at large:

SB, like nearly all free content sites, is sustainable because of advertising. But advertising is itself highly unpredictable, as the last year has shown the industry. And securing advertising around topics like physics and evolution is even more challenging as the dearth of ad pages in science magazines indicates. We started experimenting with sponsored blogs a couple of years ago and decided to market long-term sponsorship contracts instead of sporadic advertising contracts. This is not a new idea: respected magazines have been doing the same thing for years (think Atlantic Ideas Festival going on now or The New Yorker Festival, where representatives of sponsoring companies sit on stage alongside writers and thinkers, or advertorials where companies pay to create content — clearly marked as such — instead of just running an ad).

At the end of this excerpt though is the key point- when sponsored blogs are present, they must CLEARLY MARKED AS SUCH.  In a blog post about the scandal, Superbug shared specific guidelines from  American Society of Magazine Editors that state:

We recommend the following standards (subject to change as the medium evolves):
The home page and all subsequent pages of a publication’s Web site should display the publication’s name and logo prominently, in order to clarify who controls the content of the site.
All online pages should clearly distinguish between editorial and advertising or sponsored content. If any content comes from a source other than the editors, it should be clearly labeled. A magazine’s name or logo should not be used in a way that suggests editorial endorsement of an advertiser. The site’s sponsorship policies should be clearly noted, either in text accompanying the article or on a disclosure page (see item 8), to clarify that the sponsor had no input regarding the content.
Hypertext links that appear within the editorial content of a site, including those within graphics, should be at the discretion of the editors. If links are paid for by advertisers, that should be disclosed to users.
Special advertising or “advertorial” features should be labelled as such.

In the case of the Pepsi blog, Food Frontiers, it was not clearly marked as advertising.  There was no transparency.  Instead, the blog sat alongside those of pre-established, respected scientists and writers who earned their invitation to be a part of ScienceBlogs through respect.  David Dobbs wrote a great post on the matter.  Dobbs was just one of many Sciblings who took part in a mass exodus from ScienceBlogs and have been establishing new homes elsewhere on the web…and so now I remind you all to update your RSS feeds and blogrolls, as I have just done, to make sure you support all these wonderful science bloggers on their journeys to new homes on the web.

It is with great sadness that I watch all these bloggers leave ScienceBlogs and find new homes, and marks a changing landscape in the blogosphere.  I urge you all to read Bora’s post on the changing science blogging ecosystem- I cried while reading it.  PZ Myers may have the top-ranked science blog out there, but to me, Bora is the center of the science blogging universe.  To see him leave ScienceBlogs really means the end of an era.

This new era is a strange one.  For nearly two years, I have held ScienceBlogs in high regard.  I’d dreamt of one day being invited to be a Scibling, something I viewed as an honor.  But the recent actions of Seed have tainted that respect, and left a funny taste in my mouth….sort of like when you burp hot-dog flavor while eating an ice-cream cone hours later.  The bad taste may subside, but it all depends on how Seed handles itself in the near future.  I know there are still concerns and issues with those who have chosen to remain at ScienceBlogs, but that several of those individuals are seeking big changes from Seed in order to stay put.  Hopefully their needs are met.  The way Seed chooses to handle itself from here on out will dictate whether or not it will be able to regain the respect it once had.