Covering Science in Cyberspace

March 14, 2007

Yeah, but who’s going to build it?

The first two presentations this morning presented very interesting-looking web sites with very vague sources of funding and unnamed contributors.

I understand that everyone at this conference works for different publications, and that resorting to media consortiums and non-profit sites with unnamed editors is a way to stay on safe ground. But come on, folks.

A site run by some non-specified government agency or consortium of competitors is a site run by no one. Fantasies of large staffs and pie-in-the-sky ideas of experts contributing for free will not lead anywhere.

Larry Gonick pointed out that this was a conceptual exercise, because it’s easier to do everything than to make small, focused suggestions, and there were only a couple of hours yesterday to work on this. Fine. But I’d be very curious to hear more practical ideas about how such grandiose plans might actually be put into action today in the discussion of the presentations.

Comments

Let’s get Vikki to invite a business expert next time. There’s a big disconnect between those of us who provide content for sites and those who make the financial decisions. It’s always seemed a giant black box to me - and a primer on online business models might not be a bad idea for us journalists.


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This blog was written by prominent science journalists and science communicators who attended the Knight Digital Media Center Best Practices: Covering Science in Cyberspace seminar.

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