Goodbye, Old Blog – Hello, New Blog

Waving goodbye. Waving hello. Photo credit: Andrew Kruse. Shared under a Creative Commons license. Click for more information.

The original version of this blog was launched on a blog network called SciLogs, which announced earlier this month that it will be shutting down in September. This marks the end of Communication Breakdown, but the beginning of my new blog, Science Communication Breakdown – the blog that you are, in fact, reading right now.

One Reason Scientists and Science Writers Want to Talk About Game of Thrones

Photo credit: TaylorHerring. Shared under a Creative Commons license. Click for more information.

From dragons and dire wolves to the arid Red Waste and the frozen lands beyond the Wall, Game of Thrones is teeming with exotic creatures and habitats. It’s also teeming with violence, disease and cultural practices that often swing from pseudo-historical to utterly bizarre.

And, in an impressive collection of blog posts, there are scientists and science writers who want to talk about Game of Thrones and the world in which it takes place.

Black Girl Nerds: an Interview with Jamie Broadnax

Jamie Broadnax is the founder of Black Girl Nerds (BGN), a blog and podcast that covers a lot of topics, many of which are related to entertainment and pop culture. But BGN also covers issues related to tech and STEM in general.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Broadnax about things like the creation of BGN, how she decides what issues to cover, how she balances pop culture and sci/tech, and the importance of diversity for STEM.

A (Podcast) Conversation About Science Communication and Outreach

Photo credit: Chris Heidenreich. Retrieved via Flickr, shared under a Creative Commons license. Click for more information.

Want to hear me talk about some of the nuts and bolts of science communication? Now’s your chance.

The Book for Science Bloggers (or Anyone Thinking About Starting a Blog)

A new book hit shelves on March 1. The book, Science Blogging: The Essential Guide, is specifically aimed at helping two groups of people: those who have already launched science blogs, and those who are thinking about launching science blogs. That said, the book would be useful for anyone interested in blogging – regardless of what the blog is about.

Changes At WIRED (And Questions)

Earlier this month, WIRED unveiled a new design for its Science Blogs platform. But the re-design is only the most visible change to WIRED’s science coverage. There are plenty of other recent changes as well.

Big Changes at the Scientific American Blog Network

Scientific American posted an announcement Dec. 15, stating that editors will be “reshaping” the Scientific American Blog Network and releasing new editorial guidelines for the network. What wasn’t entirely clear in the post, titled “A New Vision For Scientific American’s Blog Network,” was that a number of blogs on the network have been eliminated.

Seasonal Science Stories: Using the Calendar as Your News Hook

Detail from poster for “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” (1964). Artist unknown. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons. Click on image to link to full poster.

Reporters and bloggers write in a variety of styles for a variety of audiences, but one of the things that every blog post or news item needs to do is explain to readers why the writer is telling this story now. What’s the news hook?

Science Blogging and Citations

Photo credit: North Carolina State University

Paige Brown Jarreau, author of the SciLogs blog From The Lab Bench, recently wrote a lengthy post on the science of science blogging. The post included a lengthy list of related journal articles, and one of them caught my eye: “Do blog citations correlate with a higher number of future citations?” With Paige’s blessing, I decided to unpack that particular paper a bit.