no news is weird news (a very long-winded post, not at all about Paris)

While traveling, I haven't been reading the internets nearly as much.  This is largely intentional, since I wanted to be doing different things on my trip than I do at home, including doing different things when I'm sitting in my Parisian apartment than I do when sitting in my New York apartment.  However, I've still been more or less keeping up with certain of my favorite blogs, which means I have a very very basic knowledge of recent world news (I'm aware that oil has stopped gushing forth from the ocean and the economy continues in a state of mild-to-medium suckiness, if you average out the reports ranging from "full recovery!" to "disaster!" and that many people are very offended about issues that are in no way new, and I assume by my not having heard of it that there have been no major wars declared involving the United States and that New York City is still more or less standing and not entirely bankrupt) but a much more detailed knowledge of various friends' and acquaintances' children, dogs, and various friendship/ career/ romance/ general happiness quests.

My feed reader is divided up into several categories (there used to be more, including two different categories for academic journal feeds; I culled it substantially before coming to Paris): Friends (people I actually know, very often in real life), People (personal blogs of people I don't know, generally grad students or twenty-first-century hippies who write about the homemade cheese they are making from the milk of their very own goats), Comics, New York Events, Articles (at this point, this section only includes Slate, which I have been reading with probably-absurd dedication for about eight years, although I expect it to flesh out again in time), Econ blogs (a revolving bunch, heavily tilted toward self-professed libertarians, whom proper libertarians tell me are actually not such), and Science Blogs.  (Just so you know, it's not that I don't read the news at all.  I make it through much of the paper New York Times on weekends, and I use the NYT skimmer when I'm at home, and variously check for updates on the slatest, cnn.com, and washingtonpost.com.  I am feeling very defensive, now that I'm in Europe, about my total unfamiliarity with BBC news.  I am not a stupid American!)

Anyway, Science Blogs.  This is a group that has fluctuated a lot in size and may be on the verge of winking out or being incorporated elsewhere; I only include in this category blogs that are about science (i.e. Carl Zimmer's) or about the doing of science, and the latter has recently become a lot less interesting to me.  Many of the science blogs I follow are, or have been affiliated with ScienceBlogs.com, and others are interested in the current kerfluffle there, so I have been reading (or, usually, skimming) a lot about it.

Here is the issue, as I understand it: ScienceBlogs.com is run by Seed Media Group, which was the parent company of the recently-defunct Seed Magazine.  The parent company has some other concerns as well, but ScienceBlogs.com is its chief web outlet.  The site is exactly what it sounds like - a family of blogs.  It is more, I am informed, than a simple indexing; there is a lot of cross-talk and cross-posting among blogs, and the bloggers feel a sense of community.  While they do get paid, the amount is probably not huge (they all have other jobs as scientists or science writers), and most of them do it simply because they are devoted to science and like blogging.  Now, recently, Seed Media Group invited a blog sponsored by Pepsi to join ScienceBlogs.  Supposedly, the blog would be a real scientific exploration of nutrition and whatnot (apparently no posts ever appeared), although still sponsored by Pepsi.  There was a vast outpouring of rage, in response to which - over the course of a few days - Seed first decided to label Pepsi's blog an "advertorial" and then decided to pull it entirely.

So, win for the little guy, right?  Evil corporate behemoth slain by valiant science bloggers?  Um, no.  The science bloggerati are still inflamed, and they are still leaving ScienceBlogs in bunches.  They are also predicting the site's demise and a new age of science blogging.  Moreover they are saying that at the height of its power, Seed Media Group lost its sense of ethics, and its editorial objectivity has been called into question.

Yawn.  I know that bloggers are self-important, because apparently I am one, but this is ridiculous.  Perhaps Seed Media Group will be driven into the ground, but I suspect that if so, this will be merely one strike among many, two others being the demise of the magazine (its original focus) and the general troubles of ad-supported internet media.  Losing a few science bloggers is not going to materially hurt ScienceBlogs.com, in my opinion, because so far the human race has not produced a paucity of people with a great deal to say (um, myself included) so it is not like it is going to be impossible to replace them.  

Mostly I am amused by the Great Revelation that a company wishes to make money, and that sometimes its actions are influenced by that  We saw something similar when we learned that the banks who had been making or selling troubled mortgages sometimes also bet against them, although perhaps this is worse because people have more idealism about the media than about banks (?).  But every publication has a bias; most don't state them outright, although a reasonably-informed reader can usually tell.  That doesn't make them bad publications.  Magazines like Seed, which are much more features than news, naturally must have a bias - they have to choose what out of all the zillions of possible articles to publish, and that will be informed by a worldview.  As will who their advertisers are.  Ideally, the worldview and the articles shape who advertises in the magazine, but of course it goes the other way around as well.  There's a reason why Cosmo has never (to my knowledge) published an article called You Are Fine As You Are Now Stop Wasting Your Money on Endless Different Shades of Eyeshadow, instead publishing endless articles called, more or less, You Are Fine As You Are But Will Be So Much Better With This Brand-New Eyeshadow... is this because every woman's eyeshadow needs change every month?  Is it because they are a slave of their advertisers?  No, it's because they know that they are beholden to their advertisers, who give them the money that keeps them afloat, and therefore must keep their worldview sympathetic to their cause.  

Moreover, the people at Seed probably didn't add the Pepsi blog for fun or out of evilness.  They probably did it because it offered a reliable profit stream that they very much needed.  In other words, the Pepsi blog would (in my conjecture) have subsidized the infrastructure that the other blogs run on.

Perhaps if I were a member of ScienceBlogs, I would now be offended enough to leave because somebody in my domain was selling something, and I would presumably feel greater pride in being on Science Blogs than I do in being on Blogspot.  But I hope I would not be naive enough to think that my employer was anything other than a corporation, with perhaps a social mission (spreading science knowledge to the masses, etc.) but definitely a desire (and need) to turn a profit.