Simon Owens, an associate editor of PBS’s MediaShift, recently posted an assessment of the H1N1 blogosphere. He touches on the benefits of H1N1 blogs (rapid spread of information) and their drawbacks (rapid spread of misinformation) — and the difficulty, for a general reader, of judging their validity.
So how do you figure out which bloggers to trust? One obvious answer: check out their backgrounds. Owens profiles one named Vincent Racaniello — of Virology Blog. Racaniello is a professor of microbiology at Columbia University, so it’s pretty safe to assume that he’s on the right track. Racaniello himself says, “You don’t know who to believe. So I’m trying to tell people, ‘I’ve been working on viruses all these years, and I’m trying to tell you what I think is right.’” You’ll find Racaniello’s flu explainers here.
Professional background isn’t everything, though. Smart, careful lay bloggers can be great sources, too. Owens gives the example of Crawford Kilian of H5N1 — who has no biology degree but who wanted to learn about influenza and share the knowledge. Kilian says he wants “to be judged by [...] the quality of people I link to.” He explains that he tries “to find the most reliable, scientifically minded people that I can, possibly the most reliable journalists who also understand what the heck is going on, and present at least the highlights of what these people are turning up.”
Owens’s entire piece is well worth reading and doesn’t simply champion blogs. In fact the article ends, quoting Racaniello, on an ambiguous note about their utility vis-à-vis H1N1: “Thirty years ago [...] all the false stuff [on vaccines] would not be out there, and so in this regard I think in some ways we’re going backwards.”
For a list of H1N1 bloggers recommended by the Harvard Nieman Foundation Guide to Covering Pandemic Flu, click here. (We just profiled the full guide here.)