I came across an interesting blog post on scienceblogs.com, about the difference (or lack thereof) between live blogging a conference, and reporting on a conference. I’ve been privy to conversations happening at conferences and workshops I didn’t actually attend, via Twitter and Facebook friends, and I have been present at events that were being “liveblogged”. But it never occurred to me that journalists might object:
At a recent meeting at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York state, Daniel MacArthur from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom, brought into focus how fuzzy the line between journalist and scientist is becoming. In addition to reporting on genetic variation in a gene that is active in fast muscle fibers at The Biology of Genomes meeting, MacArthur wrote several on the spot blog posts covering advances discussed by the participants. Francis Collins also mentioned results on his new Web site.
A specialized Web-based news service, Genomeweb, complained. To attend CSHL meetings, reporters agree to obtain permission from a speaker before writing up any results. But MacArthur didn’t have to click that box when he registered and was free to report without getting any go-ahead. Several other participants were twittering, says CSHL meetings organizer David Stewart. “They weren’t held to the same standards” as the media, says Stewart.
The liveblogger in question, Daniel MacArthur, had this to say about it:
However, I do want to emphasise the importance in general of conference organisers encouraging direct, crowd-sourced reporting of scientific data through online media. Science benefits from the open communication of data to the broadest possible audience (not only scientists, but also the wider community). Some conferences do benefit from sealing themselves off from the outside world, allowing freer exchange of ideas between participants – but meetings that are interested in increasing the impact of their presentations on the community as a whole would be well-served by actively embracing audience blogging.
It’s worth mentioning here that most of the dangers of live-blogging are (in my mind at least) generally over-stated. For instance, the risk of being scooped due to data posted on the web seems rather far-fetched given that most of the potential scoopers are already sitting in the audience watching the presentation. There is a fear that live-blogging distracts people from watching the seminar; I would argue in response that – given the number of people I see programming or working on their grant submission in genomics meetings – we should be grateful that live-bloggers are actually engaging directly with the material being presented.
I guess I just always figured presentations at conferences were public events, and therefore fair game for whoever wanted to post, tweet, or otherwise write about any data, results, conversations, experiences, etc. they found interesting. I’m not sure if the conferences I attend have a policy similar to that of CHSL, about asking for permission from the presenter before writing about their work. But I kindof doubt it, because the proceedings of these conferences (CHI, CSCW, GROUP, etc.) are considered to be archival publications, rather than preliminary results or works-in-progress. However, the conversations happening at the CSST workshop last week were… well, what? Public? Private? Blog-worthy? Newsworthy? Nobody asked us if we minded our comments being shared widely and “persistantly”. I wouldn’t have expected them to.
