Austin Frakt was interviewed at Academy Health and did a terrific job of explaining why blogging matters. He argues that blogging helps bridge the crevasse separating "researchers who know the body of scholarly work but may not necessarily be closely following the policy debate and journalists and policymakers who know what the issues of the day are, but not the relevant research." He makes excellent points about problems in the expense of communicating and the timing of the release of information, and how blogging helps solve them.
Austin said that it used to be that you communicated science to policy makers through a press release. Even more important, I think, was travelling to Washington for conversations with Congressional (or other governmental) staff. (One was taught to get your argument on a single sheet of paper, no one who mattered would ever turn a page.) What has emerged is a policy discourse process built on three electronic communication layers. There is the twitterverse, where journalists and widely read bloggers process events on a time scale of minutes and hours. A tweet, however, can serve as a headline for a linked blog post, where an academic or think tank blogger frames an argument in a few hundred words. A good academic blog post, in turn, will link to the academic literature, which is increasingly online (but unfortunately not that accessible, unless you have access rights at a university library). The net result, I think, is that more scientific evidence gets into elite discourse than when I started my university career in the 1980s, and it gets there faster.
I have no idea whether this has made a difference in the quality of political debate or policy decision making.
So, I think of academic blogging as a kind of second career in science journalism. I'm doing a public service, I hope, by making academic writing on health care accessible to a broader audience.
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