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"Physics Today" Versus "Scientific Blogging"
By Alex Antunes | July 28th 2009 12:00 PM | 7 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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About Alex Antunes

In "The Sky By Day", Dr. Alex Antunes serves twice-weekly slices of life from the sometimes strange, sometimes oddly normal workday of a NASA astrophysicist. Readers get the inside scoop on what... Full Bio

Time for a quick compare-and-contrast. Here is what "Physics Today" lists as their top stories and most popular articles for July 2009:

Guessing that the equivalence to 'top stories' and 'most popular' is our ScientificBlogging.com 'most recent' and 'most popular' (still listed even though not recent), we have:
Is PT timely, are we relevant, just how well do we match up to "Physics Today"?

Alex, the daytime astronomer
The Daytime Astronomer, Tues&Fri here, via RSS feed, and twitter @skyday

Comments

Hank's picture
I'm not sure it's possible to make a decent comparison, even in an abstract thought community like this.  Scientific Blogging is an at-will community interested in science outreach and Physics Today has editorial meetings and traffic analyses where they examine what articles have been popular in order to gauge what they should write about.

Writers here write what writers want to write about and Physics Today writers write what a CEO, salespeople, editors and the audience want them to write about.

I am not knocking them (disclosure: I get Physics World, not Physics Today) but there's no way to have the same thought go into type of content when people are basically writing for fun and the money they make is an afterthought.

Hank Campbell | 07/28/09 | 12:19 PM
Not a terribly useful comparison. Age plays a crucial role in determining what appears here, but not at Physics Today. Some of the articles you list are relatively recent, but of very limited interest.

Anonymous (not verified) | 07/29/09 | 02:32 AM
The listings in the email alert you received are based on popularity of the articles from our web visitors, not what the editors consider to be the most important.

As the manager of the Physics Today web site perhaps I should clarify what the difference is between the two terms used in the email. "Top stories" specifically refers to the popularity of our online content e.g. news we highlight from elsewhere or write in house that are "time sensitive" or cannot be done on the same scale in print (e.g. videos or multiple photos). "Most popular" refers to the print edition. The print edition usually consists of in-depth analysis or review articles that go through significant peer review (the hybrid story above for example is based on interviews with over 40 people and went through six stages of peer review).

Editorial decisions on what subjects to write about have never been based on web traffic. We rely more on our own research of journal papers, visits to meetings, and from what we hear and ask questions about from the community.

A better grasp of what stories the editors choose can be found by going to the Physics Today homepage (http://physicstoday.org )and look at the main highlight box, as we discuss what to pick in a monthly news meeting.

Regards

Sincerely

Paul Guinnessy

Paul Guinnessy (not verified) | 07/29/09 | 09:58 AM
Becky Jungbauer's picture
Regardless of whether this particular comparison is accurate, the general idea is a good one - I do wonder how Scientific Blogging compares/contrasts with other sites like us.

Becky Jungbauer | 07/29/09 | 16:19 PM
Hank's picture
I do too, except I can't find any like us.   NPG is losing money blogging but they don't do it separate from the Empire so it's tough to compare their network to ours.     Word is that Seed magazine suspended publication again so Scienceblogs is the profitable part of that company but they're mostly individual blogs rather than our feature style, though they have to be the closest to us in terms of the 'no editors' model.   There may be others (and apologies if I don't know about you, I spend all day reading good stuff here so I don't get out there much).

Paul Guinnessy seems to have objected to my comment that what the audience likes matters in editorial decisions.    One of us is either fooling himself or is evidence of the elitist mentality that plagues old media.

Hank Campbell | 07/29/09 | 18:54 PM
Becky Jungbauer's picture
One of us is either fooling himself or is evidence of the elitist mentality that plagues old media.

Good thing you aren't affiliated with elitism in any way. :)

Becky Jungbauer | 07/29/09 | 19:09 PM
Hank's picture
Well, I make it look good.

Hank Campbell | 07/29/09 | 19:14 PM

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