According to the current state of affairs, science blogs should end at the end of 2022. This also applies to my blog “Health Check”. As stated in the announcement, I’m not sure if I’m going to continue anywhere else or give up after all these years of blogging on public health and other flotsam. There are enough blogs in this area.
A marginal observation may be of interest in this context. The public health institutions, from the Federal Center for Health Education to the Robert Koch Institute, are practically all active on twitter, facebook & co. Many also have a regular newsletter. These are mainly formats focused on “broadcasting”. Discursive formats such as blogs are obviously difficult to use, perhaps because blogs are not as easy to maintain as a twitter account. If public health institutions offer blogs with a comment function at all, there is often silence.
At the Federal Association for Prevention and Health Promotion (BVPG) For example, there is a blogbut you have to search a long time before you find a comment under one of the posts.
It is irritatingly similarly silent in the Public health blog section of wissenschaftskommunikation.de zu, a joint project of Wissenschaft im Dialog (WiD), the National Institute for Science Communication (NaWiK) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Irritating, because science communication is the core concern of this project. However, there are hardly any comments in the other subject areas either.
The blog „We CaRe“ of the German Cancer Research Center (dkfz) does not seem to have gotten past the first publication in 2016: 1 contribution, 0 comments.
At the Federal Center for Health Education (BZga) there is still one Link to a blog for the Know Your Limit Alcohol Prevention Projectbut the link only leads to an error message: “Page not found”.
There’s a little more life on the side “Know what works – Cochrane blogs in German”, but this is a blog without a comment function, you can only distribute likes here. After all, this happens regularly, often with very positive ratings, a friendly readership.
The lack of comments on institutional public health blogs is not a German problem: Also on the CDC blog you can click through rows of posts without coming across comments.
Regardless of whether the heyday of blogs is over anyway, discursive formats of science communication do not seem to be a sure-fire success in public health institutions. Is a kind of “public-private partnership” more popular here? The institutions announce something, the community blogs and discusses?