Kevin Zelnio - Deep Sea News

Today we have another interview in our Get To Know A ScienceBlogger Series!  Today’s interview is with Kevin Zelnio. Kevin is a marine biologist and writer. He has studied the ecology and evolution of animals living around underwater volcanoes and described several new species of anemone and shrimp. Kevin is the assistant editor for Deep Sea News, where he contributes articles on marine science. He is now a freelance writer and independent scientist and consultant living in beautiful coastal North Carolina. Outside of science, Kevin is a songwriter and enjoys spending time with family in the long-leaf Carolina pines!

To learn more about Kevin view his CV, send him an email and follow him twitter!

 

 

 

What is the general subject of your blog?  What is a “typical” post for you, both in terms of length and in terms of the topic.

Deep Sea News covers the Earth’s largest environment! I serve as the assistant editor there. While we traditionally covered news, research and basic facts of the deep-sea, we’ve branched out in the last couple years to really encompass the whole ocean. Guess the deep-sea wasn’t big enough for us. We cover everything from conservation issues to new tech, nautical history and collect commentary and posts from our colleagues to add new voices to marine science blogosphere. The latter is the is part of a new initiative of ours called the Scientist in Residence. Each month highlights a new voice who ideally writes a post per week about their research area. We’ve had an algal oceanographer and a theoretical marine ecologist. Next up is another marine ecologist and sea tech! More variety is on the way too. Typical posts do not exist and vary widely from a quote and link to something of interest to long drawn out researched article.

 

What was your primary reason for starting/joining your blog?

Craig McClain started Deep Sea News in 2004 at blogger to collect news and new research in one place. As founder, Craig serves as chief editors and DSN is his baby. He has nurtured it through thick and thin into a marine science powerhouse. I joined in 2007. I was a graduate student in a deep-sea lab at the time and started regularly commenting on the blog. He invited me to start a guest post column on the blog – From the Desk of Zelnio – which I enjoyed. Inspired, I went off to found The Other 95% after that and made it very successful pretty quickly. About 6 months after that Craig asked me to come onto DSN permanently with him and Peter Etnoyer. I had been blogging for about 8 months then (which is like 8 years in blog years) and had settled into a voice and rhythm that seemed to resonate with people and provided enjoyment for me.


I think in hindsight, I really took to blogging quickly because I have a lot of passion and enthusiasm for science and the work I do. I needed an outlet. I am a naturally outgoing and social person and need to talk about stuff and share new things I find out! For my personality types, blogging is a natural fit. I recognized that this was an effective outreach tool too. Deep Sea News was pretty established, they got in early in the science blogging game and had a built in audience for me so I could reach people immediately and they appreciated getting their science served ‘salty’.

 

How often do you post, and roughly how much time goes into each post?

This varies widely. I tend to post several times a week. Early in the blogging game I was overdoing it because I wanted to build an audience and paid severely for that professionally. What I mean is that I wasn’t balancing myself very well between grad school and blogging. Lately, since I have been lecturing I am not posting as often as I like to. More importantly, I am not posting longer, well-researched articles which I truly enjoy writing. So it fluctuates. I have to justify the time since I blog on a volunteer basis. It has morphed into my biggest “free-time” activity though. My nights are filled with blogging and tweeting and reading.

 

How do you fit in time for blogging and social media?

I probably shouldn’t! I get sucked into it easily because I participate in a network of scientists, journalists and other professionals who are truly fascinating characters loaded with brilliant amounts of information and insight. And just like me, they are open, social beings who seem to really care about science. So I want to spend my time with them, learn from them and interact and share with them. My biggest balance is with my family. If I’m at home and not working from home, its family time (for the most part). But when those kids go to bed, I go right to my computer. My wife is the way so it works out for us LOL. We have several nights though where we watch a netflix movie or maybe a little TV and talk about grown-up stuff. But what I’ve done is make blogging and social media one of my main hobbies. It is not very conducive to academic lifestyle though and this has been a struggle for me. Such that I am in the process of leaving academia to focus full time on science communications and outreach. I want to make my obvious passion and hobby into a career. We’ll see how it goes!

 

Have there been any benefits to blogging, either personally or professionally?

Yes! Blogging is an effective outreach tool when you have an audience to appreciate it. We try to tell this to other scientists. We want them to use our space as platform to relay the excitement of their expeditions and talk about they do. Since we have a fantastic built-in audience, we encourage other marine scientists to use us. Otherwise, their voices get lost in the cacophony of struggling science bloggers. These informal relationships have helped us to form a network of dedicated marine scientists who see the value of communicating ocean science. Interacting with them has been personally and professionally rewarding. Mostly, for me at least, blogging has had nothing but benefits: paid writing opportunities, recognition from my peers, access to literature I wouldn’t otherwise see, professional interactions with media outlets and consulting companies, the list goes on! Just from writing about what excites me!

 

Have there been any downsides to blogging, either personally or professionally?

Yes, a lot of academics think it is a waste of time. And it might very well be. Blogging is suited for certain personality types. Like research or teaching, to excel at it you have to really love it and want to do it. My experience in academia after I started blogging hasn’t been rosy. Ultimately, it contributed to (but certainly not the sole reason) my leaving a PhD. Some academics certainly saw it as time-wasting and counter-productive to goals of grad school. It invited such criticisms as “you could have written your thesis by now if you devoted your energies from blogging”, “you are clearly not serious about a career in science”, etc. Of course the same critics also mentioned that they thought I was doing it well (not until after I decided to leave of course) and encouraged me to pursue that as a career. So I guess the message to me was you can either be a scientist or a science communicator but not both. Of course I think this is rubbish and some very productive scientists are also very productive communicators and bloggers. But when one is a position with no compromise what do you do? You fit their mold or leave. I chose the latter.

 

What piece of advice would you give other scientists and students in your situation who are considering moving into social media?

Students: the blogosphere has developed immensely over the last 5 years and it can be a maze to navigate and might feel pointless to get started. But when you are making your voice heard online, you are staking out your territory and making yourself relevant in the eyes of the greater community. With that being said, tread carefully cause you say and do will come back down the line in one form or another. Starting out by discussing cool research is a great way to get started without being too controversial and a nice way to find your writing voice and online persona. But what you write only matters if you are read! Get on twitter, facebook and comment on other people blogs so they can discover you.

Scientists: We have a duty (you can argue about this if you want) to tell people what we are doing. Many funding agencies are even demanding that we reach out to other demographics and talk about our research. Blogging is a great way to do this but its a delicate balance of time and blogging can suck down a lot if you let it. But go beyond writing an institutional blog, get out there online and in your community and grab readers. Write an op-ed in the local paper and link your blog to it. Make it the start of a discussion and give everyone the same amount of respect when asking even seemingly menial questions.

 

What have been the most effective ways of promoting your blog?

Being listed by Google News has been a boon, but i think most our hits come from google searches of current events related to ocean and climate. Twitter and Networked Blogs also play a large role.

 

Deep Sea News has gradually increased in size over time, and now includes 6 regular contributors.  Do you see any advantages or disadvantages to expanding the number of writers for a blog?  Would you recommend that other blogs consider expanding their ranks?

As full time scientists, all of us struggle with our love for writing about science and the duties that fill our paychecks. We always keep a look out for new and rising talent. Our philosophy has been to add new bloggers occasionally to fill in areas of our coverage that are lacking and so that our blog is updated fairly frequently, at least once a day. We don’t have structure and is more “blog at will”, but it always seems to work out! Since we have been carefully monitoring our growth over the last few years, I can’t really speak of any disadvantages. Our writers are all fantastic and are or have quickly become terrific and supportive friends! When it was just Craig and I, we really enjoyed each others’ company on the blog, but we want Deep Sea News to become big, and that meant growth. And we did just that with the help of our top-notch cadre of scientist writers!

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Thanks Kevin!  Profiles of more science bloggers to continue next week!

Travis