In the early days of Science 2.0, blogging did not get a lot of institutional respect. Public outreach was a waste of time, academics were often told, leave that to science journalists and the PIOs at schools who write press releases.
It seemed archaic. Anyone who knows how much of science is government-funded, about a third of basic research, knows that means it is political. Which means you cannot and should not let someone else write your narrative. It's too easy to manipulate. A decade ago, when a group wrote to Columbia University and asked them to remove Dr. Oz from the faculty because of his claims about supplements and that medicine was a corporate conspiracy, he got allies in corporate journalism to dismiss us as Big Pharma shills.(1)
A few years later, though, he ran for office and the same academics and journalists who had just defended him from criticism turned on him. Only because he ran as a Republican.(2) Columbia then removed him despite claiming his TV show was free speech they supported.
It's too easy to manipulate the media ecosystem, which means it can be manipulated against you. People who are not part of the political tribe are already penalized when it comes to faculty jobs and tenure - Republicans wish they could get up to the representation of even native Americans or the handicapped in universities - but a lot of that is not due to other scientists. Which means it could be mitigated if their impact was too great to be ignored.
Eventually, blogging was included. Altmetric includes blogs by scientists here, social media channels, if they are cited by public policy sites, and now it even includes podcasts.
That's a big win.
It is important that academic scientists be where conversations are really happening, not just in paywalled journals and conferences. During the early COVID-19 pandemic, the CDC lost what little trust it had when career bureaucrats there who dictated how things got done told hospitals they couldn't get a COVID-19 test for patients until the CDC determined the patient had COVID.(3) Scientists had known about the CDC's issues for a decade; the bureaucracy created by career government employees created a culture where they needed 6 weeks to tell the public the lettuce they bought had E. coli but CDC had plenty of time to sound the alarm about fake epidemics, like pre-diabetes and vaping.
Yet if you read social media today, the CDC is some legendary science body being ruined by Republicans. The conversation remains dominated by people who are political first. Rewarding people who stand up for the truth with metrics is one way to help regain public trust in academia. A public trust shift that cannot happen as long as half of readers feel like the agenda of universities is political rather than about the public good.
And it is a lot more than 50%. It is 70%.
That is a problem academia won't fix, or it wouldn't have gotten to this point, which means it will be up to you to make your reputation.
NOTES:
(1) One time when the organic industry got tired of my criticism, they got one of their many political insiders to get a friend who was an SEO expert at a large corporate media site to suggest I might be a Nazi because a PhD here wrote a parody making fun of President Trump. Academics who later had the guns turned on them and declared we needed to stand up against this organized retaliation wondered why I was shocked they thought it was a concern only when it happened to them. They had remained silent when it had been done to me, a former US Army officer who's a lifelong defender of Israel whose grandfather fought actual Nazis. They said nothing in my defense.
(2) That will be a watershed moment in future discussions about science communication, academia, and loss of public trust, even bigger than former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer and prominent Democrat Robert F. Kennedy only getting true criticism once he became a Republican. People who said California progressives advertising measles parties in organic food venues like Whole Foods across Los Angeles was not representative of their party declared the same beliefs by Republicans were going to cause mass deaths.
(3) When the Trump administration forced them to send tests, they sent ones with faulty reagents, so then the White House had to get FDA to issue emergency authorizations to private sector companies who know what they are doing.