The young journalists behind Inkling Magazine are into science reporting because, as they say in their tag line, “science rocks”.
One of the founders of the science blog, Anne Casselman, took part in the Future Directions in Science Journalism conference over the weekend at UBC.
During a session about why people go online for science news, she gave an illuminating insight into Inkling’s readers.
The site gets some 40,000 page views and 28,000 visitors per month. But what is more interesting is that most of the traffic comes from referrals.
Some 13% come from both Digg and Stumbleupon. 5% come from Reddit, 4% from BoingBoing and 3% from Seed magazine.
This seems to back up what Pew Internet found in a 2006 study about how people find science news online. It found that the web is the main source for science news for young people on broadband.
But, more significantly, it also revealed that happenstance plays a major role in how the young find out about science. Two-thirds stumble upon science when they are searching for something else.
The stats from Inkling suggest its readers are not people looking for science news, but checking social bookmarking sites for what’s new. Eight out of Inkling’s top 10 stories were referrals from these alternative news sites.
Digg readers, said Casselman, are looking for odd and weird news, spending just an average of 24 seconds on the site. In contrast, readers coming via Google spend a minute and 24 seconds on average.
What is strange are the top Google search terms that lead readers to Inkling – tree octopus, pygmy animals, size zero statistics, baby eye colour.
Clearly Inkling has a very different audience to mainstream news sites that report on science. In Inkling’s case, at least, people are enticed into the unusual of science and they find it by chance, as Pew Internet found.
The question is, does this mean that young people are only interested in the weirder aspects of science?
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