2020 was transformative in violent and destructive ways - the pandemic has taken a huge social, medical, cultural, and financial toll on us collectively as a species. As of the writing of this note, COVID-19 has caused the deaths of 1.62 million people, including over 300,000 Americans. Our pandemic coverage has attempted to make simple the complexity of this moment, crystalizing expertise from bioethicists, biochemists, immunologists, virologists, bioengineers, epidemiologists, geneticists, healthcare practitioners, and global health specialists.

That said, we did not abandon our bread-and-butter scientific reporting. Ninety percent of our published stories were about research and stories across the sciences and engineering and that paid off in terms of traffic. We had about 2.7M pageviews in 2020, up 65 percent from 1.6M in 2019. COVID-19 coverage overwhelmed many readers in 2020, and we found our non-pandemic articles were welcomed by readers awash in hot-takes by writers without scientific expertise.

Unlike many other science news outlets that saw outsized growth driven entirely by pandemic coverage, our growth has been organic across all of our topics and channels around 11 percent of our pageviews in 2020 came from COVID-19 coverage. This growth bodes well for us in a shifting science news landscape in the coming years, as climate change drives more of the big news cycles.

We've done our best to stay value-aligned, creating equitable structures for our team and our community of scientist writers. We also make our values transparent to our audiences. The values we stated as the national uprising for Black liberation erupted in the summer of 2020 are still values we fight for in our work as a news media organization. The disparate impact of COVID-19 on BIPOC communities is stark and brutal and we will continue to highlight the violence that research can perpetuate when carelessly designed, implemented, and funded.

In addition to leading Massive Science, I started working at the media organization Science Friday in February of 2020, and shortly after my co-founder Allan Lasser began working at the content management system (CMS) company TakeShape. Massive runs on the TakeShape CMS, and Science Friday's audio products and radio program are mission-aligned with the work that Massive does. We've found that working within these organizations has been helpful in pushing Massive to grow in new directions.

We hope in the next two years to find a home for Massive that is more permanent. The options for Massive are infinite, and it will be our goal to find a safe and equitable place for Massive to continue to grow as an editorial science community and platform.

Communicating science during the pandemic has been an interesting challenge for scientists, news media outlets, and journalists. Thankfully, we had spent three years preparing for this moment. One of our first editors, Dr. Ashely Juavinett, summed the challenge up nicely:

Massive broke its previous monthly traffic record in May 2020. We haven't been able to consistently clear 300,000 monthly pageviews yet, but in comparison to 2019, monthly traffic has remained higher and more constant.

2020 easily broke our yearly traffic record set in 2019. The higher traffic also came with a 12 percent increase in the average time readers spend on a page, from 3:03 in 2019 to 3:25 in 2020, with long-form article time-on-page clocking in at 4:11. We're happy with the increase two minutes is considered the start of the "good" time-on-page range, so increasing at a healthy rate here is wonderful.

Massive's bread-and-butter is always basic science, but 2020 was the year we started doing more explainer articles, specifically focused on trending science news. For instance, in July, months ahead of most outlets, we published a piece explaining what exactly an mRNA vaccine is, and what its pros and cons are. In preparation for the winter holidays, we published a series of explainers on evolution and climate change (a two-parter), that we figured would be fodder for family arguments.

In the past, we've experimented with theme weeks, butwe tried a theme month this year and had a lot more success. In the second half of 2020, we started publishing many more interviews than we have in the past. These include one-offs (like this interview with neuroscientist Yewande Pearse about life extension) and series of interviews, like our collaboration with Science Friday on conversations with prominent women scientists. Massive also kept up with the evolving intersection of politics and science. This includes publishing anonymously-written articles from Black scientists as well as immigrant scientists facing deportation.

The most popular articles were, predictably, articles that explained rumors about COVID or put the pandemic in a different light. Five of the 10 most popular articles of the year were about COVID one explained how the virus initially spread, one debunked a conspiracy theory about the virus's origins, and the #1 most popular article put social distancing behavior in a new light.

None of what we do at Massive would have been possible without the support of the community of scientists who work with us and write with us. None of it would have been possible without the support of our partners, supporters and collaborators. And none of it would happen without the dedication of our community, editorial, and infrastructure teams! They are amazing people and I am so proud of what we've done.

I hope this has given you a sense of what Massive is all about, and how we dealt with the ups and downs of 2020. We're really excited about 2021 and hope you'll stick with us. If you ever have questions or feedback about Massive, please email me directly at nadja@massivesci.com.

Onwards to 2021 with the lessons of 2020 close at hand...

Read the original:
Massive Science Year in Review: 2020 edition - Massive Science

Comments are closed.