Scientific American In Blog Removal Controversy

Lasrick writes "Danielle N. Lee, Ph.D, the Urban Scientist blogger at Scientific American, has been mistreated twice: once by the blog editor at biology-online.org and now by SciAm itself. The blog editor asked Dr. Lee to contribute a blog post at Biology-Online, and when she declined (presumably for lack of monetary compensation), the blog editor asked her whether she was 'an urban scientist or an urban whore.' Then, SciAm deleted her blog post, in which she wrote about the incident."

Re:I agree with SciAm, sort of.

[Autumnmist]

Except the whole point is that many science bloggers at SciAm have posted "non-scientific" posts as well, so the "this is not about discovering science" excuse is BS.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/context-and-variation/2013/10/12/this-is-not-a-post-about-discovering-science/ [scientificamerican.com]

Re:Talk about sexism...

[Rolpa]

97% of the time, the term is applied to women. Do you think they would have expressed themselves in such a manner if she were a man?

Explanation from Sci Am's Editor in Chief

[Schnoodledorfer]

This was recently posted on Sci Am's website: A Message from Mariette DiChristina, Editor in Chief [scientificamerican.com]. It looks like a pretty reasonable explanation to me. The excuse is that it happened on a three-day weekend (Monday is Columbus Day in the USA) so they were short staffed. They were worried that if the accusation isn't correct, they could be sued, so they want to check the accuracy of the blog first. They acknowledge that they should have done better and claim that they will develop procedures for the future.

Re:New Season of Big Bang Theory

[forand]

It should also be noted that the blog with the offensive editor is a business partner of Sci-AM so they are not an innocent bystander. This blog [isisthescientist.com] has a screen shot of Sci-AM's "Partner Network" before it was edited [scientificamerican.com]. Furthermore, her Sci-AM blog IS her blog. As others have pointed out [scientificamerican.com], Sci-AM is being inconsistent at best in their actions.

Not innocent-- but they did apologize

[Anonymous Coward]

Sci-Am is not the platform to settle scores for private insults. Taking it there merely damages Sci-AM,
an innocent bystander.

The site in question was a Scientific American partner. They were not an "innocent bystander."

For what it's worth, Scientific American has apologized.
http://jezebel.com/sciam-apologizes-for-deleting-bloggers-post-on-being-c-1444576536 [jezebel.com]

And, looking at the link in the original article, biology online is no longer listed as a partner site.
It's not here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/partners/ [scientificamerican.com]
although it was there as of October 4: http://www.scientificamerican.com/partners/ [scientificamerican.com]

blog recruiter fired.

[hooiberg]

Well, the bastard has been fired: http://www.biology-online.org/biology-forum/about34647.html [biology-online.org] Good riddance.