Journalistic Curation of Science Videos

The web portal SciViews.de, operated by the German popular science publishing house Spektrum der Wissenschaft, focuses on curating popular science web videos. The editors, following journalistic guidelines, select and embed videos from a variety of sources, commission short journalistic reviews and present the videos to the public. The heterogeneity of science videos found on the web is high. Experiences from curating science videos for SciViews indicate that, in general, such videos are a great enrichment for science communication but often lack journalistic qualities and tend to be, in themselves, poor sources of information. Given the important role of science communication for society, this observation should raise serious concerns. Shortness and entertaining qualities, however, which are often considered to be important for "good" videos, may not play such an important role after all, as experience shows.