Not all users are created equal.

Some users know more than a reporter does about a given subject. In a traditional media world that wisdom would largely go unused. But innovative beat bloggers like Eric Berger, and his employer the Houston Chronicle, have found ways to harness the wisdom of their wisest users by giving them blogs.

The Chronicle has launched three “sphere” blogs, one on climate change, another on astronomy and space and the last one on evolution. What makes these blogs stand out is that the people writing them in many ways can be considered experts.

Atmo.Sphere is run by John Nielsen-Gammon, a Texas state climatologist, and Barry Lefer, a professor of climate change and atmospheric chemistry at the University of Houston.

Cosmo.Sphere is run by Justin Kugler, an engineer at NASA; Steve Clayworth, an amateur astronomer and Fritz Benedic, a professional astronomer. Each brings their own perspective on the cosmos and space exploration to the table.

Evo.Sphere is run by Steven Schafersman. He is a working scientist in the petroleum and environmental industries in West
Texas. He studied evolutionary
paleontology while he was working for his geology Ph.D. at Rice University.

None of these bloggers are paid, and you can sense the child-like enthusiasm they have for scientific topics in many of their posts, especially in the Cosmo.Sphere blog. Plus these bloggers know their stuff. They know their “beats” better than most beat reporters.

Take this post from Kugler about water on Mars. Plenty of news outlets and reporters broke the news of water being found on Mars, but Kugler outlines why it is important:

As an aerospace engineer working on human space flight and
exploration, the confirmation of water on Mars is important to me
because it means that we can utilize local resources to sustain human
missions to the Red Planet.  This proves that we can follow the “live
off the land” approach that Dr. Robert Zubrin has long advocated.  (I
first read The Case for Mars when I was in high school!)

With
water on the surface, we only have to carry what we need for the trip
itself - which translates into tremendous weight savings and, thus,
lower cost.  Martian water can be used for drinking, food preparation,
greenhouse irrigation, construction, and production of hydrogen and
oxygen.  We can, thus, make our own breathing air and rocket fuel using
local resources.

From a scientific perspective, the presence of
water on Mars is an important boon to the field of astrobiology.  We
are reasonably certain that Mars was a much wetter and warmer planet in
the past.  It may have been wet enough and warm enough for primitive
life, whose fossils human explorers might be able to find.

And yes, other users have responded well to the sphere blogs too. These blogs are generating comments and building community, just like Berger’s blog.

Berger is a very popular science blogger, and now he is flanked by three science blogs written by experts. This is the kind of niche, in-depth information that newspapers have traditionally not excelled at but makes a lot of sense on the Web.